My ADHD Love/Hate relationship with Focus
It’s 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, and I am sitting down to write this after a disastrous morning. I woke up with the full intention of sitting down and doing a full day of content creation. For the 48 hours previous, my brain had been hyper-focused, and it had been the most productive 2 days of 2022. That Friday night, I thought, ‘Boom, let’s ride this hyperfocus wave. Saturday is gonna be a big one’. Fast forward 15 hours. It’s 1pm. I have been lying on the kitchen floor since 8am staring at the ceiling.
The LOVE part
One of the incredible benefits of ADHD is hyperfocus and being super productive for extended periods. I can sit down with a task or set of functions and smash through them with little to no downtime or distractions. This is what I had for Thursday and Friday. I had a big photo shoot on Friday and needed to do a lot of prep to make it awesome. I also needed to take my mother to lunch, go to the gym, have multiple meetings, and more.
So Thursday morning, I woke up, the hyper-focus pinged on, and I smashed through it. I ended up in the gym at 23:15 on Thursday night, not something I usually can do. By 23:00, I am ready for bed, not willing to pump some iron. Off to bed at midnight Thursday and on location ready to shoot 8:00 Friday. A full day of shooting on Friday, plus all evening editing to get the first batch of photos to a client and BOOM, I was done. My hyper-focus had not only let me get all that done, but by gum, I had done it well.
My ADHD hyperfocus somehow allows me to just keep going. Not in those 48 hours did I feel tired or drained. I just kept going and going. The ability to do this is just flipping fantastic, and I thank you, ADHD, for giving me that skill. But yet I also hate it.
I HATE your hyper-focus
The joy of hyperfocus is that I get everything done and never need to break, but when you stop hyper-focusing, the breaks hit hard.
When I utilise my hyperfocus skill, I never stop; I never relax. This means my brain doesn’t get a break. All humans need a break; we are not machines. This means when my hyperfocus ends, that’s when I take my leave. Which sounds OK, but there is a problem.
It’s not just a regular person 5 min coffee break of an evening resting; oh no, it’s so much longer. It is like all the breaks I have skipped compound themselves and then all hit at once. I have no motivation feel tired and sluggish and just want to sleep all day. Which, as you can imagine, means I get nothing done. This is a right pain if I still want and or need to get things completed. There was still more editing to do this morning, dogs to walk, and meals to be prepped. Yet I did nothing.
I can deal with them doing nothing.
The doing nothing part of after hyper Focus I can deal with. I come from a background in the sport. I understand that our bodies need a rest period to recharge and recover. I am happy to sit and relax, but my ADHD brain has other plans.
After a hyperfocus session, half my brain is still racing at hyperspeed thinking. In contrast, the other half of my brain is done, unable to do any more thinking. I get this juxtaposed feeling where I feel anxious that I should be doing something and feel like I can’t do a thing. This all boils up and overwhelms me, and I end up like I did this morning, laying on the floor staring into space…
So do I love or hate hyperfocus?
Overall, hyperfocus has allowed me to become who I am today and allowed me to live the extraordinary life I do as with anything thing in life. These things come in waves. What goes up must come down. I am starting to learn that I can’t hyper-focus and that post times will be complicated.
I now need to know to cope with the after-effects of hyper-focus. It’s like loving a partner or a friend. The time you have with them can be filled with happiness, and then one day, they can be gone, moved away or die. You left with that feeling of wanting more but not carrying on with love. As with that, time and life will help you learn to cope.
I do not love or hate hyperfocus, but I am grateful to have such a super skill…
