Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
If cognitive behavioural therapy is the approach you keep being offered for ADHD, part of the reason is that it is easy to measure. It has good evidence behind it, and being the most studied is not the same as being the only thing that helps.
Structured, session by session approaches produce tidy numbers, so they get trialled more often and written up more often. That leaves quieter approaches looking thinner on paper than they may be in a room. Worth holding lightly if a well evidenced approach has not suited you. It is reasonable to ask what else has been tried with people like you, rather than deciding you are the problem.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Moses asked, 'Lord, lift up my heart' (Quran 20:25) and 'ease my task for me' (Quran 20:26). He asked for the help his own particular task needed, which is a fair thing to want from treatment too.
قَالَ رَبِّ ٱشۡرَحۡ لِي صَدۡرِي
Moses said, ‘Lord, lift up my heart
Qur’an 20:25read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review with meta-analysis and meta-regression of mindfulness based programmes in ADHD found promising effects reaching beyond the core symptoms, into associated conditions and day to day functioning. Promising is the right word for it. That literature is smaller and more mixed than the CBT literature, so it is a reason to keep an open mind rather than a reason to switch.
Oliva F, Malandrone F, di Girolamo G, Mirabella S, Colombi N, Carletto S, Ostacoli L. (2021). The efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder beyond core symptoms: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Knowing why one approach fills the shelves stops you reading a poor fit as a personal failure.
When not to
If something is working for you, this is not a nudge to stop it and go looking.
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
Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.
When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.