Practices

Before you part in the morning, take two minutes to learn one thing happening in your partner's day.

A short chat and a warm goodbye at parting keeps you connected through the hours apart.

When the past floods in, name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. Come back to now.

Grounding in your senses tells the mind the danger is memory, not present. The room is safe; you are here.

Breathe out longer than you breathe in, a few times. A slow breath tells the body it is safe.

You cannot argue a frightened body calm, but you can breathe it calm. Long, slow exhales do the talking.

When fear rises, being near a calm, safe person, or turning to God's remembrance, helps your body borrow that steadiness.

Our nervous systems settle in the presence of safety. A calm, attuned other, or a steadying practice of remembrance, sends the body cues of safety…

The studies tying childhood screen hours to later attention problems are correlational. They cannot tell you which way the arrow points, and there is a very ordinary reading where it points the other way.

The child who cannot settle is the child most likely to be put in front of a screen so that dinner gets cooked. A parent who is scattered themselves…

A ping about a parcel and a ping about your mother's health feel identical in the second before you look. Give that feeling a name, false urgency, and you get a little room.

The buzz carries no information about importance. It borrows the feeling of importance and lends it to whatever happened to arrive. Naming it in the…

You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.

Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday…

One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.

The young person in front of you almost certainly says it too, so any version that sounds like a reprimand will close the conversation down. Naming…

When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.

At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do…

Gaming for an hour before you start the work almost never costs an hour. Do the thing that has to be done first, then the thing you want.

Once something enjoyable is running, whatever you were meant to do afterwards looks duller than it already did, and the hour quietly becomes three.…

Charge the phone in another room overnight and use a proper alarm clock. Small change, and it takes the decision away from you completely.

In bed the phone is right there, and stopping is left to you at the hour you have the least left. Out of the room, there is nothing to resist. Buy…

The aim was never to stop needing the aids. It is to find ways round the parts that do not work well, and then to keep using them.

People tend to treat the alarms, the lists, the whiteboard by the door as scaffolding they ought to take down eventually. That is usually why it all…

Everyone has something about themselves they wish were different, and something they cannot do reliably however much they mean to. Yours has a name and a good deal of research behind it, which is not the same as being uniquely broken.

Say this carefully, because there is a careless version that does real damage. Everyone is a bit ADHD is not what is meant, and it leaves a person…

One man with ADHD described the goal as no longer suffering from it, only having it. The diagnosis had not changed. What it cost him had.

Half of that shift comes from removing particular sources of pain: the job that was never going to work, the arrangement at home that left everything…

When you fall off task, restart without the pile-on. Talk to yourself like a good coach, not a critic.

The lost hour is gone; the next one is not. Skip the self-attack and just begin again.

In the famous test a child is left alone with one sweet and told that waiting will earn them two. Some reach for it almost before the grown up has finished speaking. They understood the offer perfectly. The second sweet simply was not real to them.

That is the whole thing in one image: the knowledge intact, the feeling absent. You can know that filing the return today would save you a fortnight…

A hundred pounds now, or the same hundred pounds guaranteed at the end of the year. Same money, same certainty. One of them pulls at you and the other does not.

Worth sitting with for a moment, because it takes risk out of the picture entirely. There is nothing to lose by waiting, and the near one still feels…

When someone has missed the deadline again, the talk about how they always do this changes nothing except how they feel. If you want a different Friday, the conversation belongs on Monday, and it is about the plan rather than the person.

This is a hard one, because the frustration is real and often fair. But the lecture lands on a system that was never the failure point, and it adds…

Here is a short way to hold the whole difficulty: the now in front of you is too big and the later is too small. It fits in your head at the moment you need it, which longer explanations do not.

Use it as a question rather than a verdict. Standing at the fridge at eleven at night, or with the tab open instead of the form, you can ask whether…

Choosing the dull useful thing over the bright easy one starts with a pause, not with willpower. If the pause never happens, nothing downstream of it gets a chance to happen either.

The chain runs roughly like this: something stops you for a second, you notice what you are doing, the later consequence comes into view, and only…