I NEED a perfectly proportioned hyperfocus right now to bridge the time before we move into our new house as the waiting is driving me nuts…but I also realise I can’t go on with the hyperfocus I was starting to get sucked into yesterday (until I got interrupted) as its just too big and juicy and would absorb me for days. I could feel this topic grabbing me by the toes, dragging me in!

Thankfully, that timely interruption pulled me back out of it before I had tumbled right in, meaning I lost my momentum. This morning, I’m almost burning with the urge to pick up where I left off…but the pause has gained me a moment of rare insight that’s really important for me to have at this juncture, being that its just not the right time for me to get sucked down one of my rabbit holes. We’re moving house pretty soon and I can’t risk my brain being so divided or heavily distracted by some inner conundrum machinating in my thoughts when I need to be fully in the moment and staying present with the experience of something that is going to take a lot of executive function demands and which, frankly, I’ve wanted to happen for a very long time so I should stay with it as much as is possible. For once in my life, I am feeling the need to apply my brakes!

In other words, I’m learning that, when you have an autistic brain like mine, you really have to learn to pick your hyperfocus, a lot like you have to pick your battles!

If I allowed myself to just slide into the area of hyperfocus that is calling me, I would get caught right up in it losing all track of time, regardless of outside events, and could still very-well be focused on it when moving, which isn’t what I want or need at all. This has happened to me countless times before, as in, I’ve inconveniently become fixated on some area of hyperfocus right over the top of some special event, a holiday, an important moment in my child’s life, family Christmas, you name it… and then found it incredibly hard to get out of my head, to pay attention to details, deal with executive function tasks or be present with all the other people involved in my life. My attention, being so divided, becomes very scattered and preoccupied, I lose grip on reality and give great importance to this “thing” which is generally pretty abstract and non-urgent compared to what is really, physically, happening right in front of me.

This one trait has, I now realise, lost me a lot of the key moments, a great deal of the colour and richness, of actual life as it has played out over the years. With the benefit of hindsight, I almost wish I could go back and fill in some of those details I missed when I got so caught up in my own head I couldn’t seem to come out of my burrow for quite a long time, try as I might…but at the time I really didn’t know how much this was affecting me because I assumed this was just what everyone else did and so I allowed myself to get sucked in without any checks at all.

This was, of course, largely back in the days before I realised my autism, a state of affairs which resulted in some of its deficits running amok but, these days, I work on the premise that to be aware is to be forearmed and so I try my very best to improve and refine my autistic experience of life, a little more every day. Here’s an opportunity to do so again, faced with noticing that I am back in the danger zone of risking becoming hyper focused on the first thing that comes along, pretty much anything that entices me, just to get me through the boredom of waiting out this last phase before the excitement of moving house really happens. Nature abhors a vacuum and my AuDHD brain all the more so, which means its an uphill battle to try and stay present, or, to tide myself over with some other, more minor, less absorbing yet still somewhat hyperfocused task that might keep my brain occupied in just the right amount until things really start happening. This need to feel perpetually occupied has dictated the whole of my life!

What I need is a perfectly formed micro-hyperfocus designed to last just a handful of days…without dragging me too deeply in to its network of tunnels and caves.

The obvious one would be to revert back to the area hyperfocus I wrote about just the other day, being the “project” of orchestrating absolutely anything and everything I can to do with our move. However, I really can’t get back into that again, it would drive me nuts because there’s nowhere else I can really go with  any of it at the moment…since I need to get into the house before making any other decisions to do with interior design. All this project does is fuel my frustration that this hasn’t happened yet!

There’s very little else I can usefully get into during this limbo time; however, if I don’t supervise the hyperfocus I get into, at least a bit, I risk getting caught up in something negative like focusing on my physical pain, which has flared up these last few days, which will then send me into a spiral of health related issues at exactly the wrong time. I’ve really come to appreciate how much my ability to hyperfocus is a main source of pain relief for me, an organic one at that (so valued since I don’t get on with taking meds), because it helps me to manage my day to day symptoms far better since I seldom dwell on them…unless pain itself (similar to any of those other kinds of “bad news” so readily available out there) becomes the area of hyperfocus, in which case I would be a lost cause so I seldom let it happen.

