Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
Do not expect a low-interest task to run on willpower alone. Add the spark it needs to catch.
Man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). The striving still counts; set it up so your effort can actually flow.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An ADHD brain mobilises far better for tasks that are interesting, urgent, or novel; deliberately adding those ingredients to a dull task is working with the wiring, not against it.
Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin doi
ADHD reflects differences in behavioural inhibition and executive function rather than a lack of effort or care.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Adding engagement or urgency supplies the stimulation an ADHD brain needs to start and sustain.
Where this sits: Strength-based interventions.
For a lot of people with ADHD, making things is not a hobby but closer to an appetite. The itch to start something is always there, and when nothing is being made it does not go quietly.
A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.
One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.