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.

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The old argument about medication against behaviour therapy was set down years ago. The useful question now is what each one covers.

They work by different routes and they reach different hours of the day, so putting them in a single contest was never going to tell anyone much.…

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

Adding psychosocial work to medication buys something extra, and less than people hope. The extra tends to arrive in the places medication was never going to reach.

Homework routines, the temperature of arguments at home, how a teacher speaks to a child, the hours after a dose has worn off: that is where the…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286

Doing the behavioural work alongside a medicine can mean managing on less of it. That matters most for the side effects that follow the size of the dose.

Appetite, sleep and irritability all tend to scale with how much is being taken. Where part of the load is carried by routines, by support at school,…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31

Medication treats the attention difficulty. It does not teach reading, lift a depression, or repair a household that has been fighting for years.

Those things need treatment of their own, and they are often what the family actually came about. Treating the attention difficulty well can stop…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:83

Smoking runs high in ADHD, and nicotine genuinely does something for attention. It helps to treat that as self-medication rather than as one more impulsive habit.

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

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Structure and routine

What worry does

Making it stick

Treatment and medication

Emotions as signals

Being seen and judged

Feeling from the inside

When you use something to cope

Tolerate distress

Facing it a step at a time

Breaking the worry loop

Remembering to do it

What you are actually defending

Shame

Obsessions and compulsions

Righteous anger and perfectionism

When anger turns to harm

Posture and how you carry yourself

Self-compassion

Anger, alcohol and the body

Living with uncertainty

Letting it out safely

It changes what a conversation about stopping looks like. If a cigarette is doing a job, taking it away and leaving the job undone is a plan that…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 39:53

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

Stopping medication rises sharply in the early teenage years. If that is where you are, it helps to know this is the usual pattern rather than a sign that something has gone wrong with your child.

The pull is understandable: wanting to be in charge of your own body, hating being the one who is different, and a parent no longer standing over the…

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

When appetite disappears at lunchtime, work with the child's rhythm instead of against it. Feed them properly at the hours they are actually hungry, which is usually breakfast and then the late afternoon and evening.

What counts over a week is the total, not whether it arrived at the socially correct hour. A decent breakfast before the medicine takes hold, a light…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:32

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

Non-stimulants are usually tried after the stimulants rather than instead of them, mostly because they are harder to tolerate. That is about order, not about the drug being second rate.

There are people for whom one is the right first choice: tics, real anxiety alongside, a history that makes a stimulant a poor idea, or a body that…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286

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

Treat the first fortnight as a stretch that needs contact rather than silence. Say plainly that things may feel worse before they feel better, and arrange to hear from the person during that window instead of after it.

This is when most people quietly stop. Somebody who has been warned experiences a rough two weeks as expected; somebody who has not experiences it as…

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

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

A long acting injection into muscle releases its medicine slowly over weeks. It lifts the daily burden of remembering, at the price of not being able to stop quickly if the medicine disagrees with you.

That trade is worth naming out loud rather than settling on someone's behalf. For a person whose entire difficulty is the daily doing, weeks of cover…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28

For most people who get as far as asking for help with ADHD, medication is the single change that shifts the most. It is not compulsory and plenty live well without it, and it does deserve an honest look rather than a place at the back of the queue.

The reason is unglamorous. Nearly every strategy anyone teaches assumes you can pause before responding, hold a plan in mind while doing something…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 26:80

If you are not the one prescribing, you can still take an active part in the medication conversation. You see the person weekly and hold the ordinary detail their prescriber never gets to see.

Ask what they notice and write it down in their own words. With their permission, send the prescriber a short note that can be read in a minute: when…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 42:38

When a medicine seems to be underperforming, look at what else is in the room before reaching for a higher dose. Anxiety, low mood and a wrecked sleep pattern can each blunt a good response or imitate a poor one.

Otherwise the dose climbs while the real driver goes untreated, and the side effects arrive without the benefit. Ask what a bad night actually looks…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 16:43