Practices

Ask about the family properly: parents, brothers and sisters, children, then aunts, uncles and grandparents. Include drinking and drug use, in them as well as in the person sitting with you.

This tends to be the highest yield few minutes of an assessment, because the condition runs strongly in families. Relatives who were never assessed…

Ask whether anyone kept the old school reports. The same lines turn up generation after generation: not working to potential, talks too much, never has the right books with him.

They were written by teachers who had never heard of ADHD, about children nobody was going to assess, and that is exactly what makes them worth…

If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.

A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…

'I am disorganised' cannot be treated. 'The post piles up on the hall table until something ends up with a debt collector' can. Spend the time getting the problem down to something that specific.

Push for the particulars: which task, which moment, what was happening just before, what they did instead. Where you can, ask someone who was there…

Give your spouse one genuine compliment today, specific enough that it could only be them.

Not nice shirt. The way you handled that call was so calm. Precise praise lands deepest.

When resentment rises today, name one thing you are grateful to your spouse for instead.

The mind can rehearse grievances or blessings. Choose the blessing, out loud if you can.

Thank them for one specific thing, today.

Not "thanks for everything." Pick one thing from the last two days and name it exactly: "Thank you for taking the bins out when I was on that call. I…

Thank them for something they do so routinely you had stopped noticing it.

The unremarked, dependable acts are exactly the ones that most deserve to be seen.

Say not just that you appreciated what they did, but what it saved you.

Naming the burden they spared you turns a thank-you into being truly seen.

Praise a quality of their character, not only something they did.

To be admired for who you are, not just what you produced, is a rare and steadying gift.

Send them a message today naming one thing you are grateful for, with no occasion.

Unprompted gratitude, arriving in the middle of an ordinary day, lands especially softly.

Catch your partner doing something right, and thank them for it, specifically, on the spot.

Notice the small good things and say thanks. Appreciation given often keeps goodwill flowing.

Build a habit of mind that scans your partner and your day for what to appreciate, not what to criticize.

What you look for grows. Train your eye toward their good and the relationship warms.

Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.

It fits inside an argument, a shopping queue, the second before you send a message you will regret. The value is not the breath itself, it is the…

Say it plainly whenever you teach anything: the way I am showing you this is not the way it has to be done. Change it until it works for you.

Anyone who has failed at the standard version of something several times will not try again unless they are told clearly that adapting it is allowed.…

Cold water on your face, especially around the eyes and cheeks, slows things down fast. Splash it, or hold a cold flannel there for half a minute.

This is one of the few things that works when you are too far gone to concentrate on anything. It asks for no skill and no privacy beyond a tap. Lean…

Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.

Twenty or thirty seconds is enough to feel something shift, and most people find the breath falls into step with the tapping on its own. Warmth in…

You do not need a diagnosis to be worth teaching this to. Something that takes seconds, costs nothing and travels with you is worth having before you need it.

Practise it on an ordinary day, sitting on the bus or waiting for the kettle, so your hands already know it when the day is not ordinary. That is…

Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.

The counting slows the breath to roughly the rate that suits the heart best, and the tracing gives your eyes and hand something to do, which is…

In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most…