Hyperfocus Quotes

Never pray to be a better slave when God is trying to get you out of your situation.

We are what we pay attention to, and almost nothing influences our productivity and creativity as much as the information we’ve consumed in the past.

I’m no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people—the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve, and their silence—in a way that is hyperfocused because of my past. I’m an artist because there’s no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world including my mom.

I’m not sure if things got quiet or loud, blurry or hyperfocused, but I know the universe changed as I looked at Liz, everything melting into impressionistic streaks of fuzzy background colors.

People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus.

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.

We have to work with intention as much as possible—this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it. Intention enables us to prioritize so we don’t overload our attentional space.

Directing your attention toward the most important object of your choosing—and then sustaining that attention—is the most consequential decision we will make throughout the day. We are what we pay attention to.

1.   How much of your time you spend intentionally 2.   How long you can hold your focus in one sitting 3.   How long your mind wanders before you catch it

but in disasters, people react differently. It’s not uncommon for people to focus on one thing they can control amid a sea of chaos and hyperfocus on that one thing.

by focusing deeply on just one important thing at a time—hyperfocusing—we become the most productive version of ourselves.

Love will drive you insane, but never let it drive you stupid or blind.

By removing every object of attention that’s potentially more stimulating and attractive than what you intend to do, you give your brain no choice but to work on that task.

An unfortunate truth is that the brain is not built to do knowledge work—it’s wired for survival and reproduction.

how important it is to choose what you consume and pay attention to: just as you are what you eat, when it comes to the information you consume, you are what you choose to focus on. Consuming valuable material in general makes scatterfocus sessions even more productive.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

We hyper-focus on the lines of Scripture containing the miracles, and we miss the details of the mess.

When we are stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode, we devote our resources to managing stress, and, to put it simply, our child brain suffers. Childhood is a time of great vulnerability. Unable to survive on our own, a parent-figure’s withholding of anything perceived to hinder our survival sends stress signals flooding through our bodies. The resulting ‘survival brain’, as I call it, is hyperfocused on perceived threats, sees the world in black and white, and is often obsessive, panic driven, and prone to circular reasoning. We can break down or shut down when faced with stress.

It was great not having a roommate. I didn’t have to turn the lights off and go to bed, like, ever. I took my new medicine and stayed up doing homework late in the night, hyperfocused and erasing and reprinting my math homework. Branches would bang on the glass and scare the shit out of me; there was also a stupid owl out there that was ridiculously loud and hooty. So I was always practically falling out of my desk chair. (Stimulants make the nerves a bit . . . jangly, you know. Especially at three in the morning.) I

meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once. First, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, it allows you to set intentions and plan for the future. It’s impossible to set future intentions when you’re immersed in the present. By stepping back and directing your attention inward, you’re able to switch off autopilot and consider what to do next. Your brain automatically plans for the future when you rest—you just need to give it the space and time to do so.

Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.

One study found that when we continually switch between tasks, our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion.

Ask yourself: After consuming one of those products, will you be happy with how you invested your time and attention?

Being a journalist of your own life will force you to stop hyper-focusing on all the minor details and see the bigger picture. You

Setting specific intentions can double or triple your odds of success.

All things being equal, you should be able to trust most of your feelings. But if they derive from dissociative parts of yourself that live in trauma-time, that is, are not oriented to the present or are hyperfocused only on specific aspects of an experience to the exclusion of others, these thoughts are more likely to be inaccurate and not fit with current, external reality.

Continually seeking novel stimuli makes us feel more productive—after all, we’re doing more in each moment. But again, just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

Those who fit in neatly at church, those who are hyper-focused on the “law” are told to repent, but the sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes are invited to sit down for dinner, to share a glass of wine, and to build a friendship.

Later, as the sisters grew, Esther hyperfocused on their differences, but as a little kid she'd been far more hypnotised by their sameness. They both loved chewing lemon peels and watermelon rinds, loved pictures of goats but not actual goats, loved putting sand in their hair so they could scratch it out later, loved watching their parents slow-dance in the living room to Motown records. They loved the sound of the wind, the sound of breaking ice, the sound of coyotes calling on the mountain. They disliked zippers, ham, the word 'milk', flute music, the gurgling sound of the refrigerator, Cecily's long weekends away, Abe's insistence on regular chess matches, and days with no clouds. They disliked the boxes of books that came to their door daily or were lugged home by their father, disliked their dusty lonesome smell and how they consumed Abe's attention. They disliked when their parents closed the bedroom door and fought in whispers. They hated the phrase 'half sister.' There had been no half about it.

