Practices

The fast forceful practices are not for everyone. With high blood pressure, heart trouble or glaucoma, leave them out and use the slow ones, which carry no such warning.

Rapid breathing with effort behind it raises pressure inside the chest, the head and the eyes for as long as you keep it going. The gentler lift,…

Any breathing instruction that reaches you through a screen or a book comes from someone who cannot see you. Keep the final say over what your body does.

Recorded instructions have to be general. You are the one who knows that your chest tightens on holds, or that counting makes you anxious. Treat each…

Forethought can be as small as this. The motorway is dreadful at nine and fine at two, so you go at two. Ten seconds of picturing it, not an afternoon of planning.

If the word planning makes you tired, drop it. What you are doing is running the thing forward once before you commit: where will I be, what will it…

On Monday, take a minute to picture Thursday twice. Thursday with an hour of this already behind you, and Thursday with none of it done. Make both of them specific.

Where are you sitting, what time is it, what does your chest feel like. The comparison is the working part, since one vague future against another…

Trace a slow circle with your finger, on your knee or in the air, once a day. One a day is the whole prescription, which is why it survives contact with real life.

A small movement done daily becomes a handle. After a few weeks the gesture starts to bring a little of the settled state with it, and you can use it…

The out breath is the part that quiets things down. Cells in the brain's alarm centres behave differently across the two phases of a breath, and breathing out is the calming side of that cycle.

This is why nearly every breathing technique that works has a long exhale somewhere inside it. You do not need the anatomy to use it, but knowing why…

The planning part of the brain is the last to finish growing, and it keeps developing well into the twenties. Eighteen is a legal age rather than a developmental one.

This is worth saying plainly in a family where someone is being asked why they cannot just be responsible now. Nobody expects a fourteen year old to…

Reading a room is a skill rather than a personality trait, and it can be broken into parts. Before you speak, take a second to look: who is here, what they are doing, how loud the place is.

Give yourself a short list to run through. How are people dressed and speaking, is this somewhere jokes land, is anybody clearly in a hurry. Then…

If a year out is coming, call it a bridge rather than a gap. A gap is a hole in a record. A bridge is going somewhere.

That word will be repeated at every family gathering for twelve months, so it is worth choosing carefully. A bridge year has a direction and an end,…

Writing things down is not evidence that your memory has failed. It is what happens once there is more in your life than one head can hold.

Most people who refuse a system are protecting something: the sense of being capable, of not being the sort of person who needs help with this. Argue…

Putting a task in the diary is not the same as doing it. The slot holds the time. The starting is still yours.

Worth knowing before you build anything, because when the first week goes by with the boxes filled and half of them untouched, the honest conclusion…

Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.

The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…

Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.

The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…

Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.

The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…

Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.

Most of the time we glance at a face and move straight on. Holding your gaze long enough for something to stir is a small test of whether the feeling…

Before someone has said a word, you have often already decided what they are: only here because they were made to come, not really interested, wasting your time. That decision changes how the meeting goes.

The person sent by a court, or pushed into the room by a partner or a manager, walks in already read. Try starting the hour with nothing written: no…

Before inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?

The asking is part of the practice, not the preamble to it. Someone whose body was once not theirs to control needs the choice handed back in small…

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…

When you sit down to breathe, notice your pelvis. Tucked hard under or tipped hard forward both squeeze the breath; somewhere in the middle lets the diaphragm move.

Rock gently forward and back a few times and stop where the breath feels easiest, rather than aiming for a posture that looks correct. You will…

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…