"I may go dark for long periods of time...”
I have a superpower. You have a superpower. Most ADD adults have this same superpower.
It’s our ability, after some indeterminate period of lackluster days and loosy-goosy underperformance, to seize upon a new idea or subject or creative thought and immediately pump oceans of adrenaline and enthusiasm into it. It’s our capacity for surges of overperformance, when we solve an unsolvable problem or undertake a daunting project or grab artistic inspiration and create a thing of staggering beauty.
We call our power hyperfocus, and for many of us, it’s our proudest trait.
Hyperfocus is the other side of the attention coin, our compensation for all those times when we just can’t offer what the world expects. It’s that brief interregnum in our heads when we are in control, when we can seize the remote and keep the channel from changing while we do something amazing. It’s us at our very best, when it comes to performance. We excel; we surpass ourselves; we exceed our peers.
Hyperfocus can sometimes bring us redemption in the eyes of those around us. It can boost our self-esteem tremendously, reminding us just how much we truly have to offer, when all is said and done. It should not define us, by any means; we all must see ourselves as more than what we can do. But it is certainly an important part of who we are.
Not long ago, I had a job with a health care company as a data scientist. My role was analytics – the mining of data for important hidden information that could produce value. The particular problem I was given to solve was formidable: I had to create a method of predicting the odds of a woman giving birth prematurely.
Much was at stake, because in each US state, hundreds of millions of dollars a year are spent dealing with the consequences of a pre-term birth. A normal, healthy birth today might cost between $8,000-$15,000; a pre-term birth, with weeks of neonatal intensive care and other through-the-roof expenses, can exceed $250,000. And that’s before considering the human costs of a child who might never live a normal life, and the family that must adapt to accommodate such a child.
Finding a way to predict a pre-term birth, then, meant creating opportunities for early intervention to prevent it – to adapt the care the mother-to-be received to increase the chances of getting the baby to term.
The problem, I learned as I started researching it, was that no reliable method for predicting pre-term birth had ever been developed. This was completely new territory. And everyone around me was relying on me to solve it.
This really got my engine running. I love digging into a difficult problem, and this was a doozy! But more importantly, there was tremendous human consequence involved: solving this problem meant changing a great many lives for the better.
I started arriving at the office at 6 a.m., three hours before anyone else, so that I could work in peace and solitude. I started taking books and journal articles home at night. I took online courses to learn some tricky math. I made appointments with experts at the local university to bounce ideas off them. I spent upwards of $2,000 out of my own pocket to increase what I knew. I’m sure that to a casual outside observer I must have seemed obsessed.
In the end I succeeded, and it’s one of my proudest professional accomplishments.
But it took its toll. The intensity of my hyperfocus was such that I had very little gas left in my engine at the end of every day. I was less present with my loved ones. I was less interested in our social circle. I was burning down to nothing. I didn’t exactly shut everyone out, I managed to remain congenial – but I wasn’t engaged.
During that time, I was with a supportive, encouraging partner. But not all partners and friends are so supportive when we ADD folks go dark, as our hyperfocus often makes us. We need our periods of hyperfocus, they’re a natural channel for expressing ourselves and mustering those positive energies we carry within. We can’t squander it or ignore it. But it does carry a cost.
So it’s a good idea to have a mention of hyperfocus on the list of expectations dialogs:
“A thing about me is that I sometimes get a lot of inspiration and energy for a project I feel is important, and when that happens, I’ll go all-in on it. When that happens, I might not be fully present for a while, or might at times seem altogether unavailable. It’s important that you not take that personally; it’s just the way I am, it’s how I get important things done, and I’ll be back soon. I will invite you into my process as far as I’m able, but don’t be put off if I need some distance in order to complete my work. If you’ll be patient with me, I hope to knock your socks off with what I can do!”
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