Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Put something small at stake and you turn up more. Groups that charge a token amount get better attendance than free ones, and the same trick works on yourself.
It does not have to be money. Book the class you would have to cancel a day ahead, tell a friend you will meet them there, pay the small deposit. The point is to make not going take some effort too, so that the version of you at eight in the morning is not deciding entirely alone.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'who give, both in prosperity and adversity' (Quran 3:134). Something given, even something small, marks that a thing matters to you.
ٱلَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ فِي ٱلسَّرَّآءِ وَٱلضَّرَّآءِ وَٱلۡكَٰظِمِينَ ٱلۡغَيۡظَ وَٱلۡعَافِينَ عَنِ ٱلنَّاسِۗ وَٱللَّهُ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
who give, both in prosperity and adversity, who restrain their anger and pardon people- God loves those who do good
Qur’an 3:134read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
There is no trial here on charging for groups, so take that practice as accumulated clinical experience. What has been studied nearby is effortful control, the capacity to steer your own behaviour, emotion and attention, examined as a dimension running across internalising and externalising conditions including ADHD. If that capacity is stretched, leaning on outside supports is a sensible response and not a cheat.
Santens E, Claes L, Dierckx E, Dom G. (2020). Effortful Control - A Transdiagnostic Dimension Underlying Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology.. Neuropsychobiology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A stake outside your own head does the remembering and the deciding for you on the days your motivation dips.
When not to
Keep the amount genuinely small, since a stake that hurts to lose turns a helpful nudge into one more source of dread.
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
Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.
The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.
If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.