Practices

If the language of mindfulness puts you off, drop the language. Call it noticing what your mind is doing, and use it anyway.

Some people hear anything that sounds spiritual and close the door, and then a useful skill goes unused over a word. There is nothing here you have…

Picture a quick accelerator and a sluggish brake. In the moment the useful question is not "am I right", it is "which pedal is my foot on".

The brake also gets tired. After a long day of holding things in, the same remark lands harder, and that is worth planning around rather than judging…

The braking part of the brain is not finished until the mid to late twenties. A teenager who cannot hold their tongue is not being defiant, they are working with equipment still under construction.

Expecting adult self-control from a fifteen year old sets everyone up to fail, and then to argue about the failing. What helps more is lowering the…

Some triggers never reach words. A smell, a stuffy room, a noise you cannot place can carry you halfway to angry before anyone has said a thing.

When you keep flaring in the same place at the same time of day, look at the conditions before you look for a culprit. Air, heat, hunger, noise, a…

The part of you that reacts can be trained. The figure usually quoted is around eight weeks of small daily practice, not one weekend of good intentions.

That is oddly encouraging, because it means results were never due by Thursday. Pick something small enough that you will still do it when you are…

Your mind is judging everything all the time, quietly sorting what is safe from what is not. You cannot switch that off, and you would not want to.

The question is not whether you appraise but how coarsely. Angry appraisal is fast and sweeping: he is against me, this always happens. Slower…

If you are going to keep a record of the rough moments, name it in your own words. A hassle log gets filled in. A frustration inventory gathers dust.

The language you actually use in your head is the language that keeps a habit alive. Write the entries the same way: he was hassling me, she went…

Writing down what happened puts a little distance between you and it. Later you are not inside the row any more, you are a person reading about one.

Two things come out of a few weeks of this. You get data: the same time of day, the same person, the same bad night behind it. And you get practice…

If waiting has always been hard for you, and your attention has always been restless, that belongs in the anger picture rather than in a separate story.

Irritability, reactivity and a mind that will not settle often arrive as a set. Working on the anger while ignoring the attention leaves the ground…

Say the difficult sentence out loud, on your feet, in something like the real conditions. Thinking it through in your head is a different skill from getting it out of your mouth when your pulse is up.

Acting it out feels awkward and that awkwardness is part of why it works: the version of you who has to speak is the aroused one, so that is the…

Before telling someone what you have noticed about them, ask whether they want it. Do you mind if I offer something back to you? Then describe only what you saw, plainly.

Close attention is not neutral for a person who grew up being watched for a reason. Asking first turns being observed into something they agreed to,…

Say it plainly: my anger is allowed here. It is a healthy feeling and it is usually the thing telling me where a line should go.

For anyone who learned that their anger made them dangerous or unlovable, it now arrives with shame attached, and the shame is what turns it into…

Accepting reality as it is means dropping the fight with what has already happened. It does not mean staying somewhere that is still harming you.

The two get confused often, usually by people who were told to be patient by whoever benefited from their patience. A rough test: acceptance is for…

A hard feeling is not damage and it is not a bad attitude. It is a feeling, meant to be felt, and the only real question is at what pace.

Plenty of people were raised to treat their own sadness or anger as a failure of character, so the feeling arrives and shame arrives just behind it.…

Before you go anywhere near the hard memory, you need to be able to stay in your own body while something difficult is happening in it. That capacity is part of the work, not a delay before it starts.

Phase based approaches put this first for a plain reason: people who cannot bear the arousal either drop out or push through and come away worse. If…

When the person in front of you starts yawning during body work, it is usually not boredom. Bodies yawn as they let go of what they were holding.

Say so out loud, because most people apologise for it and then clamp down on the very thing that was starting to shift. A simple 'that is a good…

Regular massage has been studied with restless, distractible children and teenagers, and their teachers noticed the difference in class as well as the young people noticing it in themselves.

The pattern in these studies is modest and repeated: short sessions, twice a week, over several weeks, with mood and behaviour improving rather than…

In placebo studies, people improve even when they have been told outright that the pill is inert. They also usually spend half an hour talking with someone who is paying attention.

That half hour is easy to dismiss as a detail of the study design, and it may be most of the treatment. Which is oddly encouraging: careful listening…

A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.

Creators who live with ADHD have done real good here. They have made people feel recognised and made asking for help less frightening, and some…

ADHD is managed rather than cured, across a whole life. Anything advertising a cure is telling you it is not working from the evidence.

Managed sounds like a disappointment until you look at what it means in practice: treatment that fits your life now, adjusted when the life changes,…