Hyperfocus: the other side of ADHD that gets talked about less

“How can you have ADHD if you spent eight hours straight on that spreadsheet yesterday?”

The question came from his sister, without malice, half out of curiosity. And the person it was meant for didn’t know what to say. He really had sat there for eight hours. He hadn’t eaten, hadn’t got up, hadn’t heard his phone. When he looked up, it was dark outside and dinner had gone cold in the kitchen. Yet the same person has not managed, for three weeks now, to open an email from his insurance company that sits in his inbox and weighs on him a little more every day.

Both are the same attention. The first has a name that has caught on among people with ADHD and among therapists: hyperfocus. It is a state of such deep absorption in one thing that everything else — time, hunger, the people around you — disappears. And hyperfocus is the side of ADHD that is talked about least, because it seems not to belong there at all.

The part of ADHD that isn’t in the criteria

If you read the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, you won’t find hyperfocus there. The criteria talk about difficulty sustaining attention, being distracted by external stimuli, not finishing tasks. They say nothing about the opposite — that attention sometimes gets stuck and can’t be peeled away. This is why many people who know hyperfocus from experience believe for a long time that ADHD can’t apply to them.

ADHD is not a rare peculiarity. A review of population studies published by Victoria Simon and colleagues in 2009 estimated that around 2.5% of adults have it. For something so widespread, it is surprising how little research deals with hyperfocus. In a 2021 review, the researchers Brandon Ashinoff and Ahmad Abu-Akel called it “the forgotten frontier of attention”: everyone uses the term, yet there is hardly any precise definition.

We do know a few things. In 2019, Kathleen Hupfeld, Tessa Abagis and Priti Shah used a questionnaire to explore how often adults experience hyperfocus in different areas of life. People with more ADHD symptoms reported more frequent hyperfocus — at school and work, in hobbies and in front of screens. Turkish researchers led by Senem Özel-Kızıl had described something similar a few years earlier. Hyperfocus, then, is not an exception that disproves ADHD. It is one of its sides.

Attention that isn’t lacking, but unregulated

The name of the condition is somewhat misleading here. “Attention deficit” sounds as if there is too little attention — as if the container were half empty. Many people with ADHD describe something else: there is enough attention, but it has no handle. Like a spotlight that shines brightly, except you can’t aim it yourself. It is aimed by whatever is new, interesting, challenging or urgent.

Part of the explanation lies in how the brain processes reward and motivation in ADHD. In 2009, Nora Volkow and colleagues described changes in the dopamine system of adults with ADHD — the system responsible for the sense that something is worth doing. You’ll find a short explanation of this neurotransmitter in the knowledge base under dopamine. Put simply: a task that brings no interest of its own struggles to catch attention, however important it is. A task that does bring interest can catch it so strongly that it can no longer be let go.

What is involved here are the executive functions — the abilities we use to start, stop, switch and plan. Hyperfocus is not an excess of these abilities but one of the ways their dysregulation shows itself. The problem is not that a person can’t concentrate. The problem is that they don’t get to decide when, or on what.

Hyperfocus and flow are not the same

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described a state he called flow: complete absorption in an activity that is just demanding enough to challenge us and just manageable enough not to frighten us. In flow, our sense of time disappears, the work seems to do itself, and afterwards we feel fulfilled. Everyone knows flow — a musician during practice, a surgeon during an operation, a child at play.

Hyperfocus resembles flow, but it isn’t the same. The differences people with ADHD describe come down mainly to three.

• Getting out. You can usually step out of flow when you need to. Out of hyperfocus, often you can’t — or only with great effort, as if tearing yourself away from something you’re stuck to.
• Content. Flow usually happens in an activity a person values. Hyperfocus can also get stuck on something you yourself consider a waste of time: browsing the internet, a game, adjusting the colours in a presentation that no one will look at closely.
• The body. In hyperfocus, the body’s signals often don’t get through. Hunger, thirst, needing the toilet, back pain — all of it only registers once attention comes unstuck.

Because hyperfocus likes to get stuck on screens, it is worth knowing where the line lies between absorption and a habit you no longer control. I wrote about this in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem?

What it looks like in everyday life

Hyperfocus isn’t just “I worked late into the night”. People describe it in very different ways:

• Time vanishes. Five minutes become three hours. This is closely linked to how ADHD changes the experience of time — more in Time blindness: why the clock works differently with ADHD.
• Passions that come and go. Three months of everything about baking bread, then everything about old cameras. The gear from the last passion stays in the cupboard, carrying a quiet guilt.
• Projects that start on fire. The first ninety per cent goes in one sweep. The last ten, where there is nothing new any more, is left lying.
• People. Hyperfocus can also be directed at a person — often at the start of falling in love. The partner receives exceptional attention, which over time settles to an ordinary level. For the other person this can be painful, because it sounds as if the interest has gone out.
• The last night before a deadline. When urgency becomes great enough, attention finally switches on — and then a person can do in a few hours what they couldn’t manage in three weeks.

That last point matters because it is often the source of misunderstanding. Those around see that the person can, and conclude that before they simply didn’t want to. In fact these are two different states of the same attention, not two different levels of willpower.

When someone else interrupts hyperfocus

Coming out of hyperfocus is not a neutral moment. When someone interrupts it — a partner, a child, a colleague — the reaction is often stronger than you would expect. Irritation, a sharp word, a feeling of having been roughly pulled out of the water. Something like this (a composite dialogue, not a real person):

“I called you for dinner three times.”
“I didn’t hear. I really didn’t.”
“When something interests you, I’m just not there.”
“That’s not true. It’s just … when I’m in there, I’m not anywhere. Not even for myself.”

