Let’s talk about attention.
Because honestly, the name ADHD has always felt a little bit misleading to me.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Because if I have an attention deficit, someone needs to explain to me why I have spent six hours researching something I absolutely did not need to know about while simultaneously ignoring the email I needed to send by this morning.
And I don’t mean a little bit of researching.
I mean gone.
The rest of the world disappears.
I have forgotten to eat. I’ve forgotten to drink. I’ve ignored messages, calls, and people at the door. I’ve suddenly realised I desperately need a wee and somehow decided that information can wait because whatever I am currently doing is apparently far more important.
Then I look at the clock and discover that somehow three hours have passed.
What do you mean attention deficit?
It feels like I have far too much attention in one very specific direction and absolutely no ability to move it somewhere else.
This is where hyperfixation comes in.
Hyperfixation isn’t an official diagnostic term for ADHD, but it is a term commonly used to describe those periods of incredibly intense, prolonged attention where you become completely absorbed in something. Research has started to look more closely at hyperfocus and ADHD, including the relationship between ADHD symptoms, executive functioning and highly rewarding activities.
And if you’ve experienced it, you probably don’t need a scientific paper to explain what it feels like.
You know.
You find something interesting and suddenly your brain is in it.
A hobby. A television show. A book. A project. A new business idea. A completely unnecessary internet rabbit hole that started with one innocent question and somehow ended three hours later with you knowing everything there is to know about the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies.
And the strange thing is that during those moments, focusing isn’t something that requires effort.
Everything else, be it important or not, becomes background noise- but often at a very inconvenient time for life that is still happening.
And then there is the other side of it.
Hypofixation.
This is much less talked about, but it is essentially that other experience of attention where you just cannot seem to engage with something.
You know you HAVE to do it. You may even genuinely care about doing it. You might even really, really want to do it. But your brain just isn’t connecting with it.
It’s just sat there on your to do-list. Okay, here I go to be productive …
Nothing.
I should put away that laundry…
Nothing.
I really need to cancel that subscription before they charge me for another month.
Absolutely fucking nothing.
And this is where I think the language of ADHD being an “attention deficit” feels inherently wrong. Because I don’t necessarily have a lack of attention. I have an attention regulation problem.
ADHD research identifies difficulties across a number of executive functions, including attention, working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility. These difficulties can affect adults across work, relationships and everyday functioning.
And I think that distinction matters. Because there is a huge difference between:
“I don’t have enough attention.”
and
“I can’t reliably control where my attention goes.”
One sounds like an absence, or a complete oversight of my capabilities.
The other sounds much more like what’s actually going on.
Sometimes my attention is everywhere.
Sometimes it is nowhere.
Sometimes it has attached itself to one particular thing with the strength of Gorilla glue.
And sometimes I am staring directly at the thing I need to do while my brain appears to have quietly left the building.
Then someone says:
“But you can focus when you want to.”
Yes.
Exactly.
That’s the problem.
I can focus.
Sometimes I can focus too much,
But being able to focus intensely on something that has captured my attention, or that im actually interested in doesn’t mean I can summon that same level of focus whenever I choose especially when it comes to mundane and often uninspiring tasks.
This is part of why ADHD can look so confusing from the outside.
Because you can have someone who spends an entire Saturday completely absorbed in a project created something amazing from nothing in what feels like a blink of an eye but then can’t also can’t tackle the pile of dishes in think sink or that stack of unopened letters.
Someone who can work for six hours the night before a deadline but couldn’t even pretend to start the same piece of work three weeks earlier.
Someone who can remember an astonishing amount of information about something random that they seem to be almost an expert on but also can’t remember where they put that glass of water that they were JUST HOLDING.
It can look inconsistent. OR like laziness. OR like a lack of motivation. Or a lack of care.
And that last one can be particularly painful because I CARE SO DEEPLY.
Because I can care enormously, understand it’s importance, value it completely and still struggle to engage with it.
So there is a clear difference between me wanting to do something and being able to summon the focus or attention required to do it.
There is a growing body of research looking at the role of reward and motivation in ADHD, alongside executive functioning. The picture is complicated and it isn’t as simple as the internet’s favourite explanation that ADHD is just “low dopamine”. Our brains are considerably more complicated than that.
