Hyperfocus is a very old friend (sometimes foe) of mine, as alluded to many times before in these posts which, face it, probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this propensity I have to hyperfocus because writing is both the target and the outlet of this tendency. If I didn’t channel the fruits of at least some of my areas of hyperfocus into writing, I would probably burst!

For the early part of last week, I was glued to my screen caught up in an extremely intense period of hyperfocus unleashed by the happy news that we, finally, have a move date for getting into our permanent home (regulars will know we have been in limbo for months as a result of selling up our old house last summer and relocating in the general direction of the house we have been waiting to buy, which has taken a whole lot longer than expected). Unplugging this cork was like sending a geyser high into the sky…I was launched into hyperfocus mode, with good cause as there was genuinely a lot to get organised in short time, but then its the particular way I get my teeth stuck in that owes everything to my neurodovergent way of becoming highly fixated and single-minded about a thing!

So my fixation has been the interior of my new house as its a blank (empty) canvas in need of new furniture in a lot of the spaces and I’ve been cooking ideas for months…more like years really as I am a longtime sponge of interiors inspirations from every imaginable source…but there was no point letting myself run riot with any of it until it was quite certain we were going ahead with our purchase. Meaning that, for months, I’ve been stifled and ingrowing, using lots of other fixations to try and distract myself but this was the real one I wanted to get stuck into. Now was my time to turn the spotlight on what was really cooking on the back burner for me, bringing it forward to the front ring so I could really focus on it…and boy did I go for it for those few days (ongoing as I write this, though I took a few days’ enforced break)!

Not only was I shopping around for what we need but I was 3D modelling the new space, creating virtual mood boards and obsessing about getting just the right colours, textures, juxtapositions…all of this before moving in but then so much of what I would “do”, even if I was in there, would be planned in my own highly visual head so what was the difference? And that’s the thing about me, whether its something “intellectual” or “creative” I’m capable of getting equally hyperfocused and, in both cases, the process (and effect on me…) is pretty much the same; I’m a lost cause for anything else until its run its course!

The exact same thing occurs when one of my endless questions leads to a phase of intense research, note taking, possibly writing a piece on a topic…i think of something, I dive in, it consumes me and I get so embroiled with it that it takes over every thought until I am done. The way that the “thing” doesn’t have to involve collecting data but can (just as easily) be a case of playing around with visuals and working on a tangible, physical object, be that a room scheme or a painting, has been a saving grace for me, for just as long as I can remember, because I do have this very balanced brain with interests in both camps and this can serve as a pressure outlet, allowing me to gain the relief of changing the type of focus in order to relieve some of the intensity of pursuing the same repeated actions for a long period. Art was that outlet for me after my health (and high intensity job) broke me down all those years ago as I was able to continue to hyperfocus…only, in a different way for a while.

Because when I am “in it” its as though anything beyond the immediate zone of my own thoughts has fuzzed out into nothing or even completely disappeared off the planet and anything that interrupts or forces me to land back in “reality” is extremely jarring, even with the potential to crash me back into huge levels of physical pain if too abrupt (shows how interrelated these zones are; I also want to add here, since it feels related, that hyperfocus can be a powerful means of distracting me from my physical pain, almost like I use it as main source of pain relief). I become intensely fixated on whatever outcome I have in mind and I go after it with the focus of a dog after a rabbit; nothing will stop me, not even any apparent signs that I am attempting to achieve the impossible (this can sometimes make me even more determined)…thus what seems unlikely is often overturned by my sheer determination to get what I want, in the end!

In my mind’s eye, I have a vision and that vision “must” come about as near as, or better than, what I have concocted in my mind’s eye and I hold true to that, no compromises allowed, unless any changes in direction happen to add value in ways I hadn’t already foreseen. I am a stickler for perfection, that benchmark held by my own standards of “what works” for me and nothing will stop me chasing after that ideal once I have my sights on it…day after day, with a commitment which (if I had ever managed to apply it to some job of paid work) would no doubt have made me a mint, however I have always struggled to apply my passions to what other people want or to situations where I am answerable to the opinions and methods of others. I must have autonomy and freedom to follow my own flow at all costs and that doesn’t often work with having “clients”. Thus this strange genius of mine has often resulted in a great deal of personal satisfaction, when it comes to creating spaces or things I have envisioned then turned into reality, but never in any kind of regular income flow (not even with my art, with which I have achieved some modest success but never flown to great commercial heights, since I am too much of a stickler for doing my own thing in my own way and to my own timescales). Now I have a new space to play with, for the first time in a long time, I am lit up as I have waited a lot of years to be able to start designing my living space from scratch!

