Practices

You are right that the first drink takes the edge off. That is exactly what makes it hard, and pretending otherwise would only be untrue.

The calm is real at a small amount and it turns on you as the amount climbs, which is why the argument at eleven at night bears no resemblance to the…

Charge the phone in another room overnight. Not face down, not on the far side of the bed: another room, so that reaching it means standing up.

Distance is what does the work here, which is why the halfway versions never hold. If you use it as an alarm, a cheap clock settles that for the…

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…

Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.

The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…

Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.

Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…

Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.

The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…

Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.

The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…

Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.

Tracking anything in your head is hard when your head is already full, and harder still when concentration is one of the things that has taken a hit.…

Serotonin syndrome comes from stacking, and the second agent is usually something nobody thought to mention: a migraine tablet, a cough medicine, a herbal remedy for low mood.

Triptans, tramadol, dextromethorphan, linezolid and St John's wort all count, as do other antidepressants. Someone who mentions in passing that they…

When someone says they react badly to normal doses of almost everything, take it as information about their body rather than as a personality trait.

Bodies differ in how fast they break a medicine down. Give two people the same dose and one of them may be holding far more of it for far longer,…

More of the medicine is not automatically better. What you are looking for is a level that sits inside the working range, and going past it usually brings side effects rather than sharper thinking.

It is a natural thought that if some helps a little, double would help twice as much. In practice people describe the higher dose as flat, or wired,…

If sleep has gone since starting, look at what time the dose is being taken before deciding the medicine is the problem. A long acting dose swallowed at one in the afternoon is still working at bedtime.

Extended release preparations are built to cover eight to twelve hours from whenever they are taken, so a late start pushes the whole thing into the…

Do not compare your dose with anybody else's. Two milligrams of one medicine and a hundred milligrams of another can both be perfectly ordinary, because strength per milligram differs from molecule to molecule.

This comes up in waiting rooms and family group chats and it causes real alarm about being on a lot. The number on the box only means something…

If you are living on campus, ask the pharmacist to split the month's supply across two labelled bottles. Then whichever one you are carrying has a valid prescription label on it.

Carrying a controlled medicine loose in a bag, or in an unlabelled tin, is a disciplinary and sometimes legal problem quite separate from any medical…

If a young driver in your house takes medication, the dose and the car keys belong together. Driving is the everyday task where one lost second costs the most.

The gap tends to open at weekends and in the holidays, when the dose gets skipped because there is no school and then someone drives anyway. Make it…

If you open atomoxetine capsules to mix the contents into food, keep it away from your eyes and wash your hands afterwards. The powder stings badly.

The molecule is acidic and cannot be softened without falling apart, so the fix is in the handling rather than the chemistry. Take it with something…

Stand up slowly. Getting off the floor after an hour of gaming, or out of bed in the morning, is where the dizziness tends to catch people.

A drop in blood pressure on standing is common enough with these medicines and it frightens people, because a near faint feels like something serious…

If swallowing the capsule is the sticking point, ask whether yours is the bead type that can be opened and tipped onto a spoonful of soft food. The little beads go down unchewed and the medicine still lasts as long as it should.

Inside these capsules sit lots of coated pellets, some with thin coats that dissolve early and some with thicker coats that dissolve later, which is…

The skin patch comes with two things worth knowing before you start. Take it off several hours before bedtime or it keeps delivering and sleep goes, and around one person in six gets a rash bad enough to stop.

The upside is real control over the length of the day. Because the medicine stops arriving soon after the patch comes off, the removal time is yours…

There is now a version taken in the evening that only switches on around nine hours later, so it is already working when you wake. The point of it is the morning, not the night.

Most families know the first hour of the day as the worst one, because the tablet taken at breakfast has not started yet and everyone still has to…