How I Am Handling My Hyperfocus
Is it a superpower? Really?
I recently had a walk with my friend Bryan and we were talking about the various iterations of the Superman movie. We both agree that the Christopher Reeve version in 1978 has been the best, but Bryan and I disagreed about Man of Steel, the one starring Henry Cavill. I loved it. He hated it.
The reason he didn’t like it is because Superman is supposed to be all about protecting lives. And Man of Steel was so awesome in it’s action sequences, that there is no way, according to Bryan, that people weren’t killed from Zod and Superman getting tossed around the towns.
I never thought about that.
Plenty of skyscrapers were decimated from Superman getting thrown or from Superman throwing Zod. Just because there was no visual image of a person being a destroyed bystander, it’s hard to believe nobody was sitting at a desk in those buildings, or no janitors were wrapping up their day.
Superman should have taken the fight “outside”….which means open field somewhere.
Is this gonna get anywhere near ADHD, you ask? What’s the point?
Understood. This is how I describe my hyperfocus with ADHD. People call it a superpower, so I would love to relate it to the superpoweriest of them all: Superman.
To me, hyperfocus is totally a superpower. It allows me to focus intensely on something of great interest. So much so that it’s almost spiritual in how “at one” I become with the activity. I am the activity. Time doesn’t exist. Only a pure drive moving me forward. The activity and I are as one.
Pretty magical, until you zoom out and see that I’m intensely organizing a sock drawer. And didn’t I have A, B, C to get done today?
ADHD, to me (personal opinion based on my own experience with ADHD/Depression), is like being Superman who wears kryptonite around his neck all the time. Normally I’m scattered, I’m debilitated, I need all kinds of assistance that I’ve either mastered or I’m working to master through skills and community to move my needle forward, and then every so often the kryptonite is removed and I take flight.
What isn’t helpful is that I don’t control when that kryptonite gets removed. I don’t get to pick what I hyperfocus on.
And I also can’t control how long it lasts. Probably why many of us feel like we have to lean into it when it happens because we have no idea if/when it will ever come back.
In the case of Man of Steel, could we also consider that being in hyperfocus, with all it’s superpowery-ness might actually be causing harm?…in the form of neglecting others, in the form of letting people down, etc.
How I handle hyperfocus now
I don’t want to give up the pure joy of turning over to hyperfocus, so I have adopted a rule that I put on it when it happens. Here it is, super simple:
I put a time lasso around hyperfocus. I don’t want collateral damage from losing time, so when I’m embarking on an activity that I know will make me blind to the time, I set timers. Many people love that time timer thing, because you can see the passage of time. I’m not that person. I want to lose myself in the activity. I want to embrace the fact that time doesn’t exist. I want to comfortably lose myself in the activity. In order to do that, I set phone timer - for an hour - and I put the phone out of sight.
This works for me because I now have permission to forget time. At some point I will get the metaphorical tap on the shoulder from the timer, saying “Excuse me, you asked me to tell you when an hour has gone by….it’s been an hour.”
Now I get to choose what to do. Now I get to check in with life. Any upcoming appointments? Do my kids have to get picked up? Do I have other work to attend to? No? Ok, let’s get back to it then, and I set another timer.
This prevents losing an entire day to an activity. It allows me to have the fun of hyperfocus without the disastrous consequences, or the guilt/shame of pissing away a day. It puts me back in control of my time.
But what if I get the hyperfocus at an inopportune time and what if I won’t ever get it back? Shouldn’t I strike while the irons hot?
Great question. Case by case? The only time that I allow myself to turn over to a hyperfocus is when it works in my schedule and I can allot time to it…or when it takes me by surprise and I catch myself mid hyperfocus because I had something else to do and another alarm went off, thereby acting like my hyperfocus alarm and allowing me to come up for air.
How do you handle your hyperfocus? Do you have a system or method that works? Which version of Superman do you like the most, and why?
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