Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › What ADHD actually is
ADHD is not only about focus. Physical health tends to drift down the list, and appointments, sleep, food and movement are exactly the sort of thing this condition makes hard to keep up with.
Pick one health task you have been putting off and make it small and dated: book the check-up, refill the prescription, put a walk in the diary with somebody else in it. These are good candidates for doing badly rather than perfectly, since a late appointment is still an appointment. Telling your doctor you have ADHD helps too, so that follow-up gets set up in a way you can actually keep.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We create man in the finest state (Quran 95:4). The body you were given is part of what was made well, and it deserves the same care as the rest of you.
لَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ فِيٓ أَحۡسَنِ تَقۡوِيمࣲ
We create man in the finest state
Qur’an 95:4read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review reports mounting evidence of an association between ADHD and obesity, one example of the physical conditions that travel with ADHD and receive less attention than the psychiatric ones. It is an association, and a review of this kind cannot say which way the arrow runs. It is still a fair reason to treat your body as part of the picture rather than a separate department.
Cortese S, Tessari L. (2017). Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Obesity: Update 2016.. Current psychiatry reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Looking after your health is a long run of dull tasks whose payoff is far away, which is the kind that slips.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Many people who end up in trouble with the law have never had their ADHD recognised. Behaviour read as defiance can be the same difficulty with stopping and thinking ahead.
The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.
Not knowing a child's family history is not evidence against ADHD. Where a child is adopted, a blank family history should keep the question open rather than close it.