But we do know that ADHD involves differences in the way attention and executive processes are regulated.
If something is interesting, novel, urgent, emotionally stimulating or rewarding, my brain may suddenly have absolutely no problem paying attention.
If something is boring, repetitive, distant, overwhelming or doesn’t feel immediately rewarding?
Well…Good luck, everyone!
And this can affect pretty much every bloody area of adult life.
Jobs. Housework. Relationships. Money. Sleep. Appointments. Eating. Personal hygiene. Those seventeen tabs currently open on your browser.
The problem is that we tend to judge ourselves based on what we know we’re capable of.
“But I’ve done it before.”
“I know I can do this.”
“Why can’t I just do it again?”
And that can create a really horrible relationship with ourselves because we start using our moments of hyperfocus as evidence that we should always be capable of functioning at that level.
But six hours of intense focus isn’t evidence that you could have done six hours of boring administration instead.
Being able to complete something under extreme urgency doesn’t mean you were capable of starting it calmly three weeks earlier.
And being able to focus on something you love doesn’t mean you should be able to force yourself to focus on something your brain currently has absolutely no interest in.
I think this is why I prefer to think about ADHD as being less about a simple deficit of attention and more about regulating the balance of my attention across the landscape of my life.
FOR THE SAKE OF CLARITY: This is my interpretation, not a replacement for the clinical definition of ADHD.
But it makes more sense to me. Because I know don’t have no attention. Honestly, I have attention coming out of my ears. Sometimes I just can’t get the stupid thing to go where I need it to.And sometimes it goes somewhere else entirely.
Like to the unanswered questions of why those monarch butterflies why do they travel 3,000 miles.
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Object Permanence and ADHD: When Out of Sight Really Can Mean Out of Mind
I like to think of this one as Schrödinger’s ADHD Cat.
The cat exists.
I know the cat exists.
I love that kitty.
But if I cannot currently see the cat, there is a small possibility that my brain has quietly moved it into the folder marked not currently relevant to my universe and thus I do not consider it, at all.
Now, before anyone gets worried, this isn’t about adults with ADHD somehow not understanding that objects continue to exist when they aren’t visible. We absolutely understand object permanence.
All humans develop very early in life. During infancy, children gradually begin to understand that an object doesn’t stop existing simply because it has disappeared from view. This was famously explored within Piaget’s work on cognitive development and the sensorimotor stage.
It’s why peekaboo works.
The person disappears behind their hands and the baby is basically:
WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GO?
Then you appear again.
OH. THERE YOU ARE.
Incredible stuff. Hilarious. 10/10
Eventually, we develop an internal understanding that the world continues to exist even when we can’t currently see it.
So when adults with ADHD talk about having poor “object permanence”, we’re not talking about losing this developmental ability. We’re talking about something slightly different.
It’s more about what happens when something is no longer visible or actively held in our attention and often our field of view.
ADHD is associated with differences in executive functioning and working memory, and these can affect how information is maintained, manipulated and brought back into our awareness. As we know by this point, assuming you’ve read my other blogs the research into adults with ADHD has found difficulties across areas including working memory, inhibition, attention and processing speed. And sometimes that means something can exist perfectly well in the physical world while becoming completely absent from my mental landscape.
Which brings us to prime example of the fridge.
The spinach has disappeared
I buy spinach. I have plans for this spinach. There will be salads. There will be healthy choices. There will be a brief period where I genuinely believe I have become one of those people who has their shit together, meal preps, and ENJOYS greens.
I put the spinach in the fridge drawer because duh that’s where spinach lives in the salad crisper drawer.
And then I close the door, and my brain goes… delete.
Not because I don’t know it exists. Not because I don’t like spinach.
It has simply disappeared from my immediate awareness.
Two weeks later I open the drawer, because my shelf of drinks and snacks is running desperately in love and discover that my well intentioned spinach has undergone a metamorphosis is now a soup.
This same kind of thing can happen with leftovers. Laundry. Bills. Paperwork. Medication.
OR
The thing you put somewhere safe.
The thing you put somewhere so safe that you will absolutely never find it again.
But wait, there’s more! People can disappear too…
This is where it gets a bit more complicated.
Because sometimes the thing that falls out of our awareness isn’t an object.
It’s a person… oh no, now that feels personal.
