Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
You can be connected to a thing as well as to a person. A cause, a project, something you are making. On the days people feel like too much, it is still there.
This works best when it asks something of you regularly: a rehearsal, a shift, a chapter a week. The obligation is the useful part, more than the enthusiasm, which comes and goes. It is not a permanent substitute for people, but it is a reasonable bridge back if most of your social history has been painful.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Be tolerant and command what is right' (Quran 7:199). Having something to stand for, and not only somebody to stand with, is part of the picture here.
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Nothing in this collection tests devoting yourself to a project, so take it as accumulated clinical wisdom rather than a finding. The nearest evidence is a review of mediation studies asking which parts of mindfulness based programmes actually carry the benefit, which is a fair reminder that the active ingredient in something helpful is often not the part you would have guessed.
Gu J, Strauss C, Bond R, Cavanagh K. (2015). How do mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction improve mental health and wellbeing? A systematic review and meta-analysis of mediation studies.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something you have committed to gives the week a shape and gives you a place where you are expected.
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
Fast, strong emotion is part of ADHD rather than a separate fault of character. It was in the original description, dropped for decades, and is being written back in.
When your child comes to you in a spin, the kind thing is to stay warm and steady rather than to promise that it will be fine. Reassurance settles the next ten minutes and feeds the asking.
Sitting in a room with other people who lose their keys, cry at nothing and hate themselves for both does something no explanation can. You find out you were never the only one.