Imagine focus exists in two different forms:
The first form: a valve.
You have the ability to control just how much attention you want to give to one thing over another. A specific task going to require around 3/10 of your attention?
You can give it just that much, and conserve the rest of your attention, letting only what you believe is important enough to get an 8/10, or even a 10/10 your entire focus.
You can also think of it as a dial or any sort of choose-your-own-value sort of type of focus.
This leaves you some left over focus that you can somewhat use on other things, like keeping tabs on your bodily states (hunger, need to use the restroom, etc.) and your surroundings.
This is how attention works for someone without ADHD (so I’ve been told).
Now let’s switch gears, the second form of focus: a switch.
You have zero control here over just how much attention you want to give to one thing. You have two options, either you are or you are not paying attention.
Switch is on, you’re focused, or what those who try their best to describe the ADHD experience describe as “hyper-focus.”
You’re at 0/10 or 10/10, and the second you want to switch tasks, or an interruption comes ’round and you have to attend to it because it’s not completely unimportant, you have the choice: switch on to the new task and forget in moments what you were doing previously, then after dealing with the interruption, take some time and hopefully remember where you were in your task.
Because your lack of ability to dial down your focus also means you won’t be able to hold in your mind two thoughts at the same time, meaning it’s possible this interruption will wipe your working memory clean of what you are doing and you will have to re-catch yourself up to where you were before you interrupted as though you had set aside the task for days and are coming to it almost brand new after a long time away.
Oh, and one more curveball. You can try to force yourself to focus on certain things, but your focus isn’t as easy to control as if you had a valve-style focus – so you can put your 100% focus on something and demand it stay put, but because distractions take away your 100% focus, and then you have to switch back, you can neither multitask efficiently, nor really keep your focus in place, even if you do manage to get it onto what you wanted, and away from what you’re naturally focused on before starting your task.
Seem like a struggle? Sure does. And this frustrating aspect of ADHD focus being more like a switch than a valve can easily be used to describe a whole onslaught of aspects of everyday life that are more difficult if you have ADHD because of this on-or-off type of focus.
I think it isn’t a stretch to explain why many with ADHD struggle not to bump into things.
If you’re trying to keep your focus on one thing, and have zero focus left for situational awareness, you’re much more likely to lose track of that wine glass someone left on the table hours ago, bumping into it because you were so focused on what you were doing, you weren’t paying any attention to your body’s location in comparison to nearby objects.
Imagine you can only 100% focus on what you’re doing, and as normal humans do, are trying to passively keep tabs on how hungry you are throughout the day.
You’re probably not going to realize you’re hungry, because even if you get the signals from your body sporadically to tell you that you’re hungry, you’re likely going to forget them momentarily, as the next thing, or even the work you were trying your best to focus on, steals your attention away.
So you stop adequately taking care of yourself, and your mood swings more than usual cause you’re not able to keep track of your hunger levels.
Hanger a thing? Yes. With ADHD? Sometimes those with ADHD will not realize until they’re way past normal levels of hunger that they really should have taken a break for food. Speaking of breaks…
Remember that each and every time you switch on to a new task, no matter how small, it’s very difficult to allocate a small reserve of memory to what you were doing so you can return to it. Because focus is all or nothing.
So you get interrupted, say because your co-worker asks you “A quick question that will take like 10 seconds to respond to” or you have to interrupt yourself for something like a food break – chances are by the end of that interruption, you will have to re-find your spot in what you were doing, as though you stepped away from it days ago.
You might be spared from mentally having to struggle so much to get back into things if the interruption blimp took place at a natural dip in what you were doing. You finished the paragraph you were working on and the interruption miraculously took place, for example.
But usually that’s not life, and usually you were mid-sentence, and you have no idea what you were writing before the interruption came, and you can’t remember what you were writing in the same way you wouldn’t if you had set aside your writing for days and came back to it with fresh eyes, but with half a sentence missing.
