Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
A small child does not have a feeling, they are the feeling, entirely, until it passes. Growing up is largely a gap opening between feeling something and doing something about it.
If that gap is narrower for you than for other people your age, it is a lag on a road everyone is on rather than a defect. The framing is worth keeping, because it lowers the shame without letting you off the hook. Notice the feeling, name it, delay the action by one breath. That is the whole skill, practised badly for quite a while before it gets easier.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'to make your hearts strong and your feet firm' (Quran 8:11). Firmness is described as something given and grown into, not something you were supposed to arrive with.
إِذۡ يُغَشِّيكُمُ ٱلنُّعَاسَ أَمَنَةࣰ مِّنۡهُ وَيُنَزِّلُ عَلَيۡكُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰ لِّيُطَهِّرَكُم بِهِۦ وَيُذۡهِبَ عَنكُمۡ رِجۡزَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ وَلِيَرۡبِطَ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِكُمۡ وَيُثَبِّتَ بِهِ ٱلۡأَقۡدَامَ
Remember when He gave you sleep as a reassurance from Him, and sent down water from the sky to cleanse you, to remove Satan’s pollution from you, to make your hearts strong and your feet firm
Qur’an 8:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a study of people aged 10 to 23, there were age related differences both in how strongly emotion was felt and in how well reappraisal could be used, alongside differences in sensitivity to rejection. That gives some substance to the idea of a trajectory rather than a fixed setting. It compares age groups rather than following the same people as they grow, so the developmental story is inferred.
Silvers JA, McRae K, Gabrieli JD, Gross JJ, Remy KA, Ochsner KN. (2012). Age-related differences in emotional reactivity, regulation, and rejection sensitivity in adolescence.. Emotion (Washington, D.C.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Distance between a feeling and an action is something that develops, which means it can still be developed.
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
When you cannot skip it, shorten it. Come for the meal and skip the drinks afterwards. Two hours of you at your best is worth more to everyone than five hours ending badly.
A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.
A reward that is far off has almost no weight in ADHD. Tying the task to something you actually care about gives you a reason that does not depend on the payoff arriving soon.