Courses › You are not lazy
Focus, starting, and ADHD
You are not lazy
Putting it off is a way of managing a feeling, not a verdict on your character, and tawakkul was never a substitute for opening the book.
If you have thought about ending your life, or you have found yourself thinking that failing would be unsurvivable, that comes before anything on this page. Tell someone today, contact your doctor, or use your local emergency number. And if the pressure you are under at home has started to feel unsafe rather than heavy, that needs a different kind of help and it exists. This course is not an emergency service.
Six short lessons on the studying you cannot start and the exam you cannot think straight in. It separates those two problems, because they are different and they need different things. It explains why avoiding a task pays you immediately and charges you later, takes apart the idea that dua replaces preparation, and gives one change in lesson four that is small enough to survive a bad day.
Who this is for
Students, and anyone sitting a professional exam or a qualification. It is written for the person who has sat at the desk for four hours and produced nothing, and for the person who prepared properly and then went blank in the hall. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not put you through mock exam conditions to get you used to the fear. That is exposure work, it is a real treatment for anxiety, and it belongs with a trained therapist rather than with a webpage. It carries nothing on stimulants, study drugs, sleep restriction or eating. It does not advise on appeals, mitigating circumstances or what to tell your institution, which is what your student support service is for. It gives no fatwa, including on anything to do with conduct in an examination, and no diagnosis, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a clinician.
The lessons
6- Two problems, one accusationNot starting and going blank are different problems, and lazy is the wrong word for either of them.
- Putting it off is mood repairAvoiding the task removes a bad feeling immediately, and that is a schedule that builds habits.
- Tie the camel, and what tawakkul does not coverThe order in the tradition is take the means, then rely. It is not rely instead.
- The if then plan and the first two minutesDecide the moment in advance, and make the first action small enough to survive a bad mood.
- What feeds itAll or nothing days, the rereading that feels like work, and the night spent on if only.
- When it is anxiety, and where to goWhat test anxiety actually is, why starting earlier does not fix it, and who does.
It is written and sourced and it has not yet been read by a scholar and a clinician. Read it as a draft, and if something in it is wrong please write to admin@inshirah.org so it can be corrected.
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:286, 3:159, 13:11, 20:114, 53:39, 94:5 to 6, 96:1 to 5. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 13:11, 2:286 and 94:5 to 6 are each commonly used in ways this course deliberately avoids, and the lessons say so on the page. 13:11 is used only for the principle that human action is part of how change happens, not as a verse about study habits. The scholar reviewer settles the permissible range of use.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 6369; Sahih Muslim 2664, 2699; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2344, 2517. Only reports graded sound or good are used. Each report inside a lesson links to its full entry with its grading. Three narrations that circulate constantly in Muslim study material are deliberately absent, because none of them was confirmed as sound: seek knowledge even in China, whoever memorises forty hadith, and seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.