ADHD and Hyperfixation: The Art of Obsession
How many unfinished projects do you have lying around? I’ve lost count.
Some people call it a superpower. Some people call it a curse. I call it the most fun, and also the most disruptive, part of having ADHD.
I’m talking, of course, about hyperfixation.
Now, it’s important to note, right upfront, that hyperfixation is not actually a recognized symptom of ADHD according to the DSM-5. However, every single person I have ever met who lives with ADHD deals with it, so I am going to treat it as a rock-solid trait of the disorder.
What is hyperfixation?
Hyperfixation, as it relates to ADHD, can be described as “an intense and often prolonged state of concentration on a particular activity or object.” (add.org)
Note that this isn’t the same as hyperfocus, which is a state of engrossment related to one particular task or activity.
Hyperfixation is when you can’t stop thinking about something, even when you should be thinking about something else. It is a state of near-total obsession.
For me, this usually manifests itself in the form of a new hobby or business idea. I will discover something that I find interesting, and spend the next few weeks obsessing over it, learning everything I can and spending all of my money. Then, when the next great thing comes along, I forget all about that obsession.
That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing
This can be a really positive thing, like when I hyperfixated on learning to fix cars, personal finance, or repairing my health.
It can also be incredibly disruptive, like when I’m thinking about disc golf while I’m in an important meeting at work, or I’m thinking about the mechanical keyboard I’m building while my wife is trying to have a conversation with me. Or when I spent $1000 on insurance licenses for a job I only held for 3 months.
These are all real examples of fixations I have had over the years.
Why do we hyperfixate?
As far as I have been able to find, no one has quite nailed down the exact cause. However, there are some aspects of ADHD that I believe may hold some answers:
- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is actually a bit of a misnomer. The ADHD brain isn’t deficient in attention, it’s deficient in dopamine. As such, the way that the ADHD brain responds to stimuli can be dramatically different than non-ADHD people.
- When you experience something enjoyable, rewarding, or mentally stimulating, it activates the brain’s “reward center,” which includes increasing dopamine creation and dopamine re-uptake activity.
- Our dopamine-starved ADHD brains are always on the hunt for the next dopamine fix, so when it experiences something that activates the reward center, it wants to keep doing that thing in order to keep the dopamine activity elevated. Once that thing no longer produces the same response, your brain loses interest and goes back to searching for the next dopamine hit.
- This search for dopamine creates hyperactivity in certain parts of the brain, which can make it very difficult to focus on anything else.
So what’s the solution? How do we control it?
Honestly, I’m still trying to figure this one out. I haven’t yet found a solution that works reliably. One thing that has helped me recently is to keep better track of time (because time blindness is a very real problem for ADHDers). I have my to-do list at work, and I tell myself that if I get a particular task done in a particular time frame (say, write an article in the next 2 hours), then I can spend 20 minutes thinking about/Googling/writing about whatever my current fixation is. I set timers on my phone to keep track.
I’m not saying it works every time, but it has certainly helped me.
Do you have a crazy hyperfixation story, a current obsession, or a trick for controlling it? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear about your experiences!
