Practices

Taking the phone away leaves a hole the exact size of the phone. Something has to go into it, or the evening just becomes an argument you both lose.

Part of why scrolling is so hard to drop is that the reward arrives at unpredictable intervals, which is the pattern that keeps behaviour alive…

Quiet room, clear desk, phone in a drawer, and you are still nowhere near the work. When the outside distractions go, the restlessness does not leave with them. It moves inside.

Headphones and a tidy desk handle half the problem. The other half is a mind looking for something to do, which will supply its own if nothing else…

Plenty of people now describe attention that fails, memory that slips and a day sliced into fragments. That description on its own is not ADHD, and it is worth being careful before anyone hands over a label.

The environment is producing a version of these symptoms in people who do not have the condition, and calling that a diagnosis does two things badly.…

After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.

This is not only teenagers. Adults describe it too: an hour that vanished, a message that reads as though somebody else wrote it, a flatness…

Spend long enough online and people start arriving as types rather than as people: brilliant or worthless, with nothing in between. The flattening happens to how you see yourself as well.

Worth naming as something the environment is doing rather than a fact about your character, because what an environment produces can be changed by…

Not every app is doing the same thing to you. The ones that tend to hurt have comments underneath, a feed chosen for you, and a number attached to how you did.

One young woman described a picture site as the safe one, because there was nowhere for anyone to reply to her. That is a useful way to sort your own…

You are already off your phone somewhere. In lessons, at work, in the pool, driving. That is worth more than it sounds.

It quietly disproves the sentence people say most often about this, that they can never put it down. They already do, most days, for hours at a time.…

For one week note three things each time: how you felt before you opened it, how it felt while you were in it, and how you feel twenty minutes after putting it down.

Most people find the before and the after are not the same, and that the middle was better than either. Usually one or two apps come out fine and one…

Sometimes the scrolling is not really about the scrolling. It is about the coursework, or the conversation, or the thing you have not let yourself think about since March.

You can usually tell by what happens when the phone goes. If the hours quietly move into something else equally absorbing and equally pointless, the…

Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.

Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…

Screens are easy to start and have no natural end. So the part worth planning is not the getting on, it is the getting off.

Decide in advance what happens at the finish, and make sure something appealing is waiting on the other side. A timer that only tells you to stop…

Some people are in this far enough that an hour a week will not reach them, and the places that could help are expensive or full. Saying so out loud is part of the work, not a failure of it.

Being honest early does two things. It stops you quietly concluding that you are not good enough, when what is actually happening is that the…

What you are on there for matters more than how long you are on. Scrolling to keep up with people you love is a different activity from posting and then watching to see who approved.

Use aimed at status, at likes, at managing how you come across tends to sit alongside feeling worse. Use aimed at staying in touch and sharing what…

Online you can draft, delete, reply an hour later or simply leave. None of that exists in a kitchen, and plenty of people now find real conversation unbearably fast.

So the ordinary friction of talking to someone in person, the pause you fill badly, the thing that comes out wrong, gets read as proof that you are…

Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.

Rudeness online is loud, cheap and rewarded, so it fills the space out of all proportion to how common it is. The trouble is that we generalise.…

Most children with ADHD grow into adults with ADHD. Some of it settles as the brain finishes developing into your late twenties, and adult life gives you more say over how your days are arranged, but the underlying difficulty tends to stay.

This is worth knowing because much of the improvement people do get comes from arranging things to suit themselves: the job that fits, the hours that…

It tends to run the same way each time. You struggle with something, you feel awful about it, so you keep away from it, and anyone who raises it gets a sharp answer, which makes you keep away harder.

The relief when you avoid it arrives instantly, which is exactly why the loop tightens. Meanwhile the pile of unopened post has not moved, so next…

The goal was never to enjoy the dull task. It is to arrive at something more like: I hate this and I can still do it well enough.

Both halves are doing work. Moving towards the thing you dislike, rather than away from it, is what loosens the avoidance. And well enough is what…

It rarely stays a matter of attention. The difficulties shape what you come to believe about yourself, that colours how you are with the people closest to you, and their responses feed straight back into the original trouble.

Discouraging to read, and genuinely useful, because it means there are three places to work and they are not equally stuck. The wiring is the hardest…

There is a difference between having ADHD and being ADHD. It sounds like word games until you notice which one you are living in.

Being it means the condition runs everything and explains everything, and there is a quiet relief in that which is hard to give up. Having it means…