When we are awake we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

2. Weaken and Break the Cycle of Addiction Instead of quitting cold turkey (or hyperfocusing on abstinence), we focus on understanding, weakening, and eventually breaking the cycle of addiction. This means we engage with and reevaluate our concepts of will, work with our willpower, manage our energy, and develop new habits, routines, and rituals. Breaking the cycle of addiction also means facing cravings head on and learning to ride them out and eventually burn through them. Some of the things we do to weaken the addiction will be the same as what we do to weaken the root causes (such as meditation), while other practices are specifically geared toward breaking up the addiction (developing new rituals and habits).

Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done—has a built-in “novelty bias.” Whenever we switch between tasks, it rewards us with dopamine—that amazing pleasure chemical that rushes through our brain whenever we devour a medium-sized pizza, accomplish something awesome, or have a drink or two after work.

Talulah watched in horror as, night after night, Musk had mumbling conversations with himself, sometimes flailing his arms and screaming. “I kept thinking he was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me. It was horrendous. I was really scared, and he was just desperate.” Sometimes he would go to the bathroom and start vomiting. “It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching,” she says. “I would stand by the toilet and hold his head.” Musk’s tolerance for stress is high, but 2008 almost pushed him past his limits. “I was working every day, all day and night, in a situation that required me to pull a rabbit out of the hat, now do it again, now do it again,” he says. He gained a lot of weight, and then suddenly lost it all and more. His posture became hunched, and his toes stayed stiff when he walked. But he became energized and hyperfocused. The threat of the hangman’s noose concentrated his mind.

I slowly began to realize that I had been wasting my time with a hyper-focus on why all the “others” were doing it wrong and began to release the icy grip I had on everything I thought I knew. I finally accepted that I would be much happier if I just focused on myself and taking my own faith journey seriously and stopped worrying so much about everyone else. As soon as I gave up on the idea of changing everyone else and exchanged it for a commitment to change myself, I saw my heart begin to change.

The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones... This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try. So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to. I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation. But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right. It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth. I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress. We are imperfect because we are unfinished. So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be? How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others? I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion. I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display.. Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love.. And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.

They used to call synesthetes insane, but I think the kind of hyperfocus required of great art calls for some madness. You have to be a little crazy to be as obsessed, as consumed by music as I’ve always been.

Nonessentialists listen too. But they listen while preparing to say something. They get distracted by extraneous noise. They hyperfocus on inconsequential details. They hear the loudest voice but they get the wrong message. In their eagerness to react they miss the point.

This happens when someone who is hyper-focused on social context becomes emotionally paralyzed, so intent on parsing every nuance of the social environment that—like a dinner guest taking her place at an elaborately set table and finding six forks flanking her plate—she is afraid of making the wrong move. Similarly, someone who is extremely sensitive to context might shape her behavior to what she thinks the situation demands, presenting herself as one kind of person to her spouse, another kind to her boss, and still another kind to her friends, until soon she begins to doubt her own sincerity and authenticity.

If that is true, then our love for the rapture reveals a lack of love for the very world Jesus came to save. The very idea of the church abandoning the world in its time of need is endemic of an American Christianity that is more focused on the self than the needs of the other, more gnostic (concerned with right ideas) than actually Christian, and hyper-​focused on the hereafter to the detriment of the here and now.

Never hyper-focus on one ball. You do not live or die by one sale. 2. You never wonder, “What’s next?” because your next deal is already in the works. 3. You are surrounded by opportunity—making contacts, gaining referrals, generating new business, always reaching for new balls. 4. You know that it takes as much energy to manage one ball as it does four, five, or even six. 5. You control the flight path—you know which balls to handle first, which ones to deal with quickly, and which ones require more time and attention. 6. You don’t blindly toss balls in the air. You care about where each one lands. LET FEAR DRIVE YOUR SUCCESS

A hyperfocus on seeking security, avoiding distress, and sticking to a comfortable routine lessens one’s curiosity and, in turn, satisfaction and meaning in life.

