Practices

Anger sends people back to the thing they had stopped, and the thing they had stopped makes the anger worse. Any plan that treats these as two separate projects tends to come apart.

Write anger into the relapse plan by name, alongside the parties, the old friends and the difficult anniversary. Then when you look at the anger, ask…

The pull towards bread, pasta and biscuits when you are low is not simply greed. Carbohydrate makes it easier for the brain to get hold of the raw material it needs for serotonin, so it gives a real if short lived lift.

Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking…

Irritable bowel symptoms turn up more often in people with ADHD, and they tend to track stress. If your stomach is at its worst in the weeks when everything else is at its worst, that is information rather than coincidence.

Two things help more often than they get suggested. Cutting caffeine frequently settles symptoms on its own, since it speeds the gut up and raises…

A medicine that lifts drive is not the same as one that settles anxiety, and for some people the energising kind makes the worry louder.

Bupropion is the clearest example: often good for flatness and lack of motivation, often unhelpful on its own when anxiety and a racing, sleepless…

The stimulant shortage is not your pharmacy being disorganised. Regulators set a fixed annual quota of the raw material, and the ceiling has been too low to cover the prescriptions being written.

Knowing that changes what you do with your energy. Ringing round twenty chemists is exhausting and it creates no supply, so spend the effort on…

Waking your child at six to give the tablet so it has taken hold by breakfast, then letting them fall back to sleep, is not a strange thing you invented because you are failing. It is a reasonable answer to a real gap in how the medicine works.

Families quietly carry a lot of these. The early alarm, the switch to a faster product, the parent who does the whole morning alone because it goes…

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.…

Being in recovery is not a reason to leave an attention difficulty untreated. The restlessness that made a substance useful is still there once the substance goes.

Clinicians often hold back here, uneasy about a stimulant for someone with a history, and that caution is understandable. The other choice carries a…

For a small number of children the question was never about school reports. A toddler who runs into a road and keeps running, a child who climbs the pool fence: what is being weighed there is whether they stay alive.

Most decisions about treating a very young child are finely balanced and deserve to be taken slowly. Where the behaviour itself is life threatening,…

Moving first does not only help you concentrate. It takes some of the heat out of being stuck, which is often the thing that ends the task.

For a lot of people the problem is not the maths, it is what happens inside them when the maths does not come immediately. That surge of frustration…

Hours of nothing, then panic, then three hours locked onto the wrong task, then dread, then a promise that tomorrow will be different. If that is your day, it is a known pattern and not a character flaw.

People post this shape as a joke and clinicians recognise it as an accurate description. Seeing it written down is often the moment something…

If a child is climbing the walls, green space helps most, a walk down a busy street helps a bit, and staying in the room helps least. Any of the three beats none.

The research on this puts them in that order rather than saying only a forest will do. A park, a scruffy playing field, the bit of grass behind the…

Slow movement practices seem to help mood, sleep and the general hum of stress. Bringing that background level down often does more for your concentration than trying to concentrate harder.

Running on a constant stress signal wears down exactly the part of you that plans, waits and holds a thought. So lowering the load is not a soft…

Keep something to eat and drink within reach for hard conversations. Handing someone a biscuit and a glass of water often settles a room faster than any instruction does.

Part of why it works is that nobody has to be told how. A person too wound up to follow a breathing exercise can still take a sip and chew. Sharing…

Being told you are too sensitive is usually someone else's comfort talking. Feeling things strongly is not the problem to solve; what to do once the feeling has arrived is.

Both halves have to be said together. Validation on its own leaves a person flooded with permission and no handles. Teaching control on its own joins…

Peripheral biofeedback, the sort that tracks skin conductance and heart rate rather than brainwaves, has more behind it than neurofeedback does. You practise letting the body drop into a calmer state while a monitor shows you it happening.

Once that state is familiar, pair it with a distinctive scent used only for this. After enough repetitions the smell starts pulling the state along…

Somebody will eventually ask you whether you want what is best for your child. It is a sales line, and knowing that in advance is most of what you need to withstand it.

Parents of a newly diagnosed child are frightened, motivated and often exhausted, which is exactly the state that gets marketed to. The question is…

If a treatment comes with a contract, take it to a solicitor before signing. Not because you cannot read it, but because that puts a few days between the pitch and your signature.

Being told not to sign rarely helps, and it asks somebody to admit in the moment that they might act rashly, which almost nobody does in front of a…

Wanting sugar, salt and something sharp at the end of a punishing week is physiology talking, not a defect in your character.

Long stretches of high stress come with real bodily consequences, and a shifted appetite is one of the visible ones. Fighting the craving head on…