Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
If reading has always been slow and effortful, that is worth looking at in its own right. Dyslexia and ADHD turn up together far more often than chance would give, and they need different help.
Someone can do very well in a subject built on reading and still read slowly, and that is often the difficulty left over once everything else has been worked around. Asking about the reading history belongs in an attention assessment rather than sitting outside it. It matters practically, because the accommodations are not the same: extra time and audio versions answer one problem, structure and reminders answer the other.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We have explained everything in detail (Quran 17:12). Detail is offered there as a kindness, and taking each difficulty separately is the same instinct.
وَجَعَلۡنَا ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ ءَايَتَيۡنِۖ فَمَحَوۡنَآ ءَايَةَ ٱلَّيۡلِ وَجَعَلۡنَآ ءَايَةَ ٱلنَّهَارِ مُبۡصِرَةࣰ لِّتَبۡتَغُواْ فَضۡلࣰ ا مِّن رَّبِّكُمۡ وَلِتَعۡلَمُواْ عَدَدَ ٱلسِّنِينَ وَٱلۡحِسَابَۚ وَكُلَّ شَيۡءࣲ فَصَّلۡنَٰهُ تَفۡصِيلࣰ ا
We made the night and the day as two signs, then darkened the night and made the daylight for seeing, for you to seek your Lord’s bounty and to know how to count the years and calculate. We have explained everything in detail
Qur’an 17:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A clinical review of adult ADHD sets out its core associated features: inattention, impulsivity, disorganisation, poor time management and procrastination. Reading difficulty is not among them, and that is the point here. The ADHD literature does not cover it, so a reading problem has to be assessed on its own rather than folded into the attention picture.
Ramsay JR. (2017). Assessment and monitoring of treatment response in adult ADHD patients: current perspectives.. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Two difficulties that travel together still need two different kinds of help.
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
Short sleep is often not a sleep problem at all. It is midnight arriving without being noticed, on top of a day whose work got pushed into the evening.
If you keep choosing whatever is in front of you, the reasoning is probably working properly. It is the information going in that is off, because the future arrives faint and the present arrives loud.
Short sight is a fair comparison. If you cannot see far, the ship has to come close before it exists for you, and no amount of trying harder brings it into view sooner.