Steady Ground

Practical guides for life's harder moments

Steady Ground: Understanding ADHD — book cover

Out now — first in the series

Understanding ADHD

A guide for adults newly diagnosed — or finally ready to find out.

Most adult ADHD books were written for someone else. The seven-year-old who couldn't sit still. The parent of that seven-year-old. The reader who wants to hear that ADHD is a superpower.

This is a different kind of book.

PDF · 62,000 words · 19 chapters · 9 appendices

About the book

For the adults who are quietly tired

This is the book I wish had existed when I walked out of a consulting room at 37 with a diagnosis letter and no idea what to do next.

It is a practical guide for adults — newly diagnosed, considering assessment, or diagnosed years ago and never quite engaged with it. Written by someone who has lived with ADHD for five years and has stopped pretending. About the medication. About the work. About the partner who has been quietly carrying things. About the children. About the parts of yourself the diagnosis explains, and the parts of yourself that it does not.

UK-focused. Plainspoken. Honest where most adult ADHD books are not.

What's inside

Nineteen chapters, nine appendices

The UK assessment landscape Including Right to Choose — the NHS pathway that nearly nobody mentions.
Medication, plainly explained Stimulants and non-stimulants, titration, side effects, what to expect month by month.
Working with an ADHD brain Email paralysis, meeting strategies, deadline management, variable performance, hyperfocus — and the systems that actually help.
Disclosure at work Under the Equality Act 2010, with scripts and templates for the conversations you'll need to have.
The relational work Partners. Parents. Children. Friends. What unmanaged ADHD has cost the people closest to you, and how to begin repairing it.
The inner work Grief, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, identity after diagnosis, therapy — the chapters most adult ADHD books skip.
"Steady ground is not a destination. It is the relationship to the ground you already stand on, attended to with care, returned to when you lose it, recovered when you fall."

From the closing chapter

The series

Steady Ground

A series of practical guides for adults navigating life's harder moments. Late diagnosis. Illness. Loss. The slow weight of things nobody quite prepared you for.

Each book is written by someone who has lived the experience it describes. No superpower rhetoric. No promises of transformation. No clinical distance.

Available now

Understanding ADHD

A guide for adults newly diagnosed, or finally ready to find out.

Coming soon

When a Parent Gets Sick

For the adults who find themselves quietly taking over — the appointments, the medication, the conversations nobody else will have.

Stay in touch

Be told when the next title is out

No marketing. No frequency. Just a short note when a new book is finished — once or twice a year at most.

About

Who writes these books

Steady Ground was started by an adult who got an ADHD diagnosis at 37 and spent the next five years working out what to do with it. The books in the series are written by people who have lived the experience each one describes — not by clinicians, not by professional self-help writers, and not by anyone who is going to tell you the condition you have is a superpower.

The first title — Understanding ADHD — is the book the writer needed when he walked out of his diagnostic appointment with a letter and no idea what to do next. The second title — When a Parent Gets Sick — comes from a different lived experience but with the same intention: name what is happening, give the reader the practical scaffolding for what comes next, and respect that they are an intelligent adult who has already read too many books that did neither.