Though it’s sometimes called a “superpower,” hyperfocus is a classic challenge for adults with ADHD, and it’s particularly problematic when it’s detrimental to sleep.
I’ve mentioned my ADHD here before, but I’ve been reluctant to share anything particularly specific or personal about it because, well, I’ve kind of felt like it was no one else’s business.
There’s a part of me that always thought sharing more would be beneficial, since there’s so much misinformation out there, and the only way to help people understand is to actually help them understand. Also, though I’m not interested in turning this space into a stand-in for therapy, it’s clear that there’s a potential for personal benefit in processing my own thoughts and struggles in writing.
This all occurred to me when an article critical of Gary Vaynerchuk’s philosophies on work appeared in my Medium feed. Though it wasn’t written about ADHD at all, I read it through that lens. (Because: That’s my lens. Or, rather, that’s one of my lenses.)
I don’t think I’d ever heard of “Gary Vee” before reading the article, and everything I know about him is from the reading/Googling I did after reading it. So my reactions here aren’t so much to him, since I don’t really know anything about him, his worldview, or the advice he gives people about business, work, and success.
The article on Medium, “Gary Vaynerchuk is Trying to Kill You,” is a reaction to a statement from Vaynerchuk, from his book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion:
turn water into wine
Here’s the deal: if you want it badly enough, the money is there, the success is there, and the fulfillment is there. All you have to do is take it. So quit whining, quit crying, quit with the excuses. If you already have a full-time job, you can get a lot done between 7:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. (9:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. if you’ve got kids), so learn to love working during those predawn hours. I promise it won’t be hard if you’re doing what you love more…
The article’s author, Jon Westenberg, argues that the behavior described above is problematic because sleep is so important.
But I read it and thought to myself: Wow. That’s an incredible description of self-destructive ADHD behavior.
To explain what I mean, we need to start by clarifying the common misconception that ADHD is about not being able to pay attention. That’s not at all what it is — and that misconception is perhaps the most problematic way in which the general public misunderstands ADHD, especially in adults.
Rather than not being able to pay attention, adults with ADHD have trouble regulating their attention. (You might say it’s a “maldistribution of attention.”)
ADHD is a disorder of the brain’s executive functioning abilities, among them “organizing, prioritizing and activating for tasks.” That means there’s a problem in the part of the brain that can (among other things) differentiate between tasks and activities related to long-term (delayed gratification) goals and those that lead to immediate stimulation.
And though “stimulation” can mean the kind you might think — like what comes from caffeine, sex, exercise, action movies, getting lots of likes on Facebook — it actually means anything that releases copious amounts dopamine. And a task that keeps that flow of happy hormones flowing for awhile by providing legit intellectual stimulation… well, that’s just the ticket for the ADHD brain.
So: Working on an exciting and interesting new work project does the trick. That’s why adults with ADHD actually have no problem paying attention to tasks that are stimulating to their brains (at least in that moment). In fact, one common characteristic of ADHD is the tendency to go into a state of “hyperfocus,” in which we’re able to dedicate total and complete attention to a task.
It’s a euphoric experience of completely losing yourself in something. For me, it tends to be creative projects. I find myself in a state of recognizable happiness when I immerse myself in the details of graphic design or well-organized CSS, finding a sense of “flow” (see: Csikszentmihalyi) and “one-ness” with the artistic endeavor. (There’s a reason some people say that this aspect of ADHD is a “superpower.”)
But that euphoria is short lived when we finally snap out of hyperfocus to realize we’d totally lost track of time and must deal with the consequences of neglecting all those other tasks that needed to get done.
The problem with having an inability to direct or manage our attention is that we go right to the most “stimulating”/interesting/exciting task, skipping right over the step where we stop and ask whether that’s the right task to be doing at that moment, or whether the time we’re spending on that task is consistent with its importance.
(And even if we don’t skip that step and are able to recognize — cognitively — that there are more important things that need to get done, we have immense trouble bringing ourselves to get started on those more-important-but-less-stimulating things.)
All of that is just background. And though I’d usually be careful not to take so long to get to the point, I think it’s important context for my reaction to that book excerpt.
For an adult with ADHD, Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice is extremely attractive. And it’s also a recipe for disaster.
I say that for a two reasons.
The idea of using the late-night hours to work — when everyone else is asleep and there’s nothing else demanding your attention — is a perfect technique for falling into a state of hyperfocus. For someone capable of focusing their attention with intentionality, I suppose that could be a good thing, since having the time and quiet to focus on otherwise-backburner projects is an attractive opportunity. But if you can’t direct your focus, a quiet and uninterrupted stretch of time means you can easily spend those early morning hours on unimportant tasks.
