Practices

Sleep, food and movement will not cure anything, but they lengthen the fuse. Bad moments still arrive, and you handle them differently when your body is not already running on empty.

This matters more here than it sounds, because ADHD tends to wreck exactly these three and then the wreckage feeds back into the flare ups. Late…

The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.

Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…

Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.

This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they…

Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.

That frame does a lot of quiet work. It says the treatment is ongoing rather than a course you finish, it explains why things slide back when…

The therapy that helps adult ADHD is not really about arguing with your thoughts. It is practical work on how your week is built, and it works because you are the one who can go and rebuild it.

Sessions tend to circle the same handful of things. Where the list lives, what the calendar actually does when you are not looking at it, how a large…

Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.

Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is…

Listen for the condition you have attached to acting: I will apply once I know I will get it, I will go once I know I will like it. If that condition could never actually be met, it is not caution, it is a door you have quietly locked.

From the inside it rarely feels like avoidance. It feels sensible, even responsible, because who would go to all that trouble without knowing. The…

When something feels unbearable to risk, follow it downwards. If that did happen, what would it mean, and what would happen after that?

Keep asking gently, and stop when you reach something that is a statement about the person rather than about the situation, such as it would prove I…

An exam is a task with requirements. It is not a ruling on whether you are capable, however much it feels like one while you are sitting inside it.

Saying that once changes very little. The person this comes from took a long time to arrive at it, and that is worth knowing so you do not expect it…

A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.

This is worth knowing when you are building a plan around less: fewer commitments, lighter workload, nothing too taxing. Take out all the demand and…

Give a dull task some fuel: music, a timer, a stake, a partner. Your brain runs on interest.

Do not expect a low-interest task to run on willpower alone. Add the spark it needs to catch.

One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.

A repetitive session on a machine asks very little of you once your body knows it. Something with steps to follow, in time with other people, keeps…

Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.

It is a quieter thing than depression and it does not look like much from outside. Sleep is fine, you are still working, but the zest has gone out of…

Build your work around what your mind does well, novelty, hyperfocus, big-picture, not only around your gaps.

You will go further leaning on your strengths than endlessly sanding down your weaknesses.

Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.

The narrow band in between is where you stay engaged without noticing you are trying. It is usually a bit further up than feels comfortable when you…