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

Medication and how it works Twenty minutes On my own Clear all

How long you have · Twenty minutes

A minute 16 Five minutes 49 Twenty minutes 13 Longer 5

Who it is written for

Me 13 A practitioner 13 Someone I care about 8

Where you are right now

Coping, mostly 8 Getting ready for something 3 Struggling right now 2

On your own, or with someone · On my own

On my own 13 Both of us together 9 Involves someone else 8

Theme · Medication and how it works

Systems for daily life 23 Moving your body 17 Medication and how it works 13 Get started 12 Your nervous system 12 Food, caffeine and fuel 10 What ADHD actually is 10 Treatment and medication 9 What anger actually is 8 Bringing the future closer 7 Screens and attention 7 Your sense of time 7 Feelings and focus 6 Cool the body first 6 The moment before you snap 6 Tolerate distress 6 Touch and bodywork 6 Reading, numbers and learning differences 5 The fear underneath anger 5 Grounding and settling 5 When everything feels flat 4 Exercise, food and other supports 4 Shame 4 Remembering to do it 4 Getting assessed and diagnosed 4 When you use something to cope 4 Use your strengths 3 Righteous anger and perfectionism 3 Practising under provocation 3 Shame and stigma 3 Anger, alcohol and the body 3 Equanimity and perspective 3 Emotions as signals 3 Choosing your response 3 Breathing 3 Being seen and judged 3 Making it stick 2 When anger turns to harm 2 Feeling from the inside 2 Facing it a step at a time 2 Letting it out safely 2 Obsessions and compulsions 2 Breaking the worry loop 2 Structure and routine 2 Question the thought 1 Care for yourself in loss 1 Living with uncertainty 1 Rest and pacing 1 Treatment and medication 1 What you are actually defending 1 What worry does 1 Listen to the body 1 The cost of avoiding 1 Keep the bond 1 Shared spiritual life 1 Safety and grounding 1 Repair after rupture 1 Posture and how you carry yourself 1

When

Any ordinary day 7 In a change 4 Coming and going 1 Under stress 1

Prescribers usually begin below the dose likely to work and build upwards. That means the first weeks can be underwhelming by design, and it is not the moment to decide the whole thing has failed.

Ask at the outset what the plan is: the starting dose, what it is being built towards, how quickly, and what you should be noticing at each step.…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5

If you take a prescribed stimulant and your workplace tests, sort the paperwork before anyone asks. A labelled bottle and a short letter from your prescriber turn an alarming result into a filing matter.

Prescribed amphetamine shows up on a standard screen as amphetamine, because that is what it is. The test cannot tell the pharmacy from anything…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:67

Waiting to see how they get on carries a cost that is easy to miss. Every year a child spends behind narrows what is available to them the year after.

Treatment does not settle a life. What happens is that school reports, friendships and confidence build on one another, so a stretch of doing better…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:84

If you carry a firm dislike of medication from childhood, it is worth asking what you actually remember. Often what is remembered is a row between two adults rather than anything the medicine did.

Where parents disagreed about it, the disagreement was frequently about control and about each other. A child in the middle of that absorbs a…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 3:159

A pharmacy refusing a valid prescription is often working from a made-up rule or a plain mistake. It can usually be escalated, and it usually resolves fast.

People have been turned away for having a prescriber in the next county, or told the shop does not stock narcotics for a medicine that is not one.…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:87

Some settings simply suit an attention difficulty better. Expectations set out minute by minute, consequences that arrive the same day, a visible ladder to climb: military life often fits for exactly those reasons.

The point carries well beyond the army. When you are helping someone choose work, ask what the day actually looks like rather than what the job is…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185

One question is worth asking before choosing between products: which part of the day actually goes wrong? Bead type capsules tend to give more early on, while the pump type keeps more back for the afternoon.

Two products can hold the same molecule and cover the same number of hours, and still fit one person and not another, because of where the strongest…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38

If the medication question is the one burning a hole in your pocket, try holding it until last on purpose. Heard after everything else, the answer lands differently.

Most people arrive wanting to know about tablets and nothing else, and the risk in that is a plan made only of tablets. Sleep, movement, the shape of…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 3:159

With many of these medicines the unpleasant part turns up on day one and the good part takes weeks. Knowing that in advance is most of what carries people across the gap.

The first fortnight can feel like a bad bargain, because it is one: you pay now for something that arrives later. Put a date in the diary two to four…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5

If you learn one thing about how these medicines work, learn the junction between two nerve cells. Nearly every drug in this field acts at one of a handful of points in that small space.

It saves a great deal of memorising. Once you can picture a message being released, landing, and then being cleared away, most explanations turn out…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:114

Mechanism is a moving thing, so it is easier to watch than to read. A university made animation of what happens at the junction will teach you more in ten minutes than a page of description.

Prefer something made by a university or a public body over whatever a search puts at the top, since much of what is written about these drugs is…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 49:6

Once you can follow the sequence, release, landing, clearing away and breaking down, most new drugs turn out to be recombinations of those four. That is a fair claim to competence and a good place to stop.

Learning drug by drug never ends and never transfers. Learning the sequence means you can place something you have never heard of and ask a sensible…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:44

Learn the family rather than the members. If you know roughly how one drug in a class behaves, you already know most of what the others will do.

The medicines people are most often on collapse into a handful of families. A new arrival is usually a variation inside one of them, and occasionally…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185

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