Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.
Worth remembering before you build anything clever. If the pull of whatever a person is already doing is stronger than the nudge you have designed, the nudge loses, and it loses quietly, without anybody deciding anything. Signals help people who have lost track of the hour. They do very little for people who know exactly what the hour is.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'who taught man what he did not know' (Quran 96:5). Knowing is spoken of as a real gift, and it is still not the same as moving. The timer could give him the first and never the second.
عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ
who taught man what he did not know
Qur’an 96:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Part of what a cue is up against cannot be seen from outside. A literature review of mind wandering in ADHD found this internal kind of distractibility consistently associated with ADHD symptoms and largely missed by observers and rating scales. It was studying attention rather than bedtime, and the point still holds: the competing pull sits inside the person, where a lamp on a timer cannot reach it.
Lanier J, Noyes E, Biederman J. (2021). Mind Wandering (Internal Distractibility) in ADHD: A Literature Review.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A cue carries information and nothing else, so it only moves someone who was missing the information.
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
Try not to ask why. If the person knew why, they would probably have sorted it out already, and the question tends to land like an accusation.
Nearly everything on the ADHD list can show up inside a bipolar presentation, and the reverse is not true. So the shared features settle nothing, and the distinctly manic ones carry all the weight.
A clinician trained thoroughly in autism and ADHD may know almost nothing about coordination or reading difficulties, and can spend years working above foundations nobody ever checked. Ask yourself which of those categories your own training left out.