Practices

Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.

Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is…

Listen for the condition you have attached to acting: I will apply once I know I will get it, I will go once I know I will like it. If that condition could never actually be met, it is not caution, it is a door you have quietly locked.

From the inside it rarely feels like avoidance. It feels sensible, even responsible, because who would go to all that trouble without knowing. The…

A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.

This is worth knowing when you are building a plan around less: fewer commitments, lighter workload, nothing too taxing. Take out all the demand and…

Give a dull task some fuel: music, a timer, a stake, a partner. Your brain runs on interest.

Do not expect a low-interest task to run on willpower alone. Add the spark it needs to catch.

One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.

A repetitive session on a machine asks very little of you once your body knows it. Something with steps to follow, in time with other people, keeps…

Build your work around what your mind does well, novelty, hyperfocus, big-picture, not only around your gaps.

You will go further leaning on your strengths than endlessly sanding down your weaknesses.

Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.

The narrow band in between is where you stay engaged without noticing you are trying. It is usually a bit further up than feels comfortable when you…

For a lot of people with ADHD, making things is not a hobby but closer to an appetite. The itch to start something is always there, and when nothing is being made it does not go quietly.

Read that way, the restlessness that arrives when you have no project on is information rather than a character flaw. The same drive that gets called…

When the right piece of work finally has you, you are entirely there. Hours go, nothing intrudes, and the difficulty that flattens you elsewhere is nowhere in the room.

That state is the same machinery as the hyperfocus that gets you into trouble, pointed at something worth doing. Worth noticing so you can go looking…

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,…

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…

Being able to disappear into something for six hours does not cancel the diagnosis out. Getting stuck on and getting stuck off are the same switch failing in two directions.

People often use their own absorption as evidence against themselves, or a family member uses it against them: if you can play that game all night,…

When you explain ADHD to someone who does not have it, describe the effort rather than the outcome. Not that the form is unfinished, but what twenty minutes of trying to fill it in actually took out of you.

Most people around you are judging the visible result, because that is all they can see. One concrete picture of the inside of an ordinary task…

If you reach the bottom of a page and nothing has stayed, reading it again more slowly usually will not fix it. Change something about how you are reading instead.

Read a paragraph and then say it back in your own words before moving on, or write one line per section, or read with a pen underlining as you go.…

Before you decide who in front of you looks like ADHD, notice the picture you are already carrying. The loud boy gets sent for assessment and the quiet, drifting girl often does not.

The research on how race affects who gets diagnosed is genuinely mixed, and it is more honest to read the studies than to adopt a position from a…

When you meet a confident claim about ADHD, look it up before passing it on. A search of recent papers, limited to the last few years, takes a couple of minutes and often changes the picture.

Free scholarly search engines will show you abstracts without an institutional login. Two habits do most of the work: filter by date so you are…

You will see wildly different figures for how many children still have ADHD as adults. The range mostly reflects what is being counted: symptoms on a childhood list, or whether life is actually being made harder.

Counted by childhood symptom lists, many people look as though they grew out of it. Counted by whether it still gets in the way, far more have not.…

With ADHD, self-management usually runs a few years behind the birthday. Expecting a child to handle what other children their age handle sets you both up to fail.

A rough working guide many clinicians use is to expect around two thirds of the chronological age for this kind of self-regulation, so an eighteen…

Telling parents that their child's self-management is running behind their age usually brings relief rather than alarm. It names something they had already noticed and had been blaming somebody for.

Left unexplained, parents fill the gap with a story, and the story is almost always that the child is choosing this or that they have parented badly.…