Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.
If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point is that under pressure you can only reach for something that is already there. Anything you have to invent in the moment will lose to the reaction you have had a thousand times before.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'when you recite the Quran, seek God's protection from the outcast, Satan' (Quran 16:98). Protection is sought before beginning, not after things have gone wrong.
فَإِذَا قَرَأۡتَ ٱلۡقُرۡءَانَ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ
[Prophet], when you recite the Quran, seek God’s protection from the outcast, Satan
Qur’an 16:98read 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 306 experimental comparisons found that emotion regulation strategies differ a great deal in how well they work, with reappraisal and suppression producing quite different results. Since which one you use matters, choosing it in advance rather than grabbing whatever comes to hand is reasonable. These were experiments, so they say more about the strategies than about family gatherings.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
In the moment you can reach for a plan, but you cannot make one.
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
Sometimes the answer is not a better system. It is doing less, including giving up something you love, because what it costs you has stopped being affordable.
Fast, strong emotion is part of ADHD rather than a separate fault of character. It was in the original description, dropped for decades, and is being written back in.
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.