What The Heck Is Hyperfocus?

And How You Can Actually Use It?

To finish a big puzzle like this, hyperfocus might be required — that state of total absorption where time, hunger, and everything else fade away. Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

People with ADHD often have scattered minds — until something catches their interest. Then the opposite happens; it is called 'hyperfocus' and can become a superpower.

The same brain that can’t survive a tax form can sit inside one problem for fourteen hours straight and forget to eat. That’s not a contradiction. That’s hyperfocus.

I’ve seen it for forty years in my work with ADHD – and in my own life.

Some real examples