Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Fear tends to make its case as caution. Try not to let it quietly shrink what you are willing to attempt, because the shrinking rarely stops on its own.
If you have been criticised often enough, staying out of things stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like plain good sense. The way back is not a grand gesture. Pick one thing you have been swerving and do a small version of it this week, then a slightly larger one. What you are after is evidence, gathered by you, that going towards something is survivable.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Do not lose heart or despair' (Quran 3:139). It is said to people who had real reason to be afraid, not to people with nothing at stake.
وَلَا تَهِنُواْ وَلَا تَحۡزَنُواْ وَأَنتُمُ ٱلۡأَعۡلَوۡنَ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤۡمِنِينَ
Do not lose heart or despair- if you are true believers you have the upper hand
Qur’an 3:139read 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 96 studies examined how particular emotion regulation strategies, avoidance and rumination among them, relate to how severe eating difficulties become. That is a different condition, so read it as a general signal that avoidance travels with things getting worse rather than better. It is not proof that approaching fixes anything.
Prefit AB, Cândea DM, Szentagotai-Tătar A. (2019). Emotion regulation across eating pathology: A meta-analysis.. Appetite doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Every time avoidance brings instant relief it teaches you to avoid again, so the only thing that undoes it is going towards something and finding you are still standing.
When not to
Go in graded steps, and if the thing you are avoiding is genuinely dangerous or the fear reaches panic, do this with someone trained rather than alone.
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
Often the feeling fits the situation perfectly and the size of it does not. You were right to be annoyed. The ten out of ten is the part that caused the trouble.
Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.
What you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.