Let's start at the beginning: the first step of the unmasking process is realizing you're Autistic. It might not feel like it's an active step toward self-acceptance or authenticity, but coming to understand yourself as disabled is a pretty dramatic reframing of your life. Almost every neuro-diverse person I've spoken to for this book shared that discovering they were Autistic was a powerful aha moment, one that prompted them to rethink every narrative they'd believed about who they were. Painful labels they'd carried around inside themselves for years suddenly didn't seem as relevant: it wasn't that they were stupid, or clueless, or lazy, they were just disabled. It wasn't that their effort had never been enough, or that they were fundamentally wrong or bad. They simply hadn't been treated with the compassion they deserved, or given the tools that would have allowed them to flourish. Naming their position in society as a disabled person helped them to externalize that which had long been internalized. It proved that none of their suffering had been their fault.

Hyperfocus on the other can lead to a disconnection or loss of self through over-functioning and over-adapting in the relationship in an attempt to maintain and preserve the connection.

disconnecting is one of the most

Attention is the backdrop against which we live our lives wherever we go and whatever we do, even if we’re just noticing the thoughts in our head.

We also see people with ADD hyperfocusing on an activity, like rockclimbing or driving or work, probably because it allows them to forget about the expectations associated with “time.” Our patients frequently report that they are their most calm when completely caught up in the thrill of it all, whatever the “all” may be. It could be fun, a catastrophe, or a life-or-death crisis.

When facing undesirable circumstances, we do an excellent job of hyper-focusing on what irks us.

It has been found that hyper-focusing on negativity weakens the immune system. If you instead choose to be grateful no matter what appears, your life will be blessed with new and wonderful experiences.

We live in a society that is hyper-focused on avoiding failure at all costs.

Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times.

They do not become more roundabout, because they refrain from investing in capital that will not show returns for a period of time (or a period when the interest rate has not been lowered as much as shorter-term rates). Thus there is a hyperfocus on—and even addiction to—the yields of stocks and other risky and high-duration securities (a “maturity-mismatch”); there is an irrepressible allure to the steep yield curve.

The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.

Happiness is the rose-colored lens we place atop our attentional space, which allows us to relate to our experiences in a more productive and creative fashion.

View the descriptions of podcasts, TV shows, movies, and books as a pitch for your time and attention.

any sufficiently complex decision or idea is also indistinguishable from magic.

As. Yes. Well. I realized I wasn't as naturally emotive as other people. I knew I could be hyperfocused on my work, that I could be blunt and unsentimental. But I wanted to be a good girlfriend," she said, wrinkling her nose at the memory. She'd been so young and so ridiculous, thinking she could fake certain qualities to make someone else happy. Thinking that she should. She'd never make that mistake again.

Time pressure narrows our focus on the task, restricting us from considering a number of more creative ways to complete it. We don’t question our approach as much, because we haven’t stepped back to consider the alternatives. This makes it easier to switch.

ten seconds.

Meyer, in his book Setting the Table, said he believes that he can guess what type of experience he will have, in any restaurant or business, solely based on how the staff members “appear to be focused on their work, supportive of one another, and enjoying one another’s company.” Too many companies believe that improving CX requires being hyper-focused on the customer, but Meyer demonstrates that CX can be improved by focusing on the employees as well.

Create a distraction-free mode for your team. Dale Partridge, author of People Over Profit, went as far as to equip his team with lamps and squirt guns to encourage them to focus when he was CEO of Sevenly. As he explained to me, “One of the smartest things I did at Sevenly was to build custom walnut desk lamps for the entire team. They turned them on whenever they wanted to focus, and the rule was that no one was allowed to interrupt them when their lamp was on. All forty-five employees were allowed to have up to three hours of uninterrupted focus time per day—we had to limit it because that uninterrupted time was so addictive! I also equipped everyone with a squirt gun they could spray each other with when they were interrupted.

Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.

In a highly formalized organization, individuals tend to be hyperfocused on their own, unit-specific goals. Everything else is a distraction. Unfortunately, the future seldom lines up with the org chart. Parochialism not only makes new opportunities hard to spot, but hard to resource. Unit leaders often feel they have insufficient resources to deliver on their own commitments, let alone someone else’s. Share resources, and you risk missing your targets.

Of course I’m freaking out!” I exclaimed. ‘We’re dangling off a cliff—and instead of rappelling down like normal people, Erica wants to know if I smell anything!” “The point is to be aware of your surroundings at all times,” Erica explained. “Which requires using all of your senses. Right now, you’re hyper-focused on the rock in front of you and nothing else.” “The rock is important,” I explained. “If I fall off of it, I die.