Normally, I let my areas of hyperfocus occur quite organically, the result of having a hyper connective brain which throws up topics of interest on a regular and completely ad hoc basis. The length of time for which I then get sucked into said topic depends on how convoluted or enticing it is…but it could easily last for several days, even weeks or months until, suddenly, it’s replaced by something else.

This is a main reason why I can’t work for anyone in a conventional job as, when I did, it drove me mad having other people dictate what I was supposed to hyperfocus on for several hours a day; there simply wasn’t enough space left in my brain for my own interests to organically unfold and that drove me to the very brink.

Sometimes an intense area of hyperfocus that occurs right before a big event is perfectly appropriate, for instance it can be useful to hyperfocus on travel arrangements, to make sure you have everything covered and are prepared…the difficulty being when you continue to hyperfocus after the task has reached its logical conclusion (in other words, knowing when, or how, to put the brakes on a hyperfocus, once it has started gaining momentum, can be another big challenge). Its not that the area of hyperfocus is all that big but that you start to play it on repeat, obsessing and going over old ground. This can be another useful area for working on developing the ability to self-intervene: teaching yourself to more carefully pick, not only what you hyperfocus on but, how much time you are prepared to give to it, perhaps setting time limits and other boundaries in advance of diving in, before it can take you over.  For instance, saying to yourself: I’m going to spend the next hour giving my all to this thing but then I’m going to have made my informed decisions by then and will move on with my day. These days (although it took me quite a few years to get here) I am getting somewhat better at calling time on the kind of hyperfocus that doesn’t benefit me when I get stuck in a loop of over-checking things or doubting any information that I have managed to gather. I’m more prepared to reach a reasonable conclusion sooner without having to double or quadruple check that there’s nothing I have missed.

Related to this, if I’m anxious or running out of spoons I can very quickly get into a tail spin of negative hyperfocus so I need to be well aware of that and not choose to tackle such things when I am feeling under-par.

There’s another plus-point of cutting short or interrupting some of my organically arising areas of hyperfocus. By curating them more, I notice that I don’t get as mentally worn-out as I used to do. By picking and choosing lighter topics of engagement, I feel like I’ve taken a sort of brain holiday without actually becoming bored…finding a happier medium of engagement that doesn’t feel so much like it sweeps me along (or off my feet) as used to happen. Sometimes, by interrupting a particular hyperfocus’s flow, I get to realise that the hyperfocus in question no longer feels so compelling, relevant or important to me after all, so I can just let it blow away on the same wind that brought it to me, before it takes me over.

In recap, today I have to somehow manage what I hyperfocus on in order to keep myself from the brink of tumbling any further into yesterday’s topic of fixation which, engaging though it was, would have been a case of biting off more than I can easily chew right now, right before the move. This has been a reminder that, whilst hyperfocus can be highly engaging, even useful and often something those of us prone to it feel utterly compelled to do, it’s not always convenient or appropriate.

To get past the risk zone, I have to reassure myself that this thing I want to engage with won’t go anywhere if it’s important (I sometimes push on with a hyperfocus out of fear of losing a thread of insight that has just occurred to me). Pausing just long enough to check “is this a good time” for whatever I am about to get into is a useful safeguard to bring into my morning routines because I can’t always rely on a timely interruption forcing me to take a moment before I get sucked in. These points may sound really obvious to someone who is not autistic but, believe me, they are far from standard procedure to me and I am having to learn to self-intervene. Learning this has been an uphill battle all my life but it does feel like I’m finally making some headway, now that I better understand the workings of my own brain. Writing this short post has been a useful deflection from the other one I was starting to carve out yesterday (which would have been far more convoluted) and now I’m about to pursue some highly repetitive yet suitably distracting tasks to get me though the rest of my morning…and no doubt tomorrow will be more of the same, let’s call it, lighthearted distraction (and, thankfully I have a concert to distract me later). It’s a case of do what I must to avoid my brain going rogue right before such an important time, when I will require the best focus I can muster on things that are happening in real time, not so much in my head.

This feels like an important and timely evolution for me: I really deserve to make for myself a clear space in my preoccupations so I can enjoy and savour the life changes that I’ve been wanting to happen for just so very long. In order to stay open and fresh in my perception of so much newness, and to avoid feeling overwhelmed by so much change, I really need to avoid dragging so much mental preoccupation with me and if that takes keeping myself from the brink of hyperfocusing upon anything but the unfolding of life itself, that’s what I intend to do.