Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Mindfulness practice is good for most people, and may help a little more if you have ADHD. Treat it as something supportive rather than as the treatment itself.
The honest version is worth having, because being told it is the answer and then finding it is not tends to end with people dropping it entirely. If sitting quietly for ten minutes suits you, keep it. It may make the pause slightly easier to find. Just keep the structural things running alongside: the alarms, the checkpoints, the nearer deadlines.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Whoever has done an atom's weight of good will see it' (Quran 99:7). Small practices are not nothing, even when they are not everything.
فَمَن يَعۡمَلۡ مِثۡقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيۡرࣰ ا يَرَهُۥ
whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it
Qur’an 99:7read 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 89 studies examined which features of interventions actually shift intention, stage of change and autonomous motivation, and found that specific ingredients matter rather than general good intent. It did not look at mindfulness, so nothing there argues for or against it. Take it as a reason to be careful with any single practice sold as the whole answer.
Knittle K, Nurmi J, Crutzen R, Hankonen N, Beattie M, Dombrowski SU. (2018). How can interventions increase motivation for physical activity? A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Health psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Practice at noticing may make a pause a little easier to find, which is a modest and real thing.
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
If the deadline is six weeks off and you can really only see three days ahead, do not try to grow the horizon. Move the deadline closer with a checkpoint.
Whatever the record is, do it the same day, every time. The salesman writes his notes in the car outside the client's office. Not that evening, not on Friday.
Someone who will tell you the part that was not good is someone whose 'that was fine' you can believe. That is what settles the doubt, not reassurance.