Practices

Not all distraction comes from outside. Some of it is a thought that will not leave, circling while you read the same paragraph four times.

That difference matters at an assessment. Being pulled away by everything in the room, and being held in place by an intrusive thought you cannot put…

Most autistic people also meet the criteria for ADHD. The other direction is much thinner: only a small minority of people with ADHD meet the criteria for autism.

That is mostly arithmetic rather than mystery. ADHD is the more common of the two, so one overlap looks large from one side and small from the other.…

Autism and ADHD share some surface features and are still two different things. The social difficulty in each arrives by a different road.

With ADHD it tends to be impulsiveness and missing what was going on: the interruption, the thing said too fast, the friend never rung back. With…

Eating that runs away from you, and eating you cannot stop once it has started, turn up alongside ADHD more than people expect. Usually it is doing a job rather than proving a weakness.

The pattern leans towards bingeing rather than restricting, which fits: it belongs with the difficulty of stopping something already in motion. Often…

Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.

In men it runs more towards size and muscle than towards thinness, and towards fixing on one part of the body that everybody else says looks…

Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.

Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the…

With gambling machines the pull may be the lights and the noise as much as the chance of winning. That changes what you actually need to stay away from.

If the sensory buzz is doing the work, the triggers are not only the betting shop. They are the phone games built with the same flashing and chiming,…

A reward that comes every time is easy to walk away from. A reward that turns up unpredictably is the one you cannot put down, and that is exactly how your phone is built.

Sometimes there is something good in the notifications and usually there is not, and it is that uncertainty which keeps you checking. Willpower is…

When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.

Twenty percent sounds alarming until you learn what the rate is in the general population. What matters is the multiple, how many times more likely,…

The manual now asks for signs by age twelve rather than age seven, and it added wording that fits adult life, including restlessness felt on the inside.

The older cut-off quietly excluded a familiar group: bright children, or well supported ones, who managed until the demands rose and only visibly…

When someone cannot let go of the old rule after the rules have changed, that is the same machinery that loses their keys and drops the thread of a sentence. Stuck, not stubborn.

It shows up in small places. The game changes and they argue for the old version. The usual road is closed and the whole trip falls apart. A plan…

There is no box you type 'always late' into and get the answer out of. When a sensible strategy is not landing, the work is finding out what is blocking it rather than producing another strategy.

If you notice yourself handing over the fourth tool for the same problem, stop and ask a different kind of question. What happened the last time they…

A man who could not get himself to bed kept his bedtime alarm upstairs, where his wife and baby were sleeping. Switching it off meant climbing the stairs, and leaving it meant waking them. The walk to the alarm was the thing he was trying to do anyway.

That is the part worth copying. Put the cue somewhere that costs something to answer, and make answering it land you where you meant to be. Anything…

Time management is only the fit between tasks and the hours you have: planning them against time, then doing them against time. It is a skill with parts, not a verdict on what kind of person you are.

Most people arrive having already decided they are lazy, and that decision is doing them no good at all. Describing it mechanically gives you both…

If you cannot remember much about being six, you are in the majority. Early childhood comes back poorly for most adults, while the teenage years are far easier to describe.

So do not sit in an assessment feeling you have failed a test because the early years are a blur. Bring what you can find instead: old school…

A list of symptoms on its own does not make a diagnosis. What counts is that they cost you something real in at least two areas of ordinary life.

That means work or school, money, home, friendships, driving, getting through the week. Almost everyone loses keys and drifts off in meetings, so the…

Much of the symptom wording was written with children in mind. If a question sounds like it is about someone climbing the furniture, translate it into your adult life rather than answering no.

Restlessness at forty is rarely running about. It is being unable to sit through a film, the leg going under the table, two jobs left out of boredom.…

Give your spouse one genuine compliment today, specific enough that it could only be them.

Not nice shirt. The way you handled that call was so calm. Precise praise lands deepest.

When resentment rises today, name one thing you are grateful to your spouse for instead.

The mind can rehearse grievances or blessings. Choose the blessing, out loud if you can.

Thank them for one specific thing, today.

Not "thanks for everything." Pick one thing from the last two days and name it exactly: "Thank you for taking the bins out when I was on that call. I…