You can love someone deeply and still forget to talk to them.
You can genuinely care about someone and love them and want the best in the world for them and value them but then also and still forget their birthday because it wasn’t on the calendar.
And then good ol’ Facebook helpfully informs you the day after – going remember when!
Thank you Zucherburg, very useful.
And this can feel awful.
Because we don’t tend to interpret forgetfulness neutrally.
We often see it as like a moral failing.
“If I really cared, I would remember.” “If they mattered to me, I’d have messaged.” “What kind of friend forgets this?”
And suddenly we’re not dealing with a forgotten message anymore. We’re dealing with shame. We’re dealing with what that forgotten message supposedly says about the kind of person I am.
But forgetting someone isn’t the same as not caring about them.
Someone not being physically present doesn’t make them less important.
It may simply mean they aren’t currently being cued by the environment around you, while your attention is occupied by approximately 47 other things.
And for someone already experiencing difficulties with working memory and executive functioning, bringing that person or task back into active awareness may not happen as naturally or consistently as we’d expect.
And then comes the avoidance spiral
FROM THE TOP: I forget to reply. A day passes. Then two.
Now it’s a week later and I have a deep feeling because I know I haven’t replied as that notification comes to my awareness when i opened my messages to message that guy about that thing I was googling, what’s his face.
Oh boy, now I’m embarrassed.
So I avoid replying more intentionally because I feel guilty about not replying.
Another few days pass.
Now this unread and unreplied to message has become an emotional hostage situation and the only way I can face replying is by being upfront and honest about how I am the absolute worst friend in the world and again explaining how much I care and want to remain being your friend please dear god do not hate me.
And this can happen repeatedly.
Friendships.
Family.
Romantic relationships.
Work.
Meetings.
All of these tiny moments of forgetting can begin to accumulate.
And when they do, it can become incredibly easy to build a story about yourself around them.
I’m unreliable.
I’m careless.
I’m selfish.
I’m a bad friend.
I’m not capable of managing adult life.
I’m just not trying hard enough.
And here I am again in a shame spiral…
Hard to remember in those moment that my difficult with working memory isn’t a character flaw. And forgetting something isn’t evidence that it wasn’t important or that I am so self-centered that I don’t care or consider anyone else.
That’s an important distinction.
Because when something repeatedly happens, we can very easily stop seeing the behaviour and start seeing ourselves as the problem.
It isn’t just other people either
This can mess with your relationship with yourself.
You can forget what you were doing.
Lose things constantly.
Buy something you already own because you can’t find the original.
Forget food until it becomes biologically questionable.
Start a task and then completely lose track of what you were doing.
Walk into a room and have absolutely no idea why you’re there.
And eventually you might start thinking:
What is actually wrong with me?
Nothing about these experiences suggests you’re stupid.
They don’t mean you’re incapable.
And they certainly don’t mean you don’t care about others, cause trust me you do – often to your own determinant.
ADHD affects much more than whether or not someone can “pay attention”. Research into adult ADHD demonstrates differences across several cognitive processes, including working memory and executive functioning, which can have very real consequences for everyday life.
And this is where I think the language we use matters.
Because “object permanence” isn’t really the problem.
I know the object exists. I know my friend exists. I know there is food in the fridge.
The problem is that when something isn’t immediately visible or actively occupying my attention, it can become much harder to access that information at the moment I actually need it.
It’s there.
I just can’t currently find it in the enormous filing cabinet that is my brain.
And apparently someone has put the filing cabinet somewhere safe too.
So yes, visibility can matter.
Not because adults with ADHD need to be treated like children who haven’t learned that things still exist.
But because sometimes our environment can provide the external cues that our brains aren’t consistently providing internally.
And this is one of the reasons an ADHD friendly home might not look particularly neurotypical.
Maybe the thing you use every day needs to be visible.
Maybe the basket of things you constantly forget needs to sit somewhere completely ridiculous because that’s where you’ll actually see it.
Maybe your kitchen doesn’t look like something from Pinterest because having everything hidden behind beautiful cupboard doors means you promptly forget it exists.
Maybe you need three mugs of pens because apparently one mug wasn’t enough.
Fine.
Honestly, I have bigger things to worry about!
Like at this moment where the hell have I put my phone?
Which, incidentally, is currently in my hand.