Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

Narrowed down

13 practices

Exercise, food and other supports Coping, mostly Involves someone else Clear all

How long you have

A minute 1 Five minutes 7 Twenty minutes 3 Longer 2

Who it is written for

A practitioner 13 Someone I care about 11 Me 4

Where you are right now · Coping, mostly

Coping, mostly 13 Struggling right now 1 Getting ready for something 1

On your own, or with someone · Involves someone else

On my own 26 Involves someone else 13 Both of us together 2

Theme · Exercise, food and other supports

Medication and how it works 34 Systems for daily life 24 Staying regulated in conflict 24 The cost of avoiding 20 Moving your body 16 Knowing your partner 15 Rebuilding trust 14 Affection and touch 13 Exercise, food and other supports 13 Listening and understanding 12 Screens and attention 12 Repair after rupture 11 Answering bids 11 Rituals of connection 11 Shared spiritual life 10 Bringing the future closer 8 What anger actually is 8 Feelings and focus 8 Your nervous system 8 Treatment and medication 7 Breaking the worry loop 7 What ADHD actually is 7 Structure and routine 7 Getting assessed and diagnosed 7 Your sense of time 7 What worry does 6 Equanimity and perspective 6 Growing empathy 6 Food, caffeine and fuel 5 Get started 5 Emotions as signals 5 Breathing 4 When everything feels flat 4 Treatment and medication 4 When you use something to cope 4 Grounding and settling 4 Choosing your response 3 The moment before you snap 3 Facing it a step at a time 3 Righteous anger and perfectionism 3 What you are actually defending 2 Gratitude 2 Obsessions and compulsions 2 The fear underneath anger 2 Panic and the body 2 Remembering to do it 2 Shame and stigma 2 Tolerate distress 2 Touch and bodywork 2 Reading, numbers and learning differences 2 Fondness and admiration 2 Being seen and judged 2 Ask and say no well 2 Help someone grieving 2 Safety and grounding 1 Practising under provocation 1 Posture and how you carry yourself 1 Validate yourself and others 1 Cool the body first 1 Shame 1

When

Any ordinary day 12 Coming and going 1

Try swapping the word picky for particular. A fair number of people with ADHD have more densely packed taste buds, so the bitterness in a sprout arrives at full volume.

That changes what is going on at the table. A child is not refusing in order to be difficult, they are tasting something stronger than you are.…

A minuteExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 80:24

When a parent is set on something that will not hold, one honest story often lands better than a pile of studies. A family finished the better part of a year of neurofeedback and watched their child slide back to where he started within weeks.

Told plainly, with no note of triumph in it, a story like that raises durability without telling a parent they were foolish. They were not foolish.…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286

Saying that something does not work leaves a parent holding the same worry that sent them looking in the first place. Say what the time and money would buy instead, and put exercise at the top of the list.

The energy behind an unevidenced treatment is usually love with nowhere to go, and if it is not given somewhere to go it moves on to the next…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 67:15

Ask which direction a person's sensory difficulty runs before offering anything. Someone who is under responsive needs more input and someone who is over responsive needs less, and the wrong one makes the day harder.

The under responsive child is the one climbing, chewing, pressing into things, hunting for sensation in order to feel settled. The over responsive…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 28:73

Ask what someone takes that is not food, rather than asking what medications they are on. People do not file their supplements under drugs, so the usual question comes back empty.

There is a case worth carrying around for this. A liver transplant patient kept rejecting the organ, and it turned out he was quietly taking…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69

More clinicians now raise supplements themselves, and more of them will suggest something like omegas. The shift matters less for what gets recommended and more for what it does to disclosure.

People hide what they expect to be laughed at. Someone braced for an eye roll simply does not mention the four bottles in the kitchen cupboard, and…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185

Sensory integration training is popular and it does not help ADHD. Whatever value it has elsewhere, the capacity it works on is not the one that is impaired here.

What is impaired in ADHD is holding back a response and steering your own behaviour over time. Sensory modulation is a different thing altogether.…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 53:39

A child can learn a self control routine beautifully in the therapy room and not use it once all week at school. Knowing the steps and performing them under pressure are two different skills.

This is why supports that sit in the moment tend to beat supports that sit in the mind. A prompt at the point of need, a changed seat, a rule the…

Five minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 73:20

A weighted vest seems to do its work in roughly the first quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes did not beat fifteen, so longer is not more help.

Use it as a tool for a moment rather than a garment for the day: on before the piece of work that needs the most sitting still, off once that is…

Twenty minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:81

When a test trips a child on something it was never meant to measure, change how they answer rather than what is asked. A spelling test spoken aloud is still a spelling test.

One girl saw letters as solid three dimensional shapes that would not sit together on a page, so writing them was a perceptual problem rather than a…

Twenty minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286

Ask for photographs of every bottle rather than a list from memory, then pass that list to the prescriber. Recall is patchy about names and hopeless about doses.

Intake forms catch some of it and a photo of the shelf catches the rest, including the two things nobody mentions because they seem too minor to…

Twenty minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:141

Food colouring is the one narrow exception in this area. Large studies suggest it may mildly wind up some very young children, so a trial removal in a preschooler is a reasonable thing to do.

Keep it in proportion though. This is a minor irritant in a subset of little children, nowhere near the sweeping dietary cause that was claimed…

LongerExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:168

The restrictive elimination diet has real methodological problems, and it is expensive and exhausting to run. If a family still wants to try it, they can, because unproven and dangerous are different words.

There is usually more to lose by forbidding it. A family who feels blocked either does it anyway without telling you or spends another year…

LongerExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 22:78

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.