Practices

When homework takes three hours instead of one, the missing two hours come out of friends, rest and family. That loss is part of the problem, not a side issue.

Ask the school for a time limit rather than a task limit: work for the length of time the work should reasonably take, then stop and have a parent…

ADHD reaches into a marriage in ways couples rarely say out loud: attention drifting during a conversation that mattered, or a partner who has started to feel like an unpaid manager. It is a fair thing to talk about and to get help with.

The hurt usually comes from what each of you concludes rather than from the behaviour itself. One reads distraction as not being loved, the other…

Retirement takes away the timetable, the colleagues and often the person who kept the diary, and for someone with ADHD that can be the point where everything unravels.

It often gets read as depression or as an early sign of memory trouble, when what has actually happened is that a lifetime of borrowed structure…

The first year away at university takes away nearly every bit of structure at once and asks a young person to build their own. It is one of the commonest points at which ADHD finally shows itself.

Nobody wakes you, nobody notices you missed a lecture, and the work has no shape until the week it is due. The things that help are dull and…

Anger and grief often arrive with a late diagnosis, especially once treatment starts working and you see what you could have been doing all along. That reaction is not ingratitude. It needs room.

The grief is for a life that did not happen: the course you left, the marriage that wore out, the years of being told you were not trying. Left…

Far more people have ADHD than are ever assessed for it. If you have wondered about yourself for years, the odds that an assessment would be worth your time are better than you think.

The usual fear is being told you are making it up, or wasting a professional's morning. In practice adults are missed far more often than they are…

There is no age at which finding out stops being worth it. People have been diagnosed in their eighties and described it as the first explanation that ever fitted.

A late diagnosis will not give back the jobs or the years, and it is fair to grieve those. What it does is rewrite the story: not a person who kept…

Use the established rating scales and a proper developmental history rather than working from the impression someone makes in a first meeting. What you see in a room is a small and unrepresentative sample.

A structured set of questionnaires covering childhood, school, work and daily life turns vague instability into something countable, and it prompts…

When somebody insists angrily that they do not care, they usually care a great deal. The heat is the giveaway.

Indifference does not raise its voice. Answer the words and you get an argument about whether they care. Answer the caring underneath and you often…

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…

What overpowered Darwin at that glass was not the snake. It was his picture of what the snake was about to do, and that is usually what overpowers you too.

Which is oddly hopeful. The thing driving the reaction is a reading of the situation, and readings can be slowed, questioned and sometimes corrected…

The part of you that detects threat is very old and does not take instructions in words. Telling yourself to calm down mostly demonstrates that.

It explains why sensible arguments made to yourself mid-surge do so little. What does reach it goes through the body and through attention: a longer…

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…

There is movement inside the word emotion, which turns out to be a fair description. Something starts moving in you before you have named anything.

The early signs are physical: breath shortening, jaw setting, a leg going, hands doing something they were not doing a minute ago. People who learn…