Practices

Sleep, food and movement will not cure anything, but they lengthen the fuse. Bad moments still arrive, and you handle them differently when your body is not already running on empty.

This matters more here than it sounds, because ADHD tends to wreck exactly these three and then the wreckage feeds back into the flare ups. Late…

The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.

Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…

Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.

This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they…

Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.

That frame does a lot of quiet work. It says the treatment is ongoing rather than a course you finish, it explains why things slide back when…

There is no single treatment that covers all of this. What works looks more like five things running alongside each other, and understanding the condition comes first.

Each piece reaches a different part of the day. Medication does something the environment cannot, changing what a room asks of someone does something…

The stack goes: understand it, medicate where that is right, change what the adults do, change what the day asks, and keep arguing the child's corner. Each layer does a job the others cannot.

None of them stands in for another, which is why swapping one out leaves a gap rather than a smaller plan. Medication does not reorganise a…

When a child with ADHD and a parent get stuck in daily rows, the rows themselves start doing damage. Getting the ADHD properly managed early takes some heat out of those exchanges before defiance settles in as a habit.

The chain people worry about runs from constant friction at home to entrenched defiance, and from there to difficulties in the teenage years that are…

The therapy that helps adult ADHD is not really about arguing with your thoughts. It is practical work on how your week is built, and it works because you are the one who can go and rebuild it.

Sessions tend to circle the same handful of things. Where the list lives, what the calendar actually does when you are not looking at it, how a large…

The trouble now is not that nothing works. It is that the things which work are spread unevenly, and whether a family gets any of them depends heavily on where they happen to live.

Medication travels reasonably well, since a prescriber can be found in most places. The psychological and behavioural work travels badly, because it…

A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.

This is worth knowing when you are building a plan around less: fewer commitments, lighter workload, nothing too taxing. Take out all the demand and…

Give a dull task some fuel: music, a timer, a stake, a partner. Your brain runs on interest.

Do not expect a low-interest task to run on willpower alone. Add the spark it needs to catch.

One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.

A repetitive session on a machine asks very little of you once your body knows it. Something with steps to follow, in time with other people, keeps…

Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.

It is a quieter thing than depression and it does not look like much from outside. Sleep is fine, you are still working, but the zest has gone out of…

Build your work around what your mind does well, novelty, hyperfocus, big-picture, not only around your gaps.

You will go further leaning on your strengths than endlessly sanding down your weaknesses.

Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.

The narrow band in between is where you stay engaged without noticing you are trying. It is usually a bit further up than feels comfortable when you…

For a lot of people with ADHD, making things is not a hobby but closer to an appetite. The itch to start something is always there, and when nothing is being made it does not go quietly.

Read that way, the restlessness that arrives when you have no project on is information rather than a character flaw. The same drive that gets called…

When the right piece of work finally has you, you are entirely there. Hours go, nothing intrudes, and the difficulty that flattens you elsewhere is nowhere in the room.

That state is the same machinery as the hyperfocus that gets you into trouble, pointed at something worth doing. Worth noticing so you can go looking…

You cannot work out in advance what will light you up. The only reliable method is a wide and slightly undignified search: many activities, many people, plenty of reading and watching, until something catches.

This means giving yourself permission to try things badly and drop them, which is hard if you have been told all your life that you never finish…

The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.

You may have noticed you can lose four hours to something that grips you and then be unable to start a ten minute form. That gap is the thing itself,…

There is a real difference between a person who will not start and a person who cannot get started, and with ADHD it is nearly always the second.

This matters most in how you speak to yourself, and in how the people near you speak to you. Refusal invites pressure and punishment, which reliably…