When I was a (very nerdy) teenager, that meant spending a whole night applying perfect semantic HTML (with intertextual hyperlinking) to a complete database downloaded in plaintext from some sci-fi bulletin board that listed every ship to ever appear or be mentioned in Star Trek, TNG, and DS9 (well… the first season of DS9). Sure — I taught myself HTML in the process and I understood the value of semantic markup before it was hip to talk about. If I’d actually stayed committed and kept learning, it would have been a useful endeavor. But I barely looked at HTML again until after college (and I fell out of love with Star Trek sometime mid-Voyager), and in the meantime, I was a ninth grader who wanted to be a journalist and I was barely passing English. Had I maybe spent just a little of that time doing a small percentage of my homework, it would have been beneficial.
(I’m not saying the quiet nighttime was dangerous because my parents weren’t there to nag me to do my homework. The problem is that the lack of regular activity around me — noise, light, movement, people asking me questions, the sound of someone snacking in the kitchen, the sound of the TV in the other room — meant that it was especially easy to slip into an especially deep state of hyperfocus. Could I slip into it despite all those distractions? Definitely, if the task proved to be so stimulating that I could shut out everything else. But a listing of every obscure spaceship ever uttered in filler dialog by Denise Crosby or Jonathan Frakes would probably have not sucked me in quite so deep during regular waking hours.)
There are some experts who’ve made the claim that ADHD is, at its core, a sleep disorder. I’m not sure if that’s true — it’s not the prevailing mainstream opinion — but it’s based on the notion that ADHD is related, perhaps on a pretty deep level, to sleep dysfunction.
I won’t get into the details, mostly because I’m not an expert and I don’t think I understand all the intricacies. But the simplified version is that sleep is an issue for adults with ADHD. We tend to sleep weird hours, don’t necessarily always get “good” sleep, stay awake later than we should, have trouble waking up in the morning, and when we do wake up we struggle to transition from sleep to true wakefulness. And common ADHD medications can be a double-edged sword in this regard, since stimulants can be helpful in many ways, but just a slight mis-dosage or mis-timing can severely throw off your sleep schedule.
It’s also clear that one particularly effective strategy for managing adult ADHD is to get regular, adequate, restful, restorative sleep.
On the other hand, when we don’t get decent sleep, we tend to have a much harder time managing all the challenges that come with ADHD, even if we’re aided by medication, coaching, therapy, whatever. ADHD mixed with inadequate sleep leads to a downward spiral.
So the notion that it’s a good idea to stay up late, getting a few hours less sleep in order to focus on “work” — which is so attractive to adults with ADHD since we have a deep, physical/chemical attraction to the euphoria of hyperfocus — has the potential to be ruinous because those few hours of sleep are just too valuable.
I don’t blame Vaynerchuk for it. For folks without ADHD, his suggestion to get work done in the “predawn hours” may or may not be good advice. (Though Westenberg is probably right that it’s not.)
Rather, my point is that those of us with ADHD have to be vigilant to resist the draw of attitudes like this one, since this thinking can cause so much damage. For adults with ADHD — at least for this adult with ADHD — that damage means you can find yourself in a deep hole out of which it’s tough to climb.
A lot of people make a lot of assumptions about ADHD, and most people assume that they know what it is (and how it operates) by observing people who have it. But seen through the eyes of someone without it, the behavior of someone with ADHD doesn’t tell you much. That’s because all the important stuff is happening in their brain.
Though it’s on a site that seems to be mostly filled with stupid click-magnet garbage, I liked this article, intended to explain what it’s like to have ADHD to someone who doesn’t understand it. An excerpt:
We rely heavily on routine, and 90% of the time get by on autopilot. You can’t get distracted from a sufficiently ingrained habit, no matter what useless crap is going on inside your head… unless someone goes and actually disrupts your routine. I’ve actually been distracted out of taking my lunch to work, on several occasions, by my wife reminding me to take my lunch to work. What the? Who? Oh, yeah, will do. Where was I? um… briefcase! Got it. Now keys.. okay, see you honey!
[Hat tip.]
Twenty years’ worth of sustained Internet use has left me with a head full of random trivia and a profound inability to concentrate. Every time I sit down in front of my computer to write a post, I end up browsing the IMDb page for the movie Cool Runnings or the career stats for underrated outfielder Ryan Spilborghs. I’m just as distractible when my computer isn’t connected to the Internet: I’ve wasted weeks of my life playing this stupid baseball simulation game that I downloaded years ago and can’t bring myself to delete.
- Justin Peters, “I Write All My Blog Posts Out Longhand, and You Should Too”
Ok, maybe Justin’s problem is “[t]wenty years’ worth of sustained Internet use,” but that kind of internet distraction sounds awful symptomatic of adult ADHD.
I’m not a doctor. I’m just saying…
According to Zentall, an activity that uses a sense other than that required for the primary task — listening to music while reading a social studies textbook — can enhance performance in children with ADHD. Doing two things at once, she found, focuses the brain on the primary task.
Know that it is OK to do two things at once: carry on a conversation and knit, or take a shower and do your best thinking, or jog and plan a business meeting. Often people with ADD need to be doing several things at once in order to get anything done at all.