Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.
This is worth knowing when you are building a plan around less: fewer commitments, lighter workload, nothing too taxing. Take out all the demand and attention goes looking for stimulation somewhere else, usually somewhere worse. What tends to work better is swapping demands rather than stripping them out, so that what remains is difficult in a way you actually want to be difficult.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Everyone does things their own way (Quran 17:84). What settles one person leaves another flat, and there is room in that for a life that needs a bit more friction to work.
قُلۡ كُلࣱّ يَعۡمَلُ عَلَىٰ شَاكِلَتِهِۦ فَرَبُّكُمۡ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَنۡ هُوَ أَهۡدَىٰ سَبِيلࣰ ا
Say, ‘Everyone does things their own way, but your Lord is fully aware of who follows the best-guided path.’
Qur’an 17:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In three field experiments, framing learning around goals like growth and health rather than money or image improved learning, performance and persistence. That supports the idea that what keeps someone going is the pull of the thing itself rather than the pressure around it. It was ordinary learners rather than people with ADHD, and it says nothing directly about under stimulation, so treat it as a nearby finding rather than a demonstration.
Maarten Vansteenkiste; Joke Simons; Willy Lens; Kennon M. Sheldon; Edward L. Deci (2004). Motivating Learning, Performance, and Persistence: The Synergistic Effects of Intrinsic Goal Contents and Autonomy-Supportive Contexts.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Too little going on is not restful for this kind of brain, it is uncomfortable, and discomfort goes looking for something to do.
When not to
This is about engagement, not about pushing through exhaustion, and someone who is burnt out or unwell needs less for a while rather than more.
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
Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.
One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.
A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.