Hyperfocus: The Most Misunderstood Side of ADHD

"You can play for hours but you can't study, so you can do it."

I have heard this sentence too, most of all from myself. On the day after a night when I could sink into a subject I was curious about until four in the morning, when I could not give even twenty minutes to a document that had to be handed in, I said the same sentence to myself: so you can do it, so you just don't want to.

Years later I understood where that sentence was wrong. The two were the two ends of the same system.

Why there is no contradiction

The name of ADHD misleads. Attention is not missing; it cannot be directed. The system runs the command "focus on what is important" weakly and runs the command "focus on what is interesting" very well.

Hyperfocus is the extreme form of this: if the subject is attractive enough, focus locks, and coming out of the lock is hard too. This is what is stressed in Brown's description of ADHD as well: the problem lies not in the amount of attention but in its management (Brown, 2005).

What kinds of jobs open it: new ones, ones that give immediate feedback, gamified ones and ones I am truly curious about. What kinds do not open it: repetitive jobs, jobs with delayed rewards and jobs with uncertain outcomes.

The issue is not being unable to focus. It is that the key to focus is in someone else's hands.

What the research says

For a long time hyperfocus was almost absent from the clinical literature. It does not appear in DSM and is in none of the items of the diagnostic criteria. It has only recently begun to be taken seriously.

In a study with adults, a questionnaire was developed to measure this experience and applied in two separate samples. People with high ADHD symptoms reported more hyperfocus, both in general and in three separate areas: school, hobbies and screen time (Hupfeld et al., 2019). So the observation "people with ADHD get absorbed" finds a measurable counterpart.

A review that goes over the field itself is more cautious: even the definition of hyperfocus has not been agreed on; different studies measure different things and the mechanism underneath is not known (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021).

So what we have is this: the experience is real and widespread, measurement has only just begun, the mechanism is not clear and it has not been shown to be specific to ADHD. Hyperfocus is described in autism and in other conditions too. This is why I keep away from content that presents it as a "superpower": the information we have is not that clear.

Is it the same as flow?

A frequently asked question, and the answer is not clear. Flow is described as a state of being absorbed in a task with enjoyment and productivity; the person is lost in the work but the work is generally one they chose, and they feel good when they come out.

What I have in hyperfocus is not always that. Sometimes it really is like flow, sometimes like a trap: the subject takes hold of me, I want to get out and cannot, and in the end I do not feel good either. What separates the two, and whether they are even separate, is still debated (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021).

My practical distinction is crude but does its job: when I come out, do I say "I'm glad I did" or "again?" If the answer is the second, that session gained me nothing, it just took hours.

The good side

Hyperfocus cannot be squeezed into a list of faults, because most of the work I produce comes out there.

• Finishing a long and hard job in one sitting
• Learning a subject in depth within weeks
• Attention gathering at a moment of crisis

This is why some occupations fit well with ADHD: varied, short-cycle jobs whose results are visible immediately. How this can be used in self-directed learning I wrote about separately in the article on self-directed learning with hyperfocus.

The bad side

The body is forgotten. Water is not drunk, food is not eaten, the toilet is not visited. This is called body-signal blindness and combined with hyperfocus it can last for hours. The details are in the article on body-signal blindness.

Time disappears. Time blindness is already there; in hyperfocus it is wiped out entirely. "Let me look for half an hour" can really become six hours.

It goes to the wrong job. While the report that has to be handed in sits there, an unrelated subject is researched for three hours. Work comes out, but not the work that was needed. In me the most dangerous form of this is sinking into a job that looks very like the one I am putting off: I prepare, I research, I build systems. In the evening I have worked a lot and handed in nothing.

It crashes afterward. After a long hyperfocus, exhaustion comes: the hyperfocus crash. The body sends the bill later, and that bill usually arrives the next day.

Getting out gets harder. If no one says "enough," it does not end by itself. This is where I am wrong most often: I wait for a signal from inside, "let me get up now," and that signal does not come.

It touches relationships. Not hearing someone who is talking, missing the time you promised, hearing "you're not listening to me." This is the least talked about cost of hyperfocus, and seen from the other side it looks like indifference.

How to direct it

Banning hyperfocus is neither possible nor wise. What can be done is to put limits on it and steer it to the right place.

• An outside exit signal. An audible alarm, someone else warning you, a timer that switches off automatically. The signal from inside cannot be trusted. For me a phone alarm is not enough, because I turn it off and carry on; what works is an alarm that rings outside the room.
• Preparing before going in. Water, food, phone on charge. Once in, you do not think about these.
• Making the right job attractive. Adding novelty, a race against time or immediate feedback to the necessary job sometimes pulls the focus there: gamification and racing a timer.
• Leaving what comes after empty. Not planning an intense job after a long focus session.
• Not going in before bed. Hyperfocus easily shifts sleep time by three hours. I described the sleep side in the article ADHD and sleep.

Set the exit at the entrance. Making yourself a promise after you have gone into hyperfocus does not work; the person who would decide is not there at that point. Make the decision before going in: set the timer, put the alarm in another room, ask someone to call you at a certain time. For me an entry without an exit plan means a lost evening every time.

The common mistake

The most common mistake is to think of hyperfocus as a working method. It does not come to order. You cannot plan "I'll finish the report this week with hyperfocus," because you are not the one who decides whether it will open.

The second mistake is to turn it into an identity. The sentence "I'm a hyperfocus person, so I can only work the last night" eventually prevents building systems that really work. A way of working built on crisis produces output in the short term and wears you out in the long term (Faraone et al., 2021). I wrote about this side in the article on burnout in ADHD.

Where I have arrived is this: hyperfocus is less an ability than a kind of weather. I cannot order the rain, but I can take an umbrella. All I do is try to make sure the right job is within reach when it opens, and that something to stop me is waiting outside when it closes.