Practices

A swimming float keeps you at the surface. It does not decide which end of the pool you are heading for, and medication is much the same.

That is a good sentence to have ready before the first prescription. What a drug can hand you is capacity: a little more room to hold your attention,…

Ask for the actual list. Not some side effects, but the specific ones people commonly get in the first week or two, and roughly when they tend to settle.

A vague warning leaves you reading every ache as a sign that something is going wrong. Being told that an unsettled stomach, loose bowels, headache…

When someone worries that the strength of their tablet might vary a little, the first question is how wide the safe band is for that particular medicine. For most psychiatric drugs the band is generous, and small differences never reach the person at all.

A wide therapeutic window means the gap between too little and too much is large, so ordinary variation gets absorbed on the way. A narrow one means…

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.…

Before you decide a club is out of reach, ask. Some let children earn the uniform through the levels, and plenty have quiet arrangements for families who need them.

Cost keeps more children out of these things than lack of interest does. A single phone call is worth making, and the answer is often better than the…

Speech has a beat inside it. When a child cannot hold a steady rhythm, that often sits alongside difficulty with reading and with the flow of talking, so time spent clapping or tapping a beat together is doing something real.

You need nothing for this. Clap a slow pattern, ask them to clap it back, then keep it running while you both count or walk in time to it.…

Neurofeedback rests on a tidy idea: in ADHD the slower theta rhythm shows up when the faster beta rhythm should be running, so the training rewards you for shifting the balance. Knowing the idea is worth a few minutes, because it is what the brochure is built on.

Electrodes sit on the scalp, a screen animates when the signal moves the wanted way, and the person practises staying in a state of relaxed…

Ask what happens after the course ends, not only what happens during it. A gain that fades once the sessions stop was probably never a change in the person.

Neurofeedback tends to look decent while it is being delivered and then drift back, and the studies that followed people afterwards did not find…

Before committing to a course that runs into thousands, set the same money next to the other things it could buy. Tutoring, a proper assessment, a medication review and a well tested psychosocial programme all sit in the same envelope.

Neurofeedback courses often run for a month or more, insurers rarely pay, and the training of whoever delivers it varies a great deal. The cost is…

When you read that a treatment worked, look for who judged the improvement and whether they knew what the child had been given. In much of this literature, they knew.

The design to look for is a sham condition, where everybody goes through the same routine and only some receive the active ingredient, with the…

Regulators let devices through by several different routes, and only some of them mean what a family assumes. A game cleared for further investigation has not passed the bar a medicine passes.

The word approval carries an authority that advertising borrows freely, and device pathways are shorter and lighter than the ones drugs travel. It is…

Programmes built on tones through headphones and balance drills have not been shown to help ADHD. If a child does seem steadier during them, the likeliest reason is that something is occupying the part of them that goes looking for stimulation.

That effect is real enough, and it is cheap to get elsewhere. A walk, a job with the hands, background sound they choose themselves, all of it…

Several professional bodies came together to say that vision therapy is not a treatment for ADHD. A joint statement like that is unusual, and it is worth quoting to a family word for word.

Convergence problems, where the eyes struggle to work together on something close up, are a little more common in ADHD and deserve treating in their…

If you are trying omega supplements, give them four to six weeks and then decide. Imaging work has picked up changes in how neurons communicate after around four weeks, which is fast as these things go.

Fixing the end point at the start protects you twice over. It takes the sting out of nothing happening by Thursday, and it stops an open ended habit…

One senior researcher in this field is approached by ADHD app startups roughly once a month and no longer takes part, on the view that the companies are not seriously trying to build something that works.

You do not have to share his judgement to borrow the question. Before paying for a digital product, ask who tested it, whether those testers were…

Before you go looking for practice at staying steady, make sure you already have something to do instead of your usual reaction. Practising with nothing to put in its place mostly rehearses the old response.

Pick the alternative first and keep it small: a slow breath, one fixed phrase, a decision to say nothing until your hands unclench. Then you can let…

Ask yourself what you would least like the person in front of you to be thinking about you right now. Whatever surfaces is usually what your anger has been guarding.

It tends to be one short sentence and an old one. That you are weak. That you are stupid. That you do not matter. In a session a therapist can ask…

A good deal of what stings in a tense moment is what you imagine the other person is thinking. Sitting inside a silence and watching your own mind fill it shows you that plainly.

Practitioners run this on purpose. Half a minute or so of held silence, with the client asked to notice what happens inside them. Since nothing is…

Almost everyone says the same thing afterwards, that the waiting was worse than the thing itself. Say it out loud in your own words, because your own words land differently from anyone else's reassurance.

Before a difficult conversation, write one line about how bad you expect it to be. Afterwards, write one line about how it actually went. Over a few…

Run the same moment twice. The second time, change nothing except what you do with it, and let yourself not mind what the other person might be thinking.

Keeping the situation identical is the point, because then the only thing that moved was you. In a session that means the same silence and the same…