The SOM is even smaller and represents the number of people you will sell to first. To find this number, ask yourself this question, “If I had to pick up the phone right now, who is the one person/business I would call?” This hyper-focus builds the obtainable market you are going after. Out of the 500,000 people looking for investment dollars, we are only going after first-time entrepreneurs with new business ideas. This number is reduced to about 50,000.

We have to work with intention as much as possible—this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it.

just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

Identifying, developing, and optimizing talent has been the unifying theme in all of my work. One thing that’s become clear to me is that really good people can make really bad decisions. The kind person forfeiting their dreams while waiting on friends and loved ones to affirm their new direction. The caring leader surrendering the future of her organization in an effort to keep everyone on board. The world-class athlete ignoring how his hyperfocus is crippling his relationships and stealing his happiness. The highly successful entrepreneur trying to fix his marriage as if it were a business. The person who has always performed for the approval of others discovering that they lack the resilience required to master the skills of their craft.

I am not suggesting that all of GE’s problems resulted from its guidance culture, but I think it played a significant role. When business managers are hyper-focused on meeting quarterly numbers, their long-term orientation takes a back seat; when a company is desperate to make an acquisition just to meet its earnings, it can overpay for a bad asset; when a manager is unable to speak the truth about accounting obfuscations, they pile up over time.

The state of your attentional space determines the state of your life. When your attentional space is overwhelmed, you, in turn, feel overwhelmed. When your attentional space is clear, you also feel clear. The tidier you keep your attentional space, the more clearly you think.

Make a very detailed plan on how you want to achieve what you want to achieve. What I’m arguing in my research is that goals need plans, ideally plans that include when, where, and which kind of action to move towards the goal.

My entire life, I had been hyper-focused on not letting myself down, not allowing myself to fall between the cracks and end up with nothing because I grew up with nothing. And now it was so clear to me that I was doing the exact opposite, allowing that fear to cripple me. I wasn’t allowing myself to enjoy life. I was just making sure I had one, which wasn’t enough. That was obvious to me now. I guess it took almost losing my life to realize what little life I had.

Hyperfocus Conversely, sometimes it will look like those of us with ADHD can actually sustain focus, but it’s not a normal type of focus. When we deeply and intensely concentrate on something that we find very interesting, we will unconsciously tune out any irrelevant thoughts and senses. This is a single-minded trancelike state called hyperfocus. It’s our way of tuning out the chaos inside and outside of our heads. Hyperfocus happens when we completely immerse ourselves in an intriguing task, like working out complicated math problems or editing photos and film.

Perfectionism stifles confidence. Perfectionsists subconsciously undermine their own confidence. It's just simply difficult to build confidence when there is consistent focus on making mistakes-or not making them-and a hyperfocus on the outcome of performance.

the “flow” is a mental state in which you’re so fully immersed in an activity that you become hyper-focused, while experiencing a sense of underlying enjoyment).

after last night, I know he likes me. Sex is a talent and a vocation I was born with, and I know when a man’s having an excellent time. But that doesn’t mean they necessarily like me, the person, once the fun times are done. I know my shortcomings. I’m scattered, hyperfocused on puzzles to the detriment of other stuff, and I’m so clumsy, people have joked that I should be wrapped in bubble wrap.

School had never been my thing. When it was too easy, I got bored, and when it was challenging, I gave up without trying. School psychologists had diagnosed me with ADHD the second they’d met me, which…whatever. Who didn’t have it? An Addie a day kept the impulsive, dangerous, life-threatening behavior away, but focusing on shit for any long periods only happened if I was deeply interested. Then it was look out, hyperfocus here I come.

Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus.

The connectome that lights up when you’re engaged in a task is called the task-positive network, or TPN. Aptly named, the TPN gets you down to work. You’re deliberately doing something and you are intent on it, unaware of much beyond the bounds of what you’re doing. In this state, you don’t consciously know whether you’re happy or not, which is just as good as being happy, if not better, because you’re not wasting any energy in self-assessment. You may become frustrated with what you’re doing and have moments of anger or dismay, but if you stay in the task, in the TPN, those moments will pass, and the TPN, buoyant connectome that it is, will carry you along. When you’re thinking with the TPN, you’re in the Angel mindset. But you can also get trapped in the TPN, doing a task from which you cannot disengage. This is the hyperfocused state that people with ADHD can fall into. Far from being helpful, it can keep you stuck in one task, unable to shut down the screen, turn off the TV, or move from one paragraph to the next. This is the often unrecognized downside of focus.

