076 - Hyperfocus: Superpower or Superbummer?

ADHD and hyperfocus. That thing when your entire being is all about one thing and the rest of the world is tuned out. Good times? Or life destroying? Let's discuss!

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You guys, I almost recorded an entire episode on how to go to the grocery store, but it was just, I think it's too riveting. The twists and the turns, uh, we're not ready for it. So today let's spin the ADHD wheel of symptoms and see what we're talking about. And it is hyper focused. Alright. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of Descending to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Hey everybody. Hey, thanks for having me over to your earbuds today. First off, shout out to Ray. Ray, that was an awesome chat. Uh, really love chatting with you guys. I love getting to know you. Uh, the more conversations I have with people in the ADHD community, the more I realize we all have the exact same skull spaghetti. Different lives, same spaghetti. It's nuts, but it's comforting. It's comforting and it's nuttiness. It's it's pungent nuttiness uh with hints of oak. Also, announcement in the newsletter that I send out, um, and if if you guys aren't getting the ADHD Big Brother newsletter, I mean, what? Why? Click on the link in the show notes. You can stay in touch. We can keep in touch, all things ADHD Big Bro, and there's big stuff coming. Uh, but I reached out about creating a place where we can, you know, support each other and externalize accountability, get stuff moving, and the interest is uh overwhelmingly positive and big. So that's I'm hoping to have that thing ready by March. Uh, if you want to be looped in on that, just join the newsletter and you'll you'll be alerted. It's gonna be a place where we're gonna get our shit together together. That's I cannot wait. So, hyperfocus. Okay, let's discuss this supposed superpower of ours. And I swear I've talked about it before. Um, you can tell how excited I am about it. You know, what is it? So we're talking about the same thing here: hyper focus as I experience it. It's this intense focus that drowns out the world. And every part of my being is about this one thing or this one idea or this one person, or and it's a drive. It's like my mission in life. It's what I'm on the planet to do. That's how profound it is, that's how locked in it is. And the normies might look at it and be like, well, you're just redecorating the living room. And I'm like, no, I that's the task that I'm doing. I'm I am redecorating the living room. That's who I am. That's who I embody. I am that which is redecorating. It is it is all encompassing. And I may or may not redecorate the living room. I may paint half the walls, and then the fire is extinguished, and I could give zero shits about the living room. And now I've got a real problem on my hands. To me, hyperfocus, it's like being in a race, and everybody's got their running shoes on and they're all lined up, and then I get blasted out of a cannon. And that's fun and that's exciting, and people will watch you. Look at him soaring across the sky. But I don't know if you guys have ever been shot out of a cannon. Spoiler alert, gravity catches up with you at some point and you crash down. You have no control over your direction or your body. You fly and then you it is this frustrating but awesome, but annoying, but invigorating, but problematic, but inspiring, but spectacular, but also random gift. Question mark, is it a gift? I don't know. But if we could just harness it as a superpower, we would be amazing. My analogy to that is like imagine how Superman would feel about this gift. Like if he had kryptonite embedded in his skull. And so here he is, most of the time, he's just kind of slogging through life. And then every once in a while the kryptonite it fades away, and now boom, he can soar through the sky. He's 30,000 feet above the ground, he's flying, he's superman, and then the kryptonite acts up again and he plummets 30,000 feet, smashing into buildings, landing on a Prius and just totaling it. And then out of Starbucks comes Stephanie with her with her mocha, upside down Macchiato, and and her Prius is ruined. Superman with his superpower ruined her Prius. How do you think Superman would feel about his gift? I like how sinister my voice went there. How do you think you'd feel about his gift now, huh? Not so gifty, is it? That was that got really sinister with that one. You know, but then there's times when our hyperfocus, it's it's the result is beautiful. When we create something phenomenal, some artwork, or like we build something or we invent something, you know, there it's one of the most awe-inspiring gifts out there, and the feeling that we get to experience of it, it is pretty incredible. I complain about hyperfocus plenty because it is a big pain in the ass for me. Even if it's just something