Comment by dakom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakom | Hacker News Reader

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When a problem has my attention, nothing can phase me. I get hyperfocused. Music, colors, the need to eat or sleep.. doesn't matter. All that gets put aside, the thing that has my attention has my full and undivided attention

When something doesn't grab me, it takes enormous effort to maintain focus. It's not that other distractions are just so incredibly moving that they take my focus away. Rather, it's that it's physically difficult if not painful to focus on the thing that evades my attention, so by comparison, anything else is better.

I have no idea if my comment speaks to the paper. I started reading it because I am at the grocery store and the checkout line is so boring, but then the paper didn't quite grab me enough either, so I'm slightly more interested now in whatever happens to be on some other screen.

But if it is studying the effect of distractions, I think they have the wrong idea (or I have something other than ADHD), because it's never about the distractions, it's about the interest in the thing that needs my attention. Nothing else matters

> Rather, it's that it's physically difficult if not painful to focus on the thing that evades my attention, so by comparison, anything else is better.

If I had to describe the feeling it's the mental equivalent of trying to push the same poles of two strong magnets together, while the distractions are like trying to avoid the north-south poles from attracting to each other.

Especially the part where as soon as you stop applying force (i.e. mental effort) it flips.

Wow, that is a perfect metaphor for what I feel

"When something doesn't grab me, it takes enormous effort to maintain focus. It's not that other distractions are just so incredibly moving that they take my focus away. Rather, it's that it's physically difficult if not painful to focus on the thing that evades my attention, so by comparison, anything else is better."

Sounds like me trying to do geometry proofs homework in my freshman year of high school. I wanted to cry it felt so shitty forcing myself to do it. Eventually, I just stopped. Didn't help my teacher was insane and demanded we make copies of our work using carbon paper in the year of our lord 2005 and would grade you down if you turned in something off a copier/scanner. More tedium on top of dreadful tedium.

I'm part way into a massive stack of monotonous corporate e-learning modules and this is hitting me hard.

Sounds a fair amount like me. I'm autistic.

There are overlapping symptoms between the two. There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

> There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

Last I checked, it's uni-directional; if you have autism, you are more likely than the general population to have ADHD, but not the other way around.

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