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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
If you are beginning something new and half of you thinks it is nonsense, say so. A doubt that stays unspoken tends to come out as a missed appointment. Sometimes the expectation is worth arguing with and sometimes it is a real signal that this is the wrong approach or the wrong month for it. Either way it belongs in the room.
'Do not lose heart or despair' (Quran 3:139). Going in with some hope is not naivety, it is part of what makes the effort possible.
آل عمران
وَلَا تَهِنُواْ وَلَا تَحۡزَنُواْ وَأَنتُمُ ٱلۡأَعۡلَوۡنَ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤۡمِنِينَ
Do not lose heart or despair- if you are true believers you have the upper hand
Qur’an 3:139read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Trials try to hold expectation still by keeping people unaware of what they were given. A multicentre trial comparing mindfulness based cognitive therapy plus usual treatment against usual treatment alone, in 120 adults with ADHD, was single blind, so the participants knew which they had. That is normal for talking therapies, and it is one reason results in this field carry more uncertainty than a drug trial's.
Janssen L, Kan CC, Carpentier PJ, Sizoo B, Hepark S, Schellekens MPJ, Donders ART, Buitelaar JK, Speckens AEM. (2019). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy v. treatment as usual in adults with ADHD: a multicentre, single-blind, randomised controlled trial.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
What you believe about a treatment feeds straight into whether you actually do the parts of it that work.
Hope is not a promise, and saying that a properly tried approach is not helping you is not a failure of belief.
Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.
A strong feeling makes the rest of your life go quiet for a while. That is when people resign, send the message, or start something they cannot undo, for reasons that seem good and are not enough.
Picture spilling coffee down your shirt on the way in. One version: the day is ruined and everyone will see. Another: this is going to be a good story by eleven. Same coffee, two different days.