Interruptions are learned to be frustrating things that mean you have to re-set entirely, wasting many minutes “catching yourself up” to where you were – if you can even remember where you were because most times, that thought is just lost because you cannot hold it in your head passively throughout the interruption.
And if you can manage to hold it in your head throughout the interruption, it’s because you switched focus back and forth between the two tasks. Switch, switch back, switch again.
Which is super inefficent and makes you seem like you’re paying no attention to either – so if the interruption was your co-worker, they’re going to be frustrated you’re not giving them 100%, not understanding that the problem is you are only able to give 100%, and unable to keep passive track of what you were doing prior, thus losing your place before being interrupted completely.
If you’ve seen someone with ADHD doing housework (here’s an ADHD household chore productivity hack that works for me btw), you’ve probably noticed a phenomenon where they start one thing, see another, it triggers an impulse in them and then the just do “that new thing real quick” – but quick does not happen because they nearly finish the new thing or mid-way through see something else that needs done and they follow the new impulse down to a new task.
This leads to one of the most common symptoms of ADHD unfolding before your eyes: incomplete projects everywhere.
The intention is to go back to these things after spending just a moment on the new task. The intention is not the problem, the problem is that without the dialed down focus, a level 3 or even a level 6 given to the housework task, and maybe a 1 or 2 left for retaining the working memory of what one was doing before, someone with ADHD will almost never remember to go back to the initial project.
Unless the thought randomly pops into their heads, or they get a visual trigger, like the unfinished task, urging them to follow this now new impulse to finish the previous task.
We’re not in control. We look super illogical, super unrational about how we go about tasks, until you realize we just can’t control what we remember.
Even in short spurts. I went to eat a banana and finish my morning coffee just now and realized that after two bites of my banana, I was beginning to lose my train of thoughts in writing this article, so back to the article I go to get out my thoughts before they fall out of my mind, and in the meantime, my coffee gets cold and my banana sits on my desk uneaten.
Such is the frustration of life with ADHD. You don’t have control – and it’s easily chalked down to this one image of focus like a switch.
Switch, switch, switch, from one task to the next, that’s all we can do.
And it’s frustrating to watch us go through incomplete task over incomplete task, but we aren’t in as much control, because we can’t dial down our focus, give a task only as much focus as is needed and preserving the rest for some lesser tasks, like keeping in check with if we’re getting hungry or keeping in mind the other thing we’re supposed to do just after this.
I have heard that some medications, at the right doses, for some people can sometimes enable someone with ADHD to be able to hold two different ideas in their head at once – at the same “volume” and without one competing with the other and basically “erasing it” or “beating it out” for the 100% focus.
Two ideas at 50% volume that are held in union in an ADHD brain – that’s like witchcraft – magical sounding to us.
If you tell us to think of two seperate things, like two tasks on a list, and it’s not in the form of some run on sentence, and we need to hold that thought for a long time, it’s not going to work.
We’re going to lose the second thought in no time, we cannot hold onto it as it will be drowned out by the first thought.
This makes doing basic things so much more difficult, but it’s all we’ve got to work with.
So our productivity often suffers, we often do irrational things, like getting mad at someone who literally came in to ask a 2 second question that requires no effort to answer.
It’s only logical once you see why there is such a struggle, why there is such an enormous mental load on a person with ADHD who is expected to multi-task, or even stay on task.
Because our brains naturally want to follow every impulse down the “new input” rabbit hole, and switching back to the task at hand not only requires mental work, it also means we lose the new input, the new impulse’s memory in our minds, and cannot return to it unless we magically wrote it down somewhere to externally (not from our memory) re-ignite the impulse later.
I hope whether you have ADHD or not, this gives you a little more understanding for the struggle, the odd-looking behaviour, the frustration we feel that you wouldn’t have any reason to feel if you could simply dial back your attention.
It’s just not something we can do. And this wreaks havock in our lives. Especially in terms of productivity.
As for me, it’s finally a good time time to finish my coffee, now cold.
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