like redecorating a living room, the fire inside of us, that human experience, it's a big deal and not everybody gets to experience it at that level. So for that, it's pretty wonderful. But you know how we crave sometimes, like, God, how cool would it be just to be able to have my shit together and experience what a normie can experience? Like, I have my ducks in a row and I'm comfortable in the responsibilities of life. Wow. And I think that's why, like, the women in my life that I've been attracted to the most have been like they've been fun and funny, but they've been very practical and logical. And I'm so enamored by that. Like, oh my gosh, you you have a system in place for paying your bills on time? Oh my god, that's so hot. Wow. Or wait, what is this? You knock out chores Saturday morning so you have the day to unwind and do something fun without any impending like like chores. Oh my god, I'm so so so hot in here. Wow. Whew, that's steamy. I see that as a gift. Wow. To be able to do that, I'll take that, please. For me to do that, I'd have to pre-plan the day before, create work sessions, build in breaks, set some gosh darn timers. I can't just do chores. It's a fucking process every time. Every single time. I'm not trying to rally anybody against hyperfocus. I mean, there's aspects of it that are great, there's aspects of it that suck, you know? Some people love it, some people hate it, some people think it's a superpower, some people don't. Well, you know, it's whatever. I've just been screwed over too many times by it. Like, it's not like we can just shut it off or avoid it. You can't just stop flying through the air when you've been shot out of a cannon. My personal view, like my personal take, is that anything that's caused such damage in my life, I shall not call that a superpower. I shall call that a super bummer. Except when I'm experiencing it. Then when I'm experiencing it, it's glorious, it's everything. I can I'm intensely focused and connected to a thing. It's a love hate. It's also not something that we can will into existence. I mean, it's not like I can say, I'm doing my taxes. Hyperfocus activate. If there was an on-off switch and I could decide when and where and what I hyperfocus on, okay, show's over. This is now like uh hyperfocus, big brother, and that's that's all we're talking about. That would be phenomenal. But that's not how it goes. How it goes is that I'll meet somebody that paints board game miniatures, and then I think, yeah, no, that's who I am now. I'm a guy that buys board games and paints miniatures, and I'll spend hundreds of dollars on board games that I would rarely play, and I would get paint sets and have all these miniatures that I would paint, and that is a real thing that happened in my life. And then to this date, I mean, if I add up all the miniatures that I've painted, it's zero. I've painted zero of them. If I had an off switch for that one, I would have used it. Or oh my god, think of the careers that we would have started in because we were in a hyperfocused stupor. We're like, this isn't this isn't this one didn't happen, but it's like if if you all of a sudden want to become a shipwright, and people are like, wait, what? So you're gonna you're gonna fix ships? What? You saw a documentary one time on ship building and ship fixing, and now you found your calling in life. And so you bought all the books, you you didn't even consider the library, you had to buy the books, and now you're buying shipwright tools, and you don't even have a ship to fix. That's hyperfocus. So we should talk about this more, shall we? Maybe some I don't know about a fix, because I don't think we can really fix it. But what we can do is work with it and find solutions to make its negative impact less. I mean, that that would be a way to go. I've had some success with dealing with my own hyperfocus. What I've been doing and that's worked a bit is if I can get some clarity and some self-awareness when I'm hyperfocusing, I'll bind it to a time limit. Burnout, that's my enemy. I've traveled the path of hyperfocus too many times, and then cleaning up that physical and emotional aftermath, it's just too much shame. It's too much guilt. Like, oh God, here we go again. That's not fun. But if I get juiced up about something and then that's my entire life, I'll throw a 45-minute timer on it. When the timer goes off, I take a break, my brain will still be going strong for that thing, but I'll do something else while I'm thinking about it, right? This helps me to eliminate that shame, that shitty feeling for letting the day go to hell because I was hyper-focused. You know that feeling at the end of the day when you realize, oh crap, these things that I was gonna do? That's that Owskana syndrome that we talked about a few weeks back of like, oh, I was gonna have lunch with my friends.

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Crap.

