She Counted to Ten Again. This Time It Worked.

The last piece in the emotional regulation series. The one where counting to ten actually worked.

So Priya came back last week. First time since March. She sat down, and I hadn’t even finished writing the date; she just started. “It happened again,” she says. Email thing. Daughter interrupting during a work call. That sort of thing.

Now I remember the last conversation we had about this. She’d be maybe three sentences into whatever reaction she was having before anything registered with her at all. Door already slammed shut. Reply already sent off. She’d tried the counting thing, knew how it worked in theory. Didn’t work though. Because by the time she remembered she should probably count, the moment the counting was meant to catch was already behind her.

“Tell me what was different this time,” I said.

And she actually thought about it, which you know she doesn’t always do. Usually with Priya it’s just, tell me what to do.

“I felt it in my chest first. Before I knew what I was about to say. There was this half-second where I noticed it as a feeling in my chest, not as a sentence already forming.”

Right. That half-second. That’s the whole thing really, isn’t it?

Richard Davidson’s been doing this work for decades now, not so much on the feeling of emotion but on the biology of it, the timing. What does it actually look like on a brain scan when someone gets knocked sideways and comes back quite quickly versus when they get knocked, and they’re down for hours? He calls all of this emotional style. Different people have different emotional styles the same way we have different personality types or whatever. How long does a low mood last, how accurately can you read what’s going on in the room, how fast does recovery happen.

And his argument is that all of this stuff sits on circuits that keep changing with use. He’s done imaging work with people who’ve been doing sustained mental practice over years and years and years. The circuits change. You can measure it. It’s not a metaphor.

So I’m sitting in clinic week after week seeing people who’ve been told for years, decades sometimes, that their emotional reactions are just them. That’s their personality; it’s fixed, it’s done.

Davidson suggests that it isn’t as simple as that. The way that your emotional system works is not set in stone; you can adapt and train it. His research has shown that, and that is so important for people who believe that they cannot react in any other way. Others such as Barkley have said for a long time that these emotional storms are part of ADHD, not separate from it.

We already know if we are going to intervene, we have to get in there early before things really cascade. Marc Brackett teaches us to use the gap between feeling something and acting on it by naming what we are feeling. That can work incredibly well for some — when the naming is available, which it isn’t always. Previously I had mentioned how Linehan was interested in what survives complete overwhelm, and what doesn’t. Dunkley wrote about something quieter beneath the anger. Whilst they come at it from different angles, they all focus on the same endpoint.

So Priya came in saying something had shifted, and honestly what she described made sense. The window hadn’t got wider, it had just moved. Earlier. Like before Gross would say the cascade fully kicks in. She was catching things before they became full reactions. And she wasn’t white-knuckling anything. It had just changed through practice.

The body registers before the story catches up. She had just had more practice.

It turns out there’s a name for starting with the body instead of the word. The grounding part of CARE begins in exactly the same place:

https://care.thecontextshift.com

I do want to be careful here though. ADHD isn’t something you can just practice your way out of. Most weeks for most of my patients, the noticing still doesn’t arrive in time, which is fine; six weeks isn’t actually very long when you’re up against years of the pattern already being in place.

Another patient told me at the start of this series that his focus had fixed itself on meds, but he still blew up at his wife the same way, still got snappy with the kids the same way. He said that was just him. I said wiring changes with use, just slowly.

Half a second. That’s what we’re talking about here. And it moves.

So if something comes up this week, in that window before it becomes words, what did you feel in your body? Not what you thought about it after. The actual thing. Tell me that in the comments.