Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
The unkind thoughts tend to arrive in a handful of familiar shapes. One friend is busy so nobody wants you. One bad mark so you are going to fail everything. Someone did not say hello so they must dislike you.
Rather than fighting the content, try naming the shape: that is the all or nothing one, that is the mind reading one. Most people find they only have three or four regulars. Once you can spot them arriving they lose a little authority, because a thought you can label is a thought you are standing slightly outside of.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'inspired it to know its own rebellion and piety' (Quran 91:8). The soul is described as able to see its own drift, which is more or less what naming a thought pattern is.
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of 36 randomised trials asked whether therapies that go directly at repetitive negative thinking, meaning worry and rumination, reduce it more than therapies that do not. It is worth knowing that the question was put to the trials rather than settled by them, and that this work was in depression rather than ADHD, so the read across is reasonable and not proven.
Spinhoven P, Klein N, Kennis M, Cramer AOJ, Siegle G, Cuijpers P, Ormel J, Hollon SD, Bockting CL. (2018). The effects of cognitive-behavior therapy for depression on repetitive negative thinking: A meta-analysis.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Recognising a familiar pattern puts a small gap between you and the thought, and a gap is enough to choose what happens next.
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
Being far apart is not the same as being out of touch. What usually stops contact is the question of who starts it, not the miles.
Setting out to get rid of worry altogether sets you up to fail twice, first at the worry and then at the failing. A kinder aim is to change how you sit with it.
Self-restraint runs on a supply that stress uses up. In a week when everything is late and nothing has been slept on, you will react to things you would normally let go.