Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Self-compassion
Nothing here does the job on its own. Medication if it suits you, a few practical systems, something for the low mood and shame that has built up, and the people you live with brought into it.
The practical layer is the easiest to describe and the first to fall over, because whether you use a system at all depends on how you feel about yourself and how things are going at home. The tools themselves can be scruffy. A note on the back of an envelope counts as much as an expensive app. What matters is that the emotional and relational parts are not left out, since they decide whether the rest ever gets used.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Help is described as something you go and get, and from more than one direction.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta analysis of 419 randomised trials with 53,288 participants compared different kinds of psychological intervention on mental wellbeing, setting aside which school they came from. Several approaches help and no one of them holds all the ground. That is an argument for a package assembled around a person rather than loyalty to a single method.
van Agteren J, Iasiello M, Lo L, Bartholomaeus J, Kopsaftis Z, Carey M, Kyrios M. (2021). A systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological interventions to improve mental wellbeing.. Nature human behaviour doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Practical fixes only get used when the feelings around them and the people around you are not working against them.
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
Every list, timer and rule exists to buy you a life worth having. If the systems have quietly become the point, something has turned the wrong way round.
It rarely stays a matter of attention. The difficulties shape what you come to believe about yourself, that colours how you are with the people closest to you, and their responses feed straight back into the original trouble.
It tends to run the same way each time. You struggle with something, you feel awful about it, so you keep away from it, and anyone who raises it gets a sharp answer, which makes you keep away harder.