Practices

One medicine can reach both the surging kind of anxiety and the circling kind, while another really only touches the surging kind. That is why the slower and broader option is usually the one people are started on.

It explains a pattern that looks arbitrary from the outside. The broad option is unglamorous: nothing happens on the first day and it takes weeks to…

Making someone calmer is not the same as treating what is making them anxious. Obsessive worry is the clearest case: something sedating can take the edge off the distress and leave whatever drives it completely untouched.

You can see it in the shape of the day. The person is quieter, slower, maybe sleeping better, and the same thought arrives just as often as it did.…

A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.

Creators who live with ADHD have done real good here. They have made people feel recognised and made asking for help less frightening, and some…

ADHD is managed rather than cured, across a whole life. Anything advertising a cure is telling you it is not working from the evidence.

Managed sounds like a disappointment until you look at what it means in practice: treatment that fits your life now, adjusted when the life changes,…

Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.

Watch closely and you see the skill appear in quiet moments and vanish in loud ones, when another child has already grabbed the ball and there is…

If mindfulness is going to help with ADHD, the version with a chance is small and spread out. A few seconds of noticing, several times a day, rather than one long sitting you come to dread.

A forty five minute block asks you to get settled in one place and then somehow carry that into the afternoon, and the carrying is exactly what tends…

By response rate, extended release stimulants are among the most effective medicines in psychiatry, and most people tolerate them well. That is worth hearing plainly, particularly from people who are not generally keen on medication.

What the long acting form buys you is coverage. A dose that has faded by four in the afternoon leaves the evening bare, and the evening is where home…

The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.

You may have noticed you can lose four hours to something that grips you and then be unable to start a ten minute form. That gap is the thing itself,…

There is a real difference between a person who will not start and a person who cannot get started, and with ADHD it is nearly always the second.

This matters most in how you speak to yourself, and in how the people near you speak to you. Refusal invites pressure and punishment, which reliably…

With ADHD the one dependable thing is that you are not dependable in the same way each day. A day when everything works and a day when nothing does can arrive with no reason you can find.

Say this out loud to the people who need to know, because the good days get held against you later, by them and by you. Plan around your average…

ADHD does not look the same in two people. If someone tells you that you cannot have it because you are calm, or organised at work, or did well at school, they are describing one version of it.

Two people with the same diagnosis can look nothing alike: one talkative and always moving, the other quiet and away inside their own head. Other…

Roughly one person in twenty has ADHD, and the figure holds up across very different countries. You are not part of a modern trend.

That number matters in two directions. It means you are not rare, so in a class of thirty or an office of forty there will be others. It also means…

More people being recognised is not the same as more people having it. What has changed over recent decades is awareness, not the number of minds built this way.

Parents often carry a quiet fear that something they did, or something modern, caused this. Grandparents with the same traits simply grew up without…

When you speak about a death by suicide, say died by suicide or completed suicide rather than committed. Committed sets a crime beside the person's name.

Families hear these words at the worst moment of their lives and carry them for years afterwards. The wording also reaches people who are struggling…

You will meet striking claims about which genes or which brain region produce your temper. Interesting is not the same as established, and none of it should settle what you think of yourself.

Several of these ideas are still argued over by the people who study them, and they keep getting repeated in training rooms long after the caution…

Darwin once stood with his face against the glass in front of a viper, quite determined not to move, and jumped backwards anyway when it struck. Deciding in advance does not govern a startle.

Keep that in mind on the days you conclude that flinching or snapping proves something shameful about your character. The determination was real and…

You are built to react before you have thought about it. That is why the intention you held this morning loses so easily to the moment itself.

This is worth hearing properly, because most people take the failure personally. The reaction runs first and the thinking arrives a beat later, often…

An alarm that goes off at every shadow is a nuisance, but one that misses the real intruder is worse. Your system was tuned with that trade in mind.

So overreacting is a setting rather than a defect, and it is a setting that once kept people alive. What it means now is that the alarm will be wrong…

If anger management sounds like something being done to you, call it impulse control instead. The work is the same and the word is easier to live with.

Plenty of people who will not sit through feelings talk will happily work on catching an impulse, because that sounds like training rather than…

A certain wariness is standard equipment. Nothing in this work is trying to leave you soft and open to whatever comes along.

People often hesitate here because it sounds like being asked to stop protecting themselves. The opposite is nearer the truth: you keep the guard and…