Practices

Telling someone they have changed their brain lands harder than telling them they have changed their mind. That is worth knowing, and worth handling carefully.

Brain language feels solid and permanent, so a person can lean on it. That same weight is why it should not be stretched: promising rewiring you…

Your brain is less a single organ than a crowd of billions of cells working out what to do next. The angry pull you feel is one voice in that crowd, not the whole of you.

This matters most in the second when an impulse arrives sounding completely certain. You can hear it, treat it as one contribution, and still not act…

You do not have to believe the calmer sentence yet. Say it anyway, on purpose, often, and belief tends to arrive behind the repetition rather than in front of it.

Pick one line you would want ready in your mouth, something like: he is not doing this at me. Repeat it in quiet moments, not only in hot ones. It…

A new practice needs somewhere to live. Hook it to something you already do a few times a day, like sitting down to eat.

Vague plans to practise more collapse without anyone noticing. Name the moment instead: when I put my plate down, I take three slow breaths before…

Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.

Memory is unfair about this. The single evening you lost your temper stays vivid while thirty quiet successes disappear, and then it feels as though…

If you held back at four o'clock and then snapped at seven, the holding back still happened. A later slip does not reach backwards and cancel it.

All or nothing scoring is the quickest route from one lapse to giving the whole thing up: I lost it, so none of it was working, so why bother. Count…

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.

A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…

Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.

It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the…

Serotonin syndrome comes from stacking, and the second agent is usually something nobody thought to mention: a migraine tablet, a cough medicine, a herbal remedy for low mood.

Triptans, tramadol, dextromethorphan, linezolid and St John's wort all count, as do other antidepressants. Someone who mentions in passing that they…

When someone says they react badly to normal doses of almost everything, take it as information about their body rather than as a personality trait.

Bodies differ in how fast they break a medicine down. Give two people the same dose and one of them may be holding far more of it for far longer,…

Try putting a sentence between you and the mood: this is what my brain is doing right now. It does not make me a bad person, and it does not mean I cannot cope. It just feels that way today.

Low mood does not arrive labelled as a mood. It arrives as facts about you, that you are useless, that nobody wants you around, and it is very hard…

When someone tells you they have been hurting themselves, keep your face steady and stay curious. Alarm closes the conversation, and you need it open.

A visible flinch teaches the person that this is not something you can hear, and the next disclosure goes elsewhere or nowhere. It can also make the…

More of the medicine is not automatically better. What you are looking for is a level that sits inside the working range, and going past it usually brings side effects rather than sharper thinking.

It is a natural thought that if some helps a little, double would help twice as much. In practice people describe the higher dose as flat, or wired,…

If sleep has gone since starting, look at what time the dose is being taken before deciding the medicine is the problem. A long acting dose swallowed at one in the afternoon is still working at bedtime.

Extended release preparations are built to cover eight to twelve hours from whenever they are taken, so a late start pushes the whole thing into the…

Do not compare your dose with anybody else's. Two milligrams of one medicine and a hundred milligrams of another can both be perfectly ordinary, because strength per milligram differs from molecule to molecule.

This comes up in waiting rooms and family group chats and it causes real alarm about being on a lot. The number on the box only means something…

If you are living on campus, ask the pharmacist to split the month's supply across two labelled bottles. Then whichever one you are carrying has a valid prescription label on it.

Carrying a controlled medicine loose in a bag, or in an unlabelled tin, is a disciplinary and sometimes legal problem quite separate from any medical…

If a young driver in your house takes medication, the dose and the car keys belong together. Driving is the everyday task where one lost second costs the most.

The gap tends to open at weekends and in the holidays, when the dose gets skipped because there is no school and then someone drives anyway. Make it…

If you open atomoxetine capsules to mix the contents into food, keep it away from your eyes and wash your hands afterwards. The powder stings badly.

The molecule is acidic and cannot be softened without falling apart, so the fix is in the handling rather than the chemistry. Take it with something…

Stand up slowly. Getting off the floor after an hour of gaming, or out of bed in the morning, is where the dizziness tends to catch people.

A drop in blood pressure on standing is common enough with these medicines and it frightens people, because a near faint feels like something serious…