Practices

If drinking is anywhere in the picture, stopping will probably do more for your anger than any technique you could learn. That is not the interesting answer, it is just the one that moves the most.

Skills work at the edges of a hard moment. Alcohol removes the very part of you those skills run on, so you can practise beautifully on a Tuesday…

Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.

This is the cheapest work available and it is nearly always skipped, because it feels too obvious to count. Notice when your worst moments land: late…

If you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.

Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…

If you are testing whether a food affects you or your child, the test has to be complete. Among children with suspected sensitivity to artificial colouring, most reacted to as little as 100 mg, so a bit left in is enough to blur the answer.

What usually happens is that a family removes the obvious sources, misses the ones hidden in medicines, sauces and cereals, sees no change, and…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…

If you are going to test whether a food matters, work out in advance where the plan will leak. School lunch swaps, a grandparent's biscuit tin, your own memory on a hard week: all of it decides whether the answer means anything.

Change one thing at a time and keep everything else steady, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Then be honest about who is running the…

With the fast acting treatments, the plan for what happens afterwards matters as much as the treatment itself.

Electroconvulsive therapy can shift severe depression quickly, and without something in place afterwards the relapse rate is high, which is why…

A child who has spent years being told they are careless will often say yes to whoever finally seems glad of them. Work on how they see themselves is not a soft extra to the clinical work.

Count the corrections in a single day and it is easy to see what accumulates. By the time an offer comes from someone friendly, the pull is belonging…

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,…

If the first medicine disappoints, that is information about the first medicine. Plenty of people who get nothing from one class do well on another.

Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not the same drug at different strengths. They work by partly different routes, so a poor result on one says…

Give a new habit two months rather than two weeks, and change one thing at a time. The old line about thirty days sets you up to feel like a failure on day thirty one.

Routines that wobble make repetition harder, and repetition is the whole mechanism, so it simply takes longer for some of us. Pick one change, keep…

Unstructured play in a big open space settles a child. A structured class teaches them how to be with other children. You want some of each, for different reasons.

If you only ever book the class, you take away the roaming that calms them down. If you only ever send them out to roam, they miss the taking turns…

Whatever gets you outside and quiet for a stretch of time counts. Fishing, sitting in a hide, weeding, waiting in the car park with the window down.

Nobody has to call it mindfulness for it to work like mindfulness. Hours of low demand attention outdoors, with nothing much required of you, is the…

Martial arts happen to bundle four useful things at once: hard physical work, a fixed structure, feedback in the moment, and a teacher who stays. That is why they suit restless minds so well.

Any one of those on its own helps a little. Together they cover the arousal, the shapelessness of time, the need for a reward that arrives today…

Long goals need markers you can reach this month. Belts work because you get a visible, earned step every so often instead of one distant summit.

Build the same thing into anything you are trying to keep up: a distance, a number of sessions, a move you could not do in January. Make it something…

For a child having a hard time, one adult who plainly thinks well of them makes more difference than almost anything else. A coach or a teacher can be that person.

Studies of children growing up through poverty, hunger and worse keep landing on the same finding: those who did well usually had somebody who…

A practice kept up for years stops being something you do and becomes part of who you are. That is when it no longer needs willpower.

People who started something physical as children and carried on often point to it as where their steadiness came from. The early years are the…

Keep a movement practice going long enough and your body starts doing it without you. People who have practised for decades describe the form running itself while their mind is elsewhere.

In the early months it takes all your concentration, which is why it feels expensive. Later it stops asking for that, and you get the calm without…