Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Picture spilling coffee down your shirt on the way in. One version: the day is ruined and everyone will see. Another: this is going to be a good story by eleven. Same coffee, two different days.
The part that decides is the sentence you say about the event, and it usually arrives so fast that it feels like part of the event itself. Slowing down enough to hear it is most of the work. You are not pretending the shirt is dry. You are noticing that a small mishap and a humiliation are two different things, and only one of them was actually delivered.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'when harm touches him, he falls into despair' (Quran 17:83). The verse notices how fast a person can swing to the worst reading, which is exactly the moment worth slowing down.
وَإِذَآ أَنۡعَمۡنَا عَلَى ٱلۡإِنسَٰنِ أَعۡرَضَ وَنَـَٔا بِجَانِبِهِۦ وَإِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلشَّرُّ كَانَ يَـُٔوسࣰ ا
When We favour man he turns arrogantly to one side, but when harm touches him, he falls into despair
Qur’an 17:83read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A quantitative meta-analysis of 23 imaging studies mapped the network involved when people regulate emotion by thinking about it differently, an area where individual studies had not converged. It tells you the reappraisal step is a real, traceable process. It says nothing about how easy the step is to take when you are standing in the corridor with a wet shirt.
Kohn N, Eickhoff SB, Scheller M, Laird AR, Fox PT, Habel U. (2014). Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation--an ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Events do not arrive with their meaning attached, so the meaning you supply is where you still have room to move.
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
A wave across the road, a joke with the man in the shop, asking someone how they are and meaning it. These unplanned seconds count for more than they look like they should.
A small child does not have a feeling, they are the feeling, entirely, until it passes. Growing up is largely a gap opening between feeling something and doing something about it.
Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.