Practices

Peripheral biofeedback, the sort that tracks skin conductance and heart rate rather than brainwaves, has more behind it than neurofeedback does. You practise letting the body drop into a calmer state while a monitor shows you it happening.

Once that state is familiar, pair it with a distinctive scent used only for this. After enough repetitions the smell starts pulling the state along…

A weighted vest seems to do its work in roughly the first quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes did not beat fifteen, so longer is not more help.

Use it as a tool for a moment rather than a garment for the day: on before the piece of work that needs the most sitting still, off once that is…

If you are thinking about a weighted blanket or vest for a child, let an occupational therapist set the weight. It is a specific number for a specific body, not something to guess at in a shop.

The pull to order one straight away is understandable, especially after months of bad nights. What an OT does is match the weight to the child's size…

With some sensory routines, the part doing the work may be a parent's steady hands and full attention rather than the technique itself. Worth knowing, because contact carries into the rest of the day and a protocol does not.

Views differ on this and the research has not sorted it out. What follows practically is that a family who cannot keep the exact routine going has…

When a test trips a child on something it was never meant to measure, change how they answer rather than what is asked. A spelling test spoken aloud is still a spelling test.

One girl saw letters as solid three dimensional shapes that would not sit together on a page, so writing them was a perceptual problem rather than a…

If you are going to take supplements, it is worth paying a small subscription to a service that assays what is actually in them. ConsumerLab is one, at roughly sixty dollars a year.

The thing to check about any such service is who funds it, because a tester paid by manufacturers is a marketing department with a laboratory…

When omega levels are low, everything about ADHD tends to get louder: attention, mood swings, holding things in mind. Low omega does not cause ADHD, but it can be sitting on top of it.

Think of it as one more layer to lift off rather than the thing underneath. Specialist labs can measure levels if it seems worth checking, and…

One woman's ADHD symptoms climbed and her thinking slowed as each B12 injection wore off, then settled again after the next one. The deficiency came down one side of her family and the ADHD down the other.

The two lived in the same person without either causing the other. What made it findable was the timing, because difficulties that follow a cycle are…

Food colouring is the one narrow exception in this area. Large studies suggest it may mildly wind up some very young children, so a trial removal in a preschooler is a reasonable thing to do.

Keep it in proportion though. This is a minor irritant in a subset of little children, nowhere near the sweeping dietary cause that was claimed…

The restrictive elimination diet has real methodological problems, and it is expensive and exhausting to run. If a family still wants to try it, they can, because unproven and dangerous are different words.

There is usually more to lose by forbidding it. A family who feels blocked either does it anyway without telling you or spends another year…

Play therapy and insight based psychotherapy do not treat ADHD. There is no buried, unexpressed feeling driving it that talking will let out.

The difficulty sits in executive control and how it develops, not in hidden conflict. That said, a child with ADHD can also be anxious, grieving or…

Most of what we call memory looks backwards. The kind that actually runs your week is the other sort: a plan that has to show up in your head at the one moment you could still act on it.

So when something gets missed, the question is not really whether you knew about it. You almost certainly did, at the time you agreed to it. What…

When a task is missed it is usually not sitting somewhere being refused. It has gone off the radar altogether, the way a name goes when somebody asks you for it.

The refusal reading is the expensive one, because it turns a lapse into an insult and starts the argument in the one place where nothing can be…

A thought you have in the car about something to say at home is worth nothing until the person is actually there in front of you. Cues have to sit where the action becomes possible, not where you happened to think of it.

Picture where you will be at the moment the thing can be done, and put the reminder there: a note on the front door for something that happens on the…

The moment you think of it is the only moment you are certain to have it. Do the thing, or write it down, or set the alarm, or put something odd in your pocket that will make no sense later until you check.

The two seconds of holding it in mind while you finish what you are doing is usually where it disappears. So make capture the reflex instead of the…

Start the email and then stop: address it, write the subject line, leave it unsent. The half finished thing sits in your drafts looking wrong until you deal with it.

It works because it leaves an odd looking object in a place you already go, and because unfinished jobs nag in a way that quiet decisions do not.…

The bag that has to travel with you tomorrow goes on top of your shoes, not neatly beside the desk. Let the object stand in the way of a route you walk without thinking.

The phrase worth keeping is point of performance: the reminder has to sit where the action happens, at the time it has to happen. A note on the…

Sometimes you cannot write it down. You are driving, your hands are full, you are halfway through a conversation. Then picture the moment in detail instead: the room you will be standing in, the object you will be looking at when you do it.

Make the picture concrete rather than worthy. Not a solemn 'I must ring the surgery' but the desk you will be sitting at, the mug beside the phone,…

For most of childhood somebody else held the diary. Parents remember the dentist, the kit, the letter that needs signing, and then one day nobody is doing that for you and the whole job is yours.

This is often why someone who managed well enough at school comes apart in their twenties. Nothing got worse. The scaffolding came down, and the…

Remembering to do something later is really two jobs stacked on each other. You have to keep hold of the thing itself, and you have to keep some feel for how the hours are passing, and both have to be working at the same moment.

That is why this fails more often than either piece alone, and why it is the failure other people see. Seeing it as two jobs splits the fix in two as…