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Or oh, I was gonna do laundry today. Damn it. The self-awareness is the critical component here. We have to have a moment of clarity somewhere in there. It's kind of a delicate balance that we're looking for, like one where we embrace uh who we are and accept that our brain does this stuff, and then at the same time, we keep ourselves on a leash to maintain and manage our lives appropriately. It's all in service of managing our lives. And that's not always possible when we don't have a strategy or any tools in place to manage that life. Like when I bind my hyperfocus to time chunks, it even helps me prolong my juice for it. If I go until burnout, like you know when you're so focused and maybe you forgot to eat or drink water, we're staring at a screen all day, it ends up being depressing. Does that happen to you guys? And we get back into reality, we're exhausted, we feel maybe nauseous because we were super hungry, just completely out of balance. The time chunks, they help me with that. If I didn't have the time chunks, for me, the pattern goes like this I'm living my life, I'm managing ADHD as best I can. Then hyperfocus hits. Whoops! Maybe it's a project, maybe it's a relationship, and then I forget all other aspects of my life, responsibilities mound up, and then depending on if it's a day or multiple days, people get confused, maybe frustrated if there's uh expectations on there, what's going on here? And then I hit burnout, right? Shame, guilt, blah, blah, blah. And then I figure out how to, how can I become a different person? Like it's a reactionary 180-degree turn. I'm never gonna do this again. And then I get depressed because it's uh it's like trying to become somebody that I'm not. And then I think, oh, I'm gonna have to give up feeling connected to life in this special way. So that sucks. And then that pattern, uh, when I come back around, it repeats itself like a nice shampoo. You just rinse and repeat, and you're like, oh, living life again. And oh my god, I just figured out how to make art out of Tupperware, so maybe I'll open up an Etsy shop and that's my new life. It's different this time, I swear. Mm-hmm. Yeah, not so much. The big solution here is to come up with solutions in between or before the hyperfocus hits. Ask yourself questions when you're not in it. What can you do to be cool with yourself and to alleviate the negative aftermath of this hyperfocus sesh, you know, or this episode, or it's it should be a condition. Like I'm suffering from a hyperfocus episode. Oh my god. For example, do you spend recklessly? What can you put into place to stop you? And that's it's not about, well, just remember not to spend money. That's ineffective advice. In the moment of hyperfocus, you're going to be convinced that you need to spend money. So just don't spend money isn't it's irrelevant. It's not real advice. So, what strategy could you put into place here? How could you hinder your ability to spend money in that state? I always think it's funner to come up with these on our own because they're all going to be unique to us, unique to our situation in our lives. You could read a blog post and say, here's 10 ways to not spend money, and you'd be like, okay, but which one do I pick? I don't know which one to uh choices. Given the parameters of your life and your situation, what would work for you? And now you can explore those options. Is it about making a mess? Like when you hyperfocus, do you destroy the garage with all your tools, your lumber? There's a mess and half finished pieces of furniture. What part of that leaves you unhappy? Is it about the unfinished furniture? Is it about the mess that you made? What could you do to alleviate that? What ADHD-specific strategies could you implement to finish the thing that you start? Or the work session you could add for cleanup. Coming up with these strategies can help the next time that we find ourselves like hyper-focused. For me, the timers, that was my huge workaround, and it has done wonders for my self-worth. You guys know I preach timers. It's like it's a god to me, but that's been critical for me. I was tired of hyperfocusing and then having nothing to show for the day because I was all swept up in it. And I have depression, so I'm always riding on the edge of a depressive episode, which sucks. So the timers help me to find a way to sprinkle daily life into my hyperfocus when that's happening, and then I still have a sense of accomplishment in my day, and that helps me. What could it be for you? And if you need help with any of this stuff, you guys, feel free to reach out. I'm here to support you guys. I can't say that enough. I'm here for you. Reach out anytime. And now let me ask you this: can you guys help me do a thing? This is me asking you for a favor now. My kids and I, we get really into the stats on this on this podcast stuff. So, BuzzSprout, that's the platform that I pay to use to upload the podcast. And so I upload a podcast every week and then it spits them out to all the, you know, the directories like Spotify and iTunes and all that stuff. And the statistic that they use to tell how popular a podcast is is how many times a new episode has been downloaded in the first seven days. And we are like 40 downloads away from being in the top 10% of their podcasts. And they have over 120,000 podcasts. It's bizarre, it's crazy. It grows a little bit each time. So my favorite is can you guys please help share this episode on your social media platform or with, I mean, ideally, people that you think that the podcast would help? Or if you're somebody that writes or posts articles, could you do that? Um, I don't know. If there's any way that you can think to share the episode for this week to get us over that hump so that me and my kids can freak out and um, or or like if you if I think if you subscribe to the to the podcast, it automatically will download, so that'll count. Um, anything. I don't know. Whatever you guys can think of, if that's a thing for you, uh, if you want to consider that, we would appreciate it and we would celebrate the hell out of it. And we thank you very much. Anyway, that's it. Uh, I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.