Practices

A schedule tells you what to do now. It does not make you want to do it, and pretending otherwise sets you up to feel let down when three o'clock comes and you stay sitting.

Even so, knowing is a good half of the problem solved, and it is the half that is hard to fix any other way. The other half needs its own tools:…

A deadline you privately know is soft has no pull at all. If six o'clock really means midnight, then ten in the morning means nothing, and the whole day drifts until the panic arrives.

One man working from home lost his evenings this way for years, and it was his relationship rather than his employer that paid for it. If the true…

Before planning anything, work out which date is actually true. Does Thursday mean Thursday, or does everybody know it means Friday, and is Thursday even possible?

Planning against a date you do not believe in is planning against nothing, and you will feel that in how little the plan moves you. Get the real one…

When you set your own deadline, watch what happens to it. Thursday becomes Friday, Friday becomes Monday, and it helps to know what that slide actually costs rather than guessing at it.

Keep a light record for a few weeks. Three things only: the date you picked, the date it was done, and one line on what the gap cost you. Sometimes…

A calendar that catches only some of your commitments is more dangerous than no calendar at all. You look at Thursday, see a clear afternoon, say yes, and only later meet the thing that never got written down.

So the first job is not a better app. It is one place where everything goes, without exception, including the small things you are certain you will…

Put the demanding work where the energy is, not where the timetable happens to be convenient. Then alternate it with something they like, and break it up often.

Effort runs down fast, so an hour of hard work in one block will give you good minutes at the start and very little after. Cut it into shorter runs…

If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.

A registered clinician is not allowed to promise you an outcome, because nobody can honestly guarantee one. So a provider who promises makes you a…

ADHD is managed rather than cured, across a whole life. Anything advertising a cure is telling you it is not working from the evidence.

Managed sounds like a disappointment until you look at what it means in practice: treatment that fits your life now, adjusted when the life changes,…

Listen for the sentence that says the child could manage all of this perfectly well if they only decided to. However kindly it is meant, that is the belief to take apart.

It sounds like encouragement and it works like a verdict, because it says the ability was always there and only the willingness was missing. In a…

If mindfulness is going to help with ADHD, the version with a chance is small and spread out. A few seconds of noticing, several times a day, rather than one long sitting you come to dread.

A forty five minute block asks you to get settled in one place and then somehow carry that into the afternoon, and the carrying is exactly what tends…

By response rate, extended release stimulants are among the most effective medicines in psychiatry, and most people tolerate them well. That is worth hearing plainly, particularly from people who are not generally keen on medication.

What the long acting form buys you is coverage. A dose that has faded by four in the afternoon leaves the evening bare, and the evening is where home…

Three things are worth noticing before you buy any treatment: whether the only research on it is their own, whether they will say plainly what it is meant to change, and whether you have to sign something.

Each one covers a different way of being caught out. Research a company funded and ran itself has never been checked by anyone with nothing to lose.…

Better usually means smaller, rarer, or shorter. Pick something you can count, like losing your keys twice a week instead of every day.

Vague goals cannot be reviewed, so a few months later nobody can say whether anything changed and you are left going on mood alone. Choose two or…

You are going to look things up anyway, so start somewhere with proper review behind it. CHADD and Understood both have professionals checking what goes on the page.

Telling anyone to stop searching online has never worked and only means they search without saying so. Better to hand over two or three places worth…

Part of why so many adults are coming forward now is that well known people have said out loud that they have this. Seeing someone capable say it makes the asking cost less.

The old picture of ADHD was a careless child and a lazy adult, and that picture kept a great many people from ever mentioning it. An athlete at the…

Brain training and therapeutic games raise one question above all others. Does the improvement show up anywhere except inside the game, and does it last once you stop playing?

People do get better at what they practise, and the scores go up, which makes for a persuasive chart on a website. The harder question is whether…

Supplements are not checked before they go on sale, so what is in the bottle may not match the label. Look for a third party mark such as USP or NSF before you buy.

This is not about whether a given supplement helps. It is about the plainer question of whether you are getting the dose written on the front, since…

CBT has more research behind it than most other therapies, and part of that is because it is easy to count. Its steps and its outcomes can be scored, so it gets studied more often.

That is worth saying because a thin research base is not the same as a therapy that fails. Approaches that work through relationship, imagery or the…

Two things happening together is not one causing the other. Learn that once and you have a reply to most of the claims you will meet.

Children with ADHD may use more screens, and screens may not be the reason. The same shape turns up with sugar, with additives, with organic food and…

The point of treatment is not a tidier score on a questionnaire. It is fewer accidents, a finished course, work that holds, relationships that survive, a longer and better life.

Symptoms are worth reducing because of what they do downstream, and that is where the goal should be set. It changes what you review, too. Instead of…