Practices

Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.

This is the cheapest work available and it is nearly always skipped, because it feels too obvious to count. Notice when your worst moments land: late…

Working out where your reaction came from will not switch it off. That is not a failure of your insight, it is simply how the two kinds of memory work.

The story you can tell sits in one system. The flinch sits in another one, older and quicker, and it never learned from explanations. Which means the…

Every incident you get through without looking at it leaves something behind, a charge that goes off a bit quicker next time. Asking for help early is not making a drama of it, it is cheaper than the version that comes later.

People assume an escalating pattern means they are becoming a worse person. More often it means the same route has been practised a few more times…

If escape is holding the pattern in place, the plan closes off the escape a step at a time. If what waits at home is holding it, the plan moves those good things to the other side of the effort.

Most stuck cases are stuck because only one half was addressed. A careful ladder of steps does very little while the afternoon at home is still the…

If a child is at home, run the day as though it were a school day. Same wake time, same breakfast, bag packed, work starting when lessons would have started.

Ten hours of sleep followed by a slow morning turns home into somewhere far nicer than school, and a body clock that drifts later makes the next…

When a step does not happen, cut the next one down without any speech about it. Smaller, and carry on.

Progress here is often slower than anyone would like, and that is the method working rather than the method failing. What does real damage is a run…

You will probably not feel yourself getting better. One day you will be halfway through a chat with a stranger and realise you are doing the thing you could not do.

This is worth knowing at the start, because the middle is where people decide nothing is happening and stop. The change comes in pieces too small to…

How often you actually do it matters more than which version you chose. The people who keep turning up tend to get more out of it, and those who carry on at home get more again.

This is quietly encouraging, because an unimpressive practice done regularly beats an ideal one you manage twice. It also sets the expectation…

Part of why martial arts suit some people has little to do with the kicking. Every session opens with a plan and closes with a look back at what happened and what comes next.

Those brackets at each end are doing quiet work: planning, then reviewing, then planning again, which are exactly the things that are hard to hold in…

Running on autopilot is not the problem in itself. Patience, letting things go and wishing people well can all become automatic, and then they are there without you having to summon them.

Nobody deliberates under real pressure, so the aim is not to think harder at the time, it is to have a better default waiting. Defaults get installed…

The useful part is not the chart on the wall. It is that the person could think of things to do instead, and that took months of quiet work to arrive at.

Someone else's list of alternatives will not hold, because they thought of theirs and you did not. Build yours slowly, adding what has genuinely…

If you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.

Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…

Some of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.

Coaching for attention difficulties is mostly this, and nothing more mysterious. Someone sits with you, builds the week, works out what comes first,…

Medication can make the learning possible. It does not do the learning. If no tools get built while things are steadier, there is nothing standing there when the dose wears off.

A common disappointment runs like this: the medication helps, then it seems not to be enough, then it gets stopped. Often what happened is that…

Often the most useful thing a clinician does is not delivered by the clinician. It is delivered by the teacher, or the parent, after a conversation you had with them.

Taking that seriously changes how the hour gets spent, towards talking with the school, coaching the parents and designing the arrangement, and away…

The classroom is the strongest place to help and most clinicians cannot get into one. That is a reason to work well in the next best place, not a reason to give up.

ADHD sits in how a brain is built, and the work is on the executive skills themselves rather than on attitude or effort. Where the moment of…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…

Two people who spend time in step really do become more attuned. Nothing passes between your brains while it happens, though, so put the hours in rather than waiting for the wiring.

The phrase about brains wiring together is a picture, and a lovely one. What is actually available to you is ordinary: the same room, the same walk…

Closeness arrives much faster in a small group that keeps meeting than in a wide circle you see now and then. If you want to feel less alone, pick the small thing that repeats.

Six people who show up every Tuesday and say something real will know each other within a couple of months. Sixty acquaintances will not. It does not…