Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Self-compassion
One man with ADHD described the goal as no longer suffering from it, only having it. The diagnosis had not changed. What it cost him had.
Half of that shift comes from removing particular sources of pain: the job that was never going to work, the arrangement at home that left everything on you, the belief that you were simply lazy. The other half is making peace with what stays. Neither half is optional. Take the suffering away and there is still something to accept, and accepting without changing anything is only putting up with it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Did We not relieve your heart for you and remove the burden (Quran 94:1 and 94:2). The weight is acknowledged first and then spoken of as lifted, which is the order this change tends to come in.
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
A meta analysis of 79 samples with 16,416 participants found self compassion is positively related to several forms of wellbeing. It is correlational, so it cannot tell you that becoming kinder to yourself produces the wellbeing rather than the other way about. It does place a gentler relationship with your own difficulties firmly alongside living better with them.
Zessin U, Dickhäuser O, Garbade S. (2015). The Relationship Between Self-Compassion and Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis.. Applied psychology. Health and well-being doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Some of the pain comes from things that can actually be changed, and telling those apart from what remains is most of the relief.
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
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.
Work properly at the parts that can be managed, then be at peace with what is left over. The order matters more than it sounds.
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.