Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
A small annoyance can be steered. A full blaze cannot. Nearly all of the winnable work happens in the first thirty seconds, before the feeling has finished arriving.
Which means the skill to practise is noticing, not calming down. Learn your own early signs: the jaw, the hot face, talking faster, the flat voice, the sudden certainty that you are right. Then keep one small move ready for that moment. Standing up, a glass of water, saying give me a minute. It feels far too small to matter, and it is where the leverage sits.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'We know what his soul whispers to him' (Quran 50:16). The whisper stage is named as a real stage, and it is the one worth learning to hear in yourself.
وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read 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 young people with ADHD found difficulties across several parts of emotional life, and recognising emotions was one of them, alongside reactivity and regulation. If the noticing is itself a weak point, training the noticing is a sensible target rather than an obvious one. The meta-analysis maps where the difficulties sit and does not test any particular early warning practice.
Graziano PA, Garcia A. (2016). Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and children's emotion dysregulation: A meta-analysis.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Steering a feeling is much easier before it has taken over your body.
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
What you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.
You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.
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.