An external situation is something that exists outside of our immediate control, for instance, seeing your friend’s organized house, subsequently leading you to feel upset about your untidy house.

To put it simply, emotional dysregulation creates intense emotions. This, paired with our ADHD, can trigger an impulsive reaction. This combination can present itself as bouncing off the walls with joy or crying our eyes out. Thus, it creates a display of emotions that is unfitting for the situation. It is one of the most prevalent and demanding symptoms of ADHD.

Creating the barrier between the emotion and the response will help us recognize the emotion when it comes and allow us to step back and choose a response different from the usual.

Mindfulness focuses on taking our attention away from something emotionally stimulating and anchoring our mind to something else happening in the present moment, for instance, our breathing or what we can feel around us. It emphasizes the importance of considering our impulses before we act them out, as well as converting self-damaging thoughts into positive ones.

Furthermore, it is crucial that we enhance our executive functioning skills as this will become a valuable tool on our journey of organization and cleaning.

ADHD is often disregarded by our friends and family and not seen as a legitimate mentally impairing illness. In turn, we may find ourselves unfairly labeled as lazy or even stupid.

One way we can break down these walls of stigma is by sharing our stories. While this can feel daunting, people want to hear your voice! However, for this to be effective, we must also educate ourselves so that when it comes to battling those pesky discriminators, we are fully equipped with knowledge and factual information.

I’d begin by washing dishes, go do laundry mid-way, and ultimately end up picking out weeds from my garden. On other days, I’d have a sudden urge to combat my bathroom, living room, and kitchen all at once, to then feel burnt out and like I hadn’t really accomplished much.

you have felt how hard it is to stay focused on one thing, internally beating yourself up for not being able to concentrate like your friends. Maybe you can even relate to the exhausting feeling of a constant racing mind, all while trying to remember coping strategies and ways to process emotions accurately. The daily life of a neurodivergent individual is one that can feel overwhelming and draining, but with a loving support system and an abundance of self-care, it is a unique path that we must embrace.

This vicious cycle of hyper-focusing one week to not focusing at all another week, mixed with a million and one negative feelings, grew exhausting. However, deep down, I knew that with the right strategies, our unique minds could overcome any struggle, including converting chaos into calm.

One of the most crucial tactics for cleaning is establishing a structured routine and maintaining consistency. This means creating a plan and dedicating certain days to certain chores.

Another step to success with cleaning is prioritizing self-care, meaning it is time for you to start investing in your well-being. Practicing activities like exercising, meditation, and mindfulness are amazing for your brain.

Here are just some of the activities you’ll find in this book: Allow Yourself to De-Mask Recognize Your Triggers Learn How to Nourish Your Brain Understand and Recognize Hyperfocus Identify Rejection Sensitivity Be Aware of Interrupting Push Aside Perfectionism

Perfectionism is usually an unhealthy coping mechanism for those who dealt with excessive criticism growing up.

perfection is not the required outcome, nor is it the goal of organizing your home.

If our plan today is to write three thousand words, rock a presentation with our leadership team, and catch up on our email, and we successfully accomplish all of those, we were perfectly productive. Likewise, if we intend to have a relaxing day and manage to do absolutely nothing, we're again perfectly productive. Being busy doesn't make us productive. It doesn't matter how busy we are if that busyness doesn't lead us to accomplish anything of importance. Productivity is not about cramming more into our days but about doing the right thing in each moment.

last I checked, I didn’t need any help getting pussy.” “I also don’t remember the last time you worked so hard for it.” “Yeah, well, I’m getting bored, and we all know what happens then.” I tend to hyper-focus on something to the point of obsession. It could be anything from eating religiously at the same restaurant to hunting down the most elusive assholes with a bounty on their head.

I set my bag on top of my thighs and take a look around. There are cameras here and cameras over there as well. There are old cameras and new cameras. Cameras to carry with you. Standing cameras, sitting cameras, cameras riding wheelchairs, yawning cameras, dozing cameras, sleeping cameras, chatting cameras, cracking-up cameras, angry cameras, passionate gaming cameras, music-listening cameras, begging cameras, ignoring cameras, swearing cameras . . . and even a camera on my insides filming me. The cameras don’t know who they are. When one camera shoots another, they too are shot. Cameras that are shot and are shooting each other. Surveilling and being surveilled. Being surveilled and surveilling.