Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

Narrowed down

48 practices

Medication and how it works Getting ready for something Clear all

How long you have

A minute 5 Five minutes 36 Twenty minutes 5 Longer 2

Who it is written for

A practitioner 47 Me 41 Someone I care about 40

Where you are right now · Getting ready for something

Coping, mostly 104Getting ready for something 48 Struggling right now 25

On your own, or with someone

On my own 20 Involves someone else 19 Both of us together 9

Theme · Medication and how it works

Medication and how it works 48 Food, caffeine and fuel 20 Choosing your response 19 Systems for daily life 19 The moment before you snap 18 Cool the body first 16 Practising under provocation 16 Treatment and medication 16 Exercise, food and other supports 14 What ADHD actually is 14 Reading, numbers and learning differences 13 Getting assessed and diagnosed 12 Your nervous system 12 Facing it a step at a time 12 Your sense of time 11 Moving your body 10 Bringing the future closer 10 Grounding and settling 9 What anger actually is 9 Making it stick 8 Feelings and focus 8 Equanimity and perspective 6 Remembering to do it 6 Breathing 6 The cost of avoiding 5 The fear underneath anger 5 Touch and bodywork 5 Tolerate distress 4 When you use something to cope 4 When everything feels flat 4 Shame and stigma 3 Posture and how you carry yourself 3 Being seen and judged 3 Structure and routine 3 Treatment and medication 3 Feeling from the inside 3 Get started 2 Screens and attention 2 Breaking the worry loop 1 What you are actually defending 1 Use your strengths 1 Living with uncertainty 1 Shame 1 Self-compassion 1 Rest and pacing 1 Panic and the body 1 Anger, alcohol and the body 1 Growing empathy 1

Approach

Medical and treatment 47 ADHD skills 1

When

Any ordinary day 35 In a change 7 Coming and going 6

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…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:35

Prescribers usually begin below the dose likely to work and build upwards. That means the first weeks can be underwhelming by design, and it is not the moment to decide the whole thing has failed.

Ask at the outset what the plan is: the starting dose, what it is being built towards, how quickly, and what you should be noticing at each step.…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5

Waiting to see how they get on carries a cost that is easy to miss. Every year a child spends behind narrows what is available to them the year after.

Treatment does not settle a life. What happens is that school reports, friendships and confidence build on one another, so a stretch of doing better…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:84

If the medication question is the one burning a hole in your pocket, try holding it until last on purpose. Heard after everything else, the answer lands differently.

Most people arrive wanting to know about tablets and nothing else, and the risk in that is a plan made only of tablets. Sleep, movement, the shape of…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 3:159

A long acting injection into muscle releases its medicine slowly over weeks. It lifts the daily burden of remembering, at the price of not being able to stop quickly if the medicine disagrees with you.

That trade is worth naming out loud rather than settling on someone's behalf. For a person whose entire difficulty is the daily doing, weeks of cover…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28

For most people who get as far as asking for help with ADHD, medication is the single change that shifts the most. It is not compulsory and plenty live well without it, and it does deserve an honest look rather than a place at the back of the queue.

The reason is unglamorous. Nearly every strategy anyone teaches assumes you can pause before responding, hold a plan in mind while doing something…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 26:80

Finding the dose is a search rather than a calculation. It goes up in small steps until either the effect you want turns up, or the side effects get annoying enough that you come back down a step and settle there.

There is no way to work the right dose out from body weight or from how bad things look, which surprises people who expect medicine to be more exact…

LongerMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5

One of the founding figures of biological psychiatry summed the whole business up as some medicine helping some people at some doses some of the time. Knowing that before you start makes the first disappointment much easier to survive.

Most people need more than one adjustment: the dose, then the timing, sometimes the drug itself. Go in expecting the first prescription to be the…

LongerMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5

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