Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
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 repetitive session on a machine asks very little of you once your body knows it. Something with steps to follow, in time with other people, keeps demanding attention you cannot give on autopilot. That is why the awkward classes are often the ones people keep going back to, and the tidy solo routine is the one that quietly stops after a fortnight. If exercise has never stuck for you, the missing ingredient may be that it was too easy to do badly.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard (Quran 29:69). The striving is not a regrettable cost of the thing. It is much of what makes it worth doing.
وَٱلَّذِينَ جَٰهَدُواْ فِينَا لَنَهۡدِيَنَّهُمۡ سُبُلَنَاۚ وَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَمَعَ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
But We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause: God is with those who do good
Qur’an 29:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A cluster randomised trial across ten schools tested a self determination based approach to pupils' intentions to be active and their actual activity, on the premise that people move more when the motivation is their own. It concerns schoolchildren rather than adults in a dance class, and it tested motivational support rather than difficulty. Take it as evidence that how an activity feels from the inside affects whether it continues, which is the part that matters here.
Nikos L. D. Chatzisarantis; Martin S. Hagger (2008). Effects of an intervention based on self-determination theory on self-reported leisure-time physical activity participation. Psychology and Health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An activity you have not mastered keeps asking for your attention, which is exactly what makes it worth turning up for.
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
You cannot work out in advance what will light you up. The only reliable method is a wide and slightly undignified search: many activities, many people, plenty of reading and watching, until something catches.
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.
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.