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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
It helps to treat it like any other part of a plan, with something specific in the week rather than a general intention to be more social. One standing arrangement usually beats five vague ones. If you have been unwell for a while, expect the first few to feel like effort rather than pleasure, which is not a sign that it is failing.
'Seek help with steadfastness and prayer' (Quran 2:45). Help is something you go and get, and company counts as help.
البقرة
وَٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ وَإِنَّهَا لَكَبِيرَةٌ إِلَّا عَلَى ٱلۡخَٰشِعِينَ
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer- though this is hard indeed for anyone but the humble
Qur’an 2:45read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of experimental studies of social exclusion in psychiatric populations concluded that being left out contributes both to disorder developing and to it persisting. The reviewers pointed out that most of this experimental work has used healthy volunteers, so the clinical evidence is thinner than the effect itself. It supports connection mattering clinically, and it does not tell you the dose.
Reinhard MA, Dewald-Kaufmann J, Wüstenberg T, Musil R, Barton BB, Jobst A, Padberg F. (2020). The vicious circle of social exclusion and psychopathology: a systematic review of experimental ostracism research in psychiatric disorders.. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being regularly among people steadies your mood and keeps the rest of the routine upright.
ADHD rarely turns up on its own. If anxiety or low mood is in the room as well, it needs treating in its own right, and that includes when it is the other partner who is struggling.
Instead of sending a child out to sit and stew, send them to a side table for three very easy worksheets, then straight back to whatever everyone else is doing.
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.