Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
The same plan works in a calm week and falls apart in a chaotic one. That is not motivation coming and going. You began the chaotic week with less in reserve and spent most of it before the decisions that mattered arrived.
By the time you reach the important thing, a good deal has already gone on finding keys, apologising, rerouting and starting over. Which is why the answer to a bad week is rarely a better system. It is usually fewer decisions: clothes picked the night before, the same lunch every day, one place where the keys live.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Everyone is assigned a rank according to their deeds; your Lord is not unaware of anything they do (Quran 6:132). What a hard week cost you is not missed, even when what you managed to show for it is small.
وَلِكُلࣲّ دَرَجَٰتࣱ مِّمَّا عَمِلُواْۚ وَمَا رَبُّكَ بِغَٰفِلٍ عَمَّا يَعۡمَلُونَ
Everyone is assigned a rank according to their deeds; your Lord is not unaware of anything they do
Qur’an 6:132read 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 fourteen studies found a substantial inverse association between self compassion and psychological difficulty. The design is correlational, so it cannot say that treating yourself more kindly through a chaotic week produces the better outcome. It does sit against the habit of reading a collapsed week as proof of a character problem.
MacBeth A, Gumley A. (2012). Exploring compassion: a meta-analysis of the association between self-compassion and psychopathology.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Decisions draw on a supply that is smaller on some days and gets spent by whatever comes first.
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
The parts of this that look like lifestyle, meaning sleep, driving, drinking, appointments that get missed, are the parts carrying the most risk across a lifetime. They are also the most changeable parts.
The feeling that you were let in by mistake is common among capable people with ADHD, and it has a plain source. A patchy performance history gives you real evidence of inconsistency, and fraud is simply the wrong explanation for it.
Most of what other people do is about their own day rather than about you. That is easier to hold once you have also admitted that in childhood, sometimes, it genuinely was about you.