Practices

The first day back is worse than the weeks before it, not better. Plan for that spike rather than letting it take you by surprise.

Anxiety climbs as the return gets close and peaks somewhere near the doorway, then it comes down, but only for someone who stays long enough to find…

When the fear is about being seen, being asked, being judged, you can build the steps out of real moments: the doorway, the corridor, the dining hall, answering once in a lesson.

Fear of a whole building cannot be practised. Fear of walking into the dining hall at half past twelve can. Make each step small enough to be boring…

Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.

In the moment it is happening, a parent is not weighing up what gets learned over a term. They are trying to end the distress in front of them, and…

Build the ladder from what you do now, not from what you think you should be managing. If phone calls are currently impossible, the first rung sits somewhere below a phone call.

Have an honest look first. Which apps you talk on, whether you send voice notes or only type, whether you have ordered anything out loud in the past…

A ladder worth climbing has six things: real steps, built with you rather than for you, in your own words, a first rung that is genuinely easy, your hand on the pace throughout, and practice often enough to add up.

Most ladders come apart for dull reasons. The bottom rung was somebody else's idea of easy. The wording came out of a manual. Nobody said you were…

When something frightens you the mind offers one option: do not go. Force out two or three more before judging any of them, daft ones included. Choosing needs something to choose between.

There is an order that works. Say what the problem actually is, in one sentence. List some options without weighing them yet. Then go through what is…

Years of avoiding people leave real gaps, not only fear. How to start small talk, how to join a group already talking, how to get out of a conversation. Those can be taught, and being taught them is not an insult.

Sending someone into a peer group without the ordinary moves risks a genuinely bad afternoon, which then teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Practise…

Put a number on each step, nought to ten, and let it be your number. Two people facing the same school will not agree about which part is worst, and the ladder has to belong to the person climbing it.

One child dreads the bus and is fine once inside the building. Another would happily ride the bus all morning and cannot get through the front door.…

Run it in your head first, then act it out with someone safe, then do it for real. It is a preseason, and nobody thinks the preseason is cheating.

Each round adds a little pressure while help is still to hand. Imagining it stirs the fear enough to show whether your plan holds up. Acting it out…

Some of what you believe about yourself is not a distortion. Things really did go wrong, often for years. What can be argued with is the conclusion you drew from them, that this is simply what you are.

Try separating the record from the verdict. The record might be missed deadlines, jobs that ended badly, friendships that faded. The verdict is 'so I…

A reward that is far off has almost no weight in ADHD. Tying the task to something you actually care about gives you a reason that does not depend on the payoff arriving soon.

So instead of 'I should file these', try 'I want to be someone my family can rely on, and this is part of that'. The other half of this approach is…

Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.

After years of being told you get things wrong, a low estimate of yourself does not feel like a distortion, it feels like the evidence. So argue with…

Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.

Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…

When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.

Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…

If the urge to arrange has to go somewhere, point it at something that can actually be finished. A kitchen drawer ends. A desk you keep re-sorting never does.

The ending is the part that matters. Finishing leaves you with something real to have done, which competes with the small relief that compulsive…

Steadiness under provocation is built the way immunity is, in small doses taken on purpose, at a size you can still handle. Waiting for a real fight to test yourself is too big a dose to learn anything from.

In practice that means choosing something that stings a little and staying with it rather than swerving: the colleague whose tone you brace against,…

What you are proudest of will tell you where you are most easily wounded. The two grow on the same root.

Write down two or three things you would hate to be thought about you, then look at where they meet your ordinary week. Who is likely to imply it, in…

Go to the gym without the getting ready. No mirror check, no fixing your hair, just train and come home.

This works because it lands exactly where many people quietly keep their worth, and because the real consequences are nil. Nobody there is thinking…

A belief about yourself comes with a feeling somewhere in the body, an emotion, and a set of things you then do or avoid. Argue only with the words and the rest of it carries on exactly as before.

This is the gap behind I know it is not true but I do not feel it. Next time you catch the belief, note where it sits physically, what emotion turned…

Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.

It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…