A partner who calls three times without a response experiences it as rejection. The person in hyperfocus, on the other hand, often experiences their irritation at being interrupted as proof that something is wrong with them. Both experiences make sense and both deserve room in the conversation. How quickly and how strongly an emotion can flare up in these moments is something I describe in Emotional dysregulation in ADHD: when a feeling arrives too fast.

It helps if a couple agree on hyperfocus in advance, not in the middle of it: how one will reach the other when it really is urgent, and how the one in hyperfocus will show they’ve heard, even if they need a few more minutes to come unstuck. A touch on the shoulder or a phrase you both know often works better than a call from another room.

Gift or trap?

Hyperfocus is often talked about as a “superpower”. I understand why: for people who have heard for decades that they don’t try hard enough, it is pleasant to hear that they have something others don’t. And it’s true — in the right environment, hyperfocus can produce exceptional work. I described how this shows up in people who create their own work in ADHD and entrepreneurship: a gift and a burden at once.

But the word “superpower” hides the cost. Hyperfocus doesn’t choose what matters. It can swallow a whole day in which you were meant to do something else. It can leave you without food and sleep. And it is almost always followed by a crash: exhaustion, a headache, irritability and often guilt about everything that was left undone. Anyone living to a rhythm of “two days of everything, then three days of nothing” can slowly wear themselves out — I gathered the signs worth watching for in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break.

More than a gift or a trap, hyperfocus is power without a steering wheel. The goal is not to root it out but to add the steering: to learn to recognise it, set limits on it and, where possible, direct it where it serves you.

Exercise: an external anchor for getting out

Because it is hard to leave hyperfocus from the inside, it makes sense to prepare the exit from the outside — before you dive in. The exercise takes a few minutes and you can do it today, with the first thing you suspect will draw you in.

1. Before you start, write down the end time and the reason for it. Not “until six”, but “until six, because at half past six we’re cooking dinner together”. A reason tied to someone or something carries more weight than a bare number.
2. Set an alarm so that you have to get up. Phone in another room or at the other end of the flat. An on-screen reminder gets clicked away in hyperfocus without even being read.
3. Prepare your body. Put a glass of water and something to eat on the desk. If you know you’ll be sitting for a long time, your body will thank you later.
4. When the alarm goes off, don’t step out at once — park. In one line, write down where you stopped and what the next step is. The fear of losing the thread is often what keeps you in.
5. Make a transition. Two to five minutes between hyperfocus and the next thing: drink some water, open a window, look outside. Notice how your body feels. Only then turn to the people or the task that is waiting.

The exercise won’t work every time. Sometimes you won’t hear the alarm, or you’ll switch it off and carry on. That isn’t failure, it’s information: perhaps the end was set too early, or the anchor wasn’t strong enough. Adjust and try again.

“He can when he wants to”: what hyperfocus does in a family

Hyperfocus also has a history that reaches back into childhood. A child with ADHD who spends hours building with blocks or reading about dinosaurs, yet can’t last ten minutes over homework, often hears the same sentence: “He can when he wants to.” It is said as encouragement, but the child takes something else from it — that their difficulty is a matter of will, and therefore their fault.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we are interested in how such messages live on. An adult who grew up with “he can when he wants to” often treats themselves the same way: every day they can’t get started becomes proof of laziness, and every hyperfocus becomes proof that they could if only they tried. This is how a shame forms that is hard to put into words — I wrote about it in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

When a person understands that absorption and distractibility are two sides of the same attention, that story can change. Not in the sense of “nothing is my responsibility”, but in the sense of “my attention works differently and I can handle it more wisely”. Understanding your own brain as different rather than broken is at the heart of the view described by the concept of neurodivergence.

Where this explanation doesn’t apply

I want to be careful here, because hyperfocus is a concept that is easy to stick on to everything.

Absorption is not ADHD. Everyone sometimes gets absorbed in work, a book or a game and forgets the time. It makes sense to link hyperfocus with ADHD only when it is part of a wider picture — difficulties with starting, organisation, time and attention that have been there since childhood and show up in several areas of life. That assessment, and the diagnosis, is made by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, not by a therapist and not by an online test. I do not diagnose ADHD.

Intense absorption can have other causes. In autism, deep special interests are a common and quite different phenomenon. In anxiety, a thought can get stuck in rumination that looks like concentration from the outside. And when someone barely sleeps for several days yet feels full of energy, with racing thoughts and big plans, that is a reason to see a doctor or psychiatrist as soon as possible — such a pattern is not hyperfocus and needs a different kind of help.

Not everything needs fixing. If hyperfocus doesn’t harm you — if you eat, sleep, keep your relationships and create things in it — there may be nothing that needs changing. Some people notice that their hyperfocus changes when they start taking ADHD medication; whether medication, and which, is right for you is something to discuss with your doctor.

But when hyperfocus eats away at relationships, health or work, it is worth talking about. In therapy we don’t look for a way to switch it off, but for a way to understand it — including in relation to the people who live with you and experience it from the outside every day. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Hyperfocus is deep absorption in which time, the body and the people around you disappear — and it is common in ADHD, even though it isn’t in the diagnostic criteria.
• Attention in ADHD isn’t lacking; it is unregulated — steered by interest, novelty and urgency, not by importance.
• It differs from flow mainly in that it is hard to get out of and can get stuck on things you don’t value.
• Prepare the exit in advance and from the outside: an end time with a reason, an alarm in another room, a note of where you stopped.
• An ADHD diagnosis is made by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist; absorption on its own is not proof of it.