Don’t be afraid to try lots of off-the-wall things - star-gazing, ice-climbing, training for a triathlon. Hyperfocus is more likely to occur when you are engaged in a task that is challenging, that matters to you, and in which you make progress.
If you hyperfocus regularly, congratulations! I do, when I am writing. With hyperfocus, you can easily lose all sense of time and perspective. A teen who creates vocabulary cards for an upcoming test, for instance, may spend hours decorating them instead of studying. PET scans have shown that the hyperfocusing brain literally “lights up” with activity and pleasure.Īt its worst, hyperfocus becomes a trance-like state in which you do the same pointless act over and over again. When things finally run smoothly, they lose interest and move on.Īt its best, hyperfocus is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” - a state of mind in which you are so immersed in a task that you become (not to sound too far out) one with it. Adults can find that kind of focus in a new job - working intensely for a year, say, to fix major problems in their department. When parents tell me how their daughter breezed through a challenging science fair project only to settle into a spotty classroom performance, I know that she was hyperfocusing. Unfortunately, hyperfocus can’t be reliably sustained or controlled.
A musician may write a symphony in only a few weeks. Someone with an interest in computer programming may happily hunt for a bug in thousands of lines of code, regardless of the fact that he usually can’t sit still. Attention deficit disorder is all about distraction… until it’s not! One of the most surprising aspects of ADHD is hyperfocus - a person’s ability to hone in on a specific task, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else.