Practices

With many of these medicines the unpleasant part turns up on day one and the good part takes weeks. Knowing that in advance is most of what carries people across the gap.

The first fortnight can feel like a bad bargain, because it is one: you pay now for something that arrives later. Put a date in the diary two to four…

Treat the first fortnight as a stretch that needs contact rather than silence. Say plainly that things may feel worse before they feel better, and arrange to hear from the person during that window instead of after it.

This is when most people quietly stop. Somebody who has been warned experiences a rough two weeks as expected; somebody who has not experiences it as…

Mechanism is a moving thing, so it is easier to watch than to read. A university made animation of what happens at the junction will teach you more in ten minutes than a page of description.

Prefer something made by a university or a public body over whatever a search puts at the top, since much of what is written about these drugs is…

A child who has spent years being told they are careless will often say yes to whoever finally seems glad of them. Work on how they see themselves is not a soft extra to the clinical work.

Count the corrections in a single day and it is easy to see what accumulates. By the time an offer comes from someone friendly, the pull is belonging…

Being in recovery is not a reason to leave an attention difficulty untreated. The restlessness that made a substance useful is still there once the substance goes.

Clinicians often hold back here, uneasy about a stimulant for someone with a history, and that caution is understandable. The other choice carries a…

For a small number of children the question was never about school reports. A toddler who runs into a road and keeps running, a child who climbs the pool fence: what is being weighed there is whether they stay alive.

Most decisions about treating a very young child are finely balanced and deserve to be taken slowly. Where the behaviour itself is life threatening,…

If the first medicine disappoints, that is information about the first medicine. Plenty of people who get nothing from one class do well on another.

Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not the same drug at different strengths. They work by partly different routes, so a poor result on one says…

If the word exercise makes you flinch, drop it. Say moving about, or getting out, and see whether a plan turns up.

For a lot of people that word carries school changing rooms and years of not keeping things up. Swap it and the list of things that count grows:…

Missing a day is not the end of the programme. You missed a day. Tomorrow you carry on.

The dangerous part is not the missed session, it is the story that follows it, the one where you have blown it so you may as well stop altogether.…

When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.

The pause can be tiny. Say out loud what you did, tell someone, sit with it for a minute, thank God for it. Racing straight on to the next target…

When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.

Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…

Use a timer you can see rather than a warning you have to remember. A dial that shrinks, or a light that goes from green to red, does the work that five more minutes never quite does.

Time is not something everyone feels passing. Turning it into something you can look at moves the job from guessing to seeing, which is much easier.…

One minute of moving between tasks. Star jumps, a lap of the corridor, anything that gets the blood going before you sit down to the next thing.

Classrooms that do this report smoother changeovers and better recall of whatever was just taught. The same trick works at a desk: end one job, move…

A silent room is not restful for everybody. If every cough and creaking knee pulls at you, ask for music or bring headphones with something plain in them.

Too little going on can be as unsettling as too much. A low steady sound covers the sudden little noises that keep snagging your attention. Some…

When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.

They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…

Notice one thing your body is telling you right now. Thirsty, needing the loo, shoulders up somewhere near your ears. That noticing is a skill and it does come back with use.

Long stretches of stress teach you to override the body's signals until you stop hearing them at all. Then hunger, tiredness and the early edge of…

Five minutes of moving about sharpens concentration enough to notice. You do not need a session, you need a lap of the building.

Before a task you have been avoiding, get the blood going for five minutes. Stairs, a brisk walk to the end of the road, star jumps in the kitchen if…

It does not have to be one block. Ten minutes here and ten there add up to the same total, and they are far easier to get.

An hour set aside is an hour that one interruption can swallow. Bits scattered through the day survive better and they break up the sitting, which is…

Nobody sits down at a piano and plays Mozart the first afternoon. Set the bar at this week rather than at the finished version of yourself.

The stretch between starting and being any good is where most attempts die, because the reward sits a long way off and today feels like nothing.…

Give yourself an hour rather than a fortnight. A short window creates the pressure that gets a thing started, where a long one quietly fills up with everything else.

Two weeks of notice usually means the work happens in the last few hours anyway, with all the dread in between. So set a smaller box on purpose:…