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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
Read that way, the restlessness that arrives when you have no project on is information rather than a character flaw. The same drive that gets called impulsive when it goes into a sudden purchase or an argument goes somewhere useful when there is something to build. So keeping a project alive, however small and however amateur, is not a treat you earn once the responsible things are done. For some people it is the load bearing part of the week.
We taught him how to make coats of mail for the benefit of you (Quran 21:80). Making is given here as a gift with a use, which is a fair way to see the urge to build something.
الأنبياء
وَعَلَّمۡنَٰهُ صَنۡعَةَ لَبُوسࣲ لَّكُمۡ لِتُحۡصِنَكُم مِّنۢ بَأۡسِكُمۡۖ فَهَلۡ أَنتُمۡ شَٰكِرُونَ
We taught him how to make coats of mail for the benefit of you [people], to protect you in your wars, but are you grateful for this
Qur’an 21:80read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review found that ADHD symptoms are consistently associated with mind wandering, the same spontaneous kind of thought that other research links to generating ideas. That is an association rather than a mechanism, and it does not show that making things relieves anything. What it does is make the connection plausible: the wandering that gets in the way in one setting is close kin to the thing that produces ideas in another.
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.
A drive that has nowhere good to go finds somewhere else to go.
Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.
A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.
When the right piece of work finally has you, you are entirely there. Hours go, nothing intrudes, and the difficulty that flattens you elsewhere is nowhere in the room.