That perfectionism thing can also be both friend and foe, being such a big part of what seems to make so many hyperfocusing types tick, often leading to great achievements but sometimes at a cost. In my case, the constant pursuit of unrealistic standards has been the longtime curse of my life, one that enters into every area of life that I can think of.

When in the midst of whatever hyperfocus area I happen to be focused on at the moment, there is both an exquisite pleasure to be derived from it and an intense pain, due to this co-factor of perfectionism that can be the taskmaster of all taskmasters and take a lot of the enjoyment out of it all, when all is said and done…because when you are never quite happy with the results, when enough is seldom enough, when you are still yearning for something that remained somewhat out of reach for all your efforts and when you keep on going to the point of exhaustion, every time you set about doing something, it can be the factor that crashes your health and morale almost every time you do something, however much you are in your pleasure zone when it comes to the activity in question. Even when its not a chosen activity, such as those you are tasked with at school or in work, this same trait of perfectionism can be the very thing that breaks your back because, combined with the ability to hyperfocus, it can push you right over the edge of overdoing things, especially when you are determined to shine or not let people down.

It’s a trait I hear about a lot in neurodivergent circles and often tends to force us into the territory of “boom or bust” and that’s not good once your health starts to show the wear and tear or repeated cycles of this (there’s a phenomenon, talked about in chronic fatigue circles, called rolling post exertional malaise (PEM) where you never recover from the rolling, often overlapping, phases of overdoing things). What starts out as almost a delicious state of hyperfocus can so very easily turn into the very thing that is pushing you to the very brink of exhaustion and mental/physical breakdown so its one to be wary of, even when you “think” you’re in your element and enjoying yourself, as I did last week. Is it any coincidence I am now having a crash week or is it because I over did it, got too intense and excitable, burned the midnight oil and never let myself switch off from it all for several days in a row…hmmm, let me think about that!

To be driven by an irresistible urge to keep going with something until it reaches a certain point of satisfaction is one thing but to be driven by the need to perfect is another and, in my case, its not just the perfection I expect from myself that pushes me along so heedlessly but my demand of perfection from everyone else around me and from “circumstances” themselves. When life itself doesn’t easily deliver what I want and which I feel “ought” to be far more easily obtainable or achievable I can drive myself to my wits ends with frustration, like battering my head against a wall with a refusal to give in. I go round and around trying to force that thing to manifest and sometimes don’t know when to quit or to at least give myself a break. Its an extremely ADHD thing to lack brakes like this!

Take, for instance, the current hyperfocus upon creating “perfect” interior spaces as long visualised as what I feel I most want for the next era of my life (having lived with interiors that have long frustrated me in the old one), visions I have been cooking in my mind for months, years and even decades. There’s a lot of collated data to be sifted through in my mind’s eye to get to that. My inner style has evolved so many times over the period of wishful thinking that I have to be quite clear what I really want now and not what I think I want because it was an idea I had, but couldn’t manifest, several years ago but forgot to let go of. So there’s a mental process of churning it all through the washing machine of my mind, enough so I can hang out on the line, at the end of the process, exactly who I am today, what most clicks with the way I am and how I want to live now and also how I see myself evolving over the next phase of my life, which also takes a lot of visualising. I categorically don’t want to live with any unwanted hangover from the old life. I have such a strong need to reboot everything, now we are finally moving, thus I want this space I am creating to reflect that too; to have all the right colours, textures and feelings (I am soooo feelings led) to encourage the kind of mental and emotional states I want to be in whilst living there. This is a big undertaking, a massive brief, and I’m giving it all I’ve got whilst juggling with a budget that is very far from unlimited so there is both a relish to taking on the challenging task, a culmination of all the years I have had to wait to do this…and a desperation to get it all right first time, and all of that amounts to the biggest benchmark of perfection that I’ve had to work to for a very long time!

I also know what I like when it comes to things such as colour and style so this “thing” I am considering using can be off the mark, by just the minutest degree, compared to what I envision or feel is possible, yet if its still just not close enough for me and my perfectionism, thus I have to keep going in my search for that perfect thing. For instance, I have been looking for this one piece of bespoke furniture for days and have turned up some really valid options and yet still I search for “the one” as something tells me I’m not quite there yet. This one factor is behind days of driven behaviours that have, so far, got me some very good results because of my persistence but it can require such stamina that its no wonder I am having to take a break from it for a few days (thank goodness I now do that, something my health crashes have taught me or at least forced me to do…as old me would have kept going until the day I moved in and collapsed in a heap).

When something is “wrong” I just know it’s wrong in ways that other people around me often don’t seem to get, or at least would not be put off by (I’ve long noticed that other people seem much more content to “make do” with the nearest approximation than I ever am), though my neurodivergent daughter really gets me on this (and, unlike me, she is now making a career out of her abilities and good instincts in this area). She and I are often so incredibly in accord about such things that the way either of us explains why something isn’t quite a fit or is even utterly abhorrent to us often uses the same nuanced rhetoric, similar metaphors, even the same emphatic waving of hands in the air as we describe whatever, to us, is so patently obvious…though other people listening to us agreeing with each other on such topics often sit there with their mouths agape, clearly wondering what an earth we are talking about!

Its as though we are party to another layer of fine details that other people miss, subtle intuitions that tell us non-negotiable “yes”s or “no”s, as though we are applying some golden mean to whatever we’re appraising and, when “no” is the answer, we will stick in our heels and simply not make do, no matter what (its not a tantrum nor is it being unreasonable…because, to us, it is obvious and necessary). Having these very strong instincts feels like such a key part of the hyperfocus bag of tricks that I don’t think it can be taken out of the equation; so I suspect, whatever the area of hyperfocus, those of us prone to it always have very good instincts about our area of fixation. So when something isn’t quite what we are after, we then become obsessed with fixing the situation to our liking, no matter how many extra hours of trawling the internet or chasing this idea around might take. This one single thing about me has driven my parents or partners completely mad in the past as they just can’t see why I throw something out as “not quite right” when it seems perfectly adequate to them. This relentless search for the ideal is undeniably such a big part of my obsessional behaviour that I would say it is one of the very biggest drivers of my hyperfocusing tendency…and my tendency to bust myself in the process!

So this thing completely takes my brain over like a brain fire raging in every quarter of my awareness to the exclusion of all else when I am in it. I have no interest in cooking or even engaging with everyday smalltalk in family life, I’m just in it for the long haul; nothing else really matters and other deadlines or important factors be hanged. I pump up this thing’s importance like I’ve injected it with steroids; so, now super sized and all consuming, it fills every cell in my body, manifesting not only as hyperfocus but as tension in my muscles, an inability to sleep properly, a degree of seriousness in my demeanour that you would think I was dealing with a world crisis on my shoulders not (in this case) a few sticks of furniture and a colour palette to get right. And as for researching, trawling online for these things I’m quite determined exist out there, to my budget (though I’m often proved right when my persistence pays off…) I can do this from dawn to dusk, day after day with such astonishing stamina dredged from who knows where…and often do…until I get there, or my body calls time on me.

Its not the first time, and won’t be the last, that a passion for creating interior spaces takes me over, having been a fixation of mine since I inherited my first solo bedroom when my sister moved out (I was only 6) and began to realise how the way a space looks and feels to the senses can alter how you feel in it and, though the process of hyperfocus is much the same when I am researching some idea I have had, or engaged in a piece of writing, a painting, a craft hobby or some other type of fixation, this one has got to be the most all-engaging focus of all when it gets the chance to be active, perhaps because it incorporates both the cerebral and the manifest, the conceptual and the visual, the physical and the abstract, a crossover zone with the power to utterly enthral me like nothing else.

Like I said, its like I won’t take no for an answer from life when challenges come up in this area, so I keep searching for that needle in a haystack, all the time salivating over the hunt, my brain lit up in ways it seldom gets the addictive pleasure of in everyday life; yes there is a lot of dopamine to be milked from such a pursuit. There’s also the risk of peaking too early or, as my daughter says, going after the “ta-da” moment too soon, determined to rush ahead to the big reveal when, really, things might come together better in the long run if allowed to do so more slowly and organically (perhaps after we have lived in a half-empty house for a while and let the mud settle). However, this intense control freakishness and obsession in me has to rush to its conclusion, even at the risk of experiencing crashing anticlimax at the end…as has often been the case when my latest hyperfocus has peaked, exploded its brightest lights against the backdrop of the everyday sky and fallen softly to earth again, leaving everything just a little drabber after the event. I know, even as I pursue these hyperfocus areas, that I am risking my own crash to earth just as soon as the thrill of the chase is over!

In other words, delayed gratification isn’t in my remit; I just don’t seem to be able, or to want, to go after that….like I know it’s there, as a possibility, but shrug it away in favour of the full intensity, every time. In fact, everything is to do with intensity of experience, when it comes down to it; a sort of dogged pursuit in me for that feeling of being richly alive, vital, driven, urgent and, in this respect, I feel quite sure its something to do with my ADHD brain but also the way that intersects with my autism and the whole package of 2E neurodiversity because I really NEED this dial-turned-up kind of thrill in my life, where the whole switchboard feels lit up at once and I am sat playing with all the controls. It’s my version of gestalt experiencing (something, I suspect, a lot of neurodivergent people trend towards) and its the zenith of being alive with my kind of brain.

Everything I’ve just described is about a sort of intellectual and experiential, an emotional, even spiritual (in the sense that its about playing with universal possibilities, believing in ideals, manifesting things…) intensity in me that lights up to full brightness when I have a big juicy project to focus on and I really need that in my life. Times when I haven’t had it have, no surprise, corresponded with those when my mental and physical health have been at their most floundering. So when it’s not one thing it’s another but I must have my fixations, areas where I can’t help myself but hyperfocus for long periods of time, or all my systems start to shut down. Then the more I crave staying in this state, ever more dopamine hungry for it, desperate for it not to stop, the more of a whirling dervish I can become, leading to increased impulsivity and thence to anxiety!

In other words, when I am in the hyperfocus, I become afraid of stopping and, in particular, live in dread of interruption or distraction…anything that could cause me to lose the intensity of the experience. I am chronically afraid of the low motivation states that, equally, come with my ADHD brain as it’s just so hard to get out of them once entrenched so, when I get into the hyperactivity and hyperfocus again, finding my latest obsession to hook onto, it’s usually a massive relief. It’s like having to peddle your legs really hard all the time to keep your head above water but far better than sinking below the waterline!

Or, here’s a better analogy, I heard someone recently describe getting into ADHD flow as being like getting a massive passenger plane off the ground…it takes quite a lot of taxiing along and a supreme effort to get it up there but, once you are cruising at 40,000 feet, you are “in the zone” and there’s a kind of genius to it because this is the “place” where things occur to you and ideas join together in creative ways that never occur to you down on the ground. Its like popping your head above the bank of clouds and getting to see the bigger picture, where anything is possible and ingenious connections can be made. Anything coming into that flow state from the side is like turbulence hitting the side of the plane and can send you right back into a tailspin; everything starts to judder again and all the momentum you gained is now lost. Whatever you can manage to hold onto, from the place where you were so hyperfocused before, becomes doubly precious to you on the way down, partly because you have now had that taste of the gilded zone where everything seems to come together more easily and coherently and, mostly, because its all now been put at risk and you don’t even know if you will ever see it again. One more interruption and you will have crashed right back down to earth again, to where your working memory is next to non-existent and everything feels like a load of obstacles in the way of any clear or inspired mental processing (at least, this is how it feels to me).

This dread of everything being jeopardised by interruption or distraction, of so many connections being lost if I am forced to lose “altitude”, is what drives my hyperfocus states along; I simply have to stay up there for long periods in order to get whatever it is done, because the constant need to come back down to earth would make it impossible to be in the flow state at all. When the crash back to earth happens (strange that, just as I was writing this, someone happened to come into the room and slump down next to me with their clunking breakfast bowl and crunching sounds, breaking my early morning writing solitude, utterly crashing my thoughts…) I may seem externally serene but, inside, I feel like a bear with a sore head and just so aggravated. My skin is now hot and pricking with irritation (strong clue, again, as to just how closely connected this kind of frustration is with all the physical body systems) and my coherent thoughts are all running away from me just as fast as they where previously flowing. In other words something once progressive is now in reverse mode, as though the directional switch was flipped, and I am losing all of my inspiration in the downdraught, my thought scattered like pieces of paper on the wind.

Fortunately, I think I have enough notes written down from an earlier draft of this post so that I can continue on to conclusion (added note: I had to leave off writing and come back to it another day…) but there have been many times when some prized moment of culmination has been lost forever because of not being able to stay in the flow state; and this is why, I suspect, hyperfocus is just so important to people with brains wired somewhat like mine, because it protects the flow state from outside distractions of all kinds, shutting everything else out and locking my brain to the task until the job is done!

So, when this happens, I become my own worse taskmaster and run myself ragged, unable to switch off or to put down the urge to research late into the evenings or even in the middle of the night if something happens to occurs to me when I stir to go to the bathroom (so many nights interrupted by the “need” to get back to my hyperfocus). I push myself harder than any employer could ever legally do and I give myself fewer breaks than any corporate would be allowed to get away with these days…and then, eventually, I snap. Once my spoons are all used up, my vulnerability to health crash increases day by day until the stage when I reach some point of release; either the culmination of the hyperfocus project itself or some unavoidable need to put it all on hold, as has happened to me at the end of last week (since there was nothing left that I could actually progress for a while plus my health took a downturn, leaving me too flat and fatigued to continue for a while so the decision to cease was, in effect, made for me).

Before I saw all of this through the eyes of my neurodiversity, I think I tended to excuse it all in the name of being someone who diligently followed through with their ideas and who just happened to have an active imagination/intellect in need of vigorous daily exercise. I normalised my behaviours, for a lot of years, under the guise of being a perfectly “normal” response to exam or work pressure and as being my version of “what everyone else was doing” to get through it all at the time, though I look back now and notice that very few of my peers ever hyperfocused quite to the extent of me and certainly not in their personal lives where they could choose to have an easier time of it. There were a lot of years when I used to actively feed the hyperfocus urges, deliberately amping up their intensity, because I saw having this trait as my main advantage when it came to doing well at things and pushing ahead (in what were, in hindsight, academic and career domains where I was being invisibly disadvantaged by my unrealised neurodivergence). I was hypercompensating for other shortcomings by being even more determined to achieve perfection and come up with the goods. I have always been extremely self-driven, never without some current fixation sat there on the counter in front of me since a very early age, literally navigating my life via the path of one obsession rolling on into another, those highly preferable states where dopamine is gushing freely, and forever extremely poor at finding my own brakes (that old adage of the Ferrari with the bicycle brakes again). So, really, I see that I have just kept on going like this for years, from one hyperfocus to the next, with a never ceasing degree of intensity, all of my life!

The only way I could ever stop myself was to crash into a wall and I now know that type of crash can look like physical burnout, chronic fatigue, much exacerbated pain that “comes out of nowhere”, anxiety, autonomic dysfunction, bouts of depression, sudden loss of purpose or even feelings of hopelessness that contrast wildly with those other times when I am fully obsessed with my latest fixation. The question has to be: how can I harness the hyperfocus without the physical hangover or burnout? I now appreciate that there has got to be a better way than boom or bust but its a case of trying to achieve that with the full understanding, and respect, of my kind of brain wiring, which can’t even hope to get into the genius zone, in the first place, if I just “take things steadily” like other people do because steady doesn’t even allow me to get my plane off the ground.

I have to have a certain amount of intensity to get into the flow of being the highly creative and inquisitive, connection making, idea flowing person that I am…otherwise I am left in the mundane, clunky, un-lit-up state of my everyday life. However, there clearly have to be measures in place to make sure I don’t overdo it or ignore all my bodily needs (bearing in mind my interoceptive skills are so poor I often don’t realise I need these things) such as a change of sitting position or some movement, food and water, bathroom breaks, sleep, interpersonal connections and the kind of relaxation that can only ever come from a complete change of activity. Without those things, the amount of strain I have traditionally put myself through is becoming too much for my ever ageing physical body, which is now showing increasing signs of wear and tear with each bout of overdoing it. I’ve already mentioned the risk of rolling post exertional malaise (rolling PEM) and the risk of this can dramatically increase when you don’t allow yourself the appropriate time to recover from covid, hence the phenomenon of long covid. I realise, in my own case, that I am as yet not fully over the after-effects of the covid I had over Christmas so I need to be so careful here.

I am starting to realise that, once the challenging bits of my latest hyperfocus have been done to my satisfaction I then need to know when to pull back and give myself permission for the rest and recovery, the mental and physical space that I need, between that and the next thing. To encourage this I can take a slow walk, pick up a more relaxing hobby, indulge in a TV series, free-write in my journal, do anything that switches down the pace for a while. I could also benefit from the regular reminder that I don’t have to do it all now; in fact, some of it would do better if I could only slow down or wait a while before rushing in…I might even come back feeling more inspired, seeing things even more clearly, if I allow the mud to settle for a while (as I have done with the house project over the last few days).

So this has all been an interesting exercise in observing an episode of hyperfocus so closely as it happened, this time seen through the lens of my ever-increasing familiarity with my neurodivergent traits and with a much closer eye than ever on the physical effects hyperfocus can have on me. I’m hoping it will help me to mitigate the worst kinds of dangers whilst still able to cultivate the better outcomes of my intensity, passion, creativity, vision, determination and extraordinary capacity for focus. I can’t rid my life of hyperfocus, nor would I want to as its such an intrinsic part of who I am, also the source of the very best that I can deliver, but I do need to balance my enhanced appreciation of it with increased self-compassion and understanding about all the ways it intersects with my longterm physical health.