Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.
It may be a side effect of not weighting the future heavily. The past does not press down quite as hard either. People who have been sacked, dropped out or watched a project collapse are often the ones willing to begin again from nothing a month later. If you are demoralised now, what you need is not encouragement from someone else but a list of the times you restarted. Write down three of them.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is He who made the night a garment for you, and sleep a rest, and made the day like a resurrection (Quran 25:47). Each morning is described as a real restart rather than a continuation of yesterday.
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ لِبَاسࣰ ا وَٱلنَّوۡمَ سُبَاتࣰ ا وَجَعَلَ ٱلنَّهَارَ نُشُورࣰ ا
It is He who made the night a garment for you, and sleep a rest, and made the day like a resurrection
Qur’an 25:47read 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 52 effect sizes across 28 papers examined how people with ADHD weigh delayed rewards compared with typically developing samples, and whether males and females differ in that. What it studied is preference between sooner and later rewards, not resilience. Reading the same present focus as a source of bounce back is an extension the analysis does not test, so take it as a way of understanding yourself rather than a research finding.
Doidge JL, Flora DB, Toplak ME. (2021). A Meta-Analytic Review of Sex Differences on Delay of Gratification and Temporal Discounting Tasks in ADHD and Typically Developing Samples.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Someone who feels the present most strongly is often less weighed down by what has already happened.
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
If you have ten minutes and the episode is forty, the moment to act is before it starts. Stopping halfway is a much harder ask than never beginning.
Getting going is a separate expense from working slowly. Plenty of people move quickly once they are in and still lose forty minutes in the gap between deciding and starting.
Every trait worth having here arrives with its twin. A love of the offbeat and a real problem with deadlines are the same wiring seen from two sides.