Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.
Worth saying, because a conversation about emotional control can easily become a list of everything wrong with you. The aim is not a flatter version of you. It is keeping the spontaneity while putting a small delay in front of the decisions that cost money, jobs and relationships. Big feelings can stay. The unrecoverable choice made inside ten minutes is the problem.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'inspired it to know its own rebellion and piety' (Quran 91:8). Both are described as living in the same soul, which is a fair account of a strong temperament.
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read 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 102 children with ADHD, emotional difficulties made a contribution of their own, separately from executive difficulties, delay aversion and variable reaction times. So the emotional side stands on its own rather than being a by-product of something else. Research like this measures costs and not benefits, so the upside described here comes from clinical experience rather than from data.
Sjöwall D, Roth L, Lindqvist S, Thorell LB. (2013). Multiple deficits in ADHD: executive dysfunction, delay aversion, reaction time variability, and emotional deficits.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The trait itself is not the trouble, the speed from feeling to action is.
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
After years of feeling slightly outside every room, pulling back stops being a decision and becomes the setting you live at. Worth knowing about yourself before you conclude that you are simply not a people person.
You can be connected to a thing as well as to a person. A cause, a project, something you are making. On the days people feel like too much, it is still there.
Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.