Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.
This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves you with something in reserve by the evening. Pick the single part of the scramble that costs you most, the mornings or the paperwork or the bedtime, and put your effort there rather than at the temper directly.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Did We not relieve your heart for you' (Quran 94:1) and 'remove the burden' (Quran 94:2). The burden and the state of the heart are spoken of together, as one thing bearing on the other.
أَلَمۡ نَشۡرَحۡ لَكَ صَدۡرَكَ
Did We not relieve your heart for you [Prophet]
Qur’an 94:1read 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, difficulties with emotion contributed separately from executive difficulties, delay aversion and variable reaction times. Two honest things follow. The emotional side is real in its own right, and it is not simply a by-product of the practical side, so tidying your systems is not guaranteed to calm your reactions. The case for doing it anyway is clinical experience and the relief people describe.
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
Running at your limit all day leaves nothing spare for the moment somebody irritates you.
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.
Saying I need a break only works if you have agreed beforehand what a break means. How long it lasts, what the other person does meanwhile, and when the two of you come back to it.
When you genuinely cannot know what someone thought of you, the harsh guess is no more accurate than the kind one. Since you are inventing either way, invent the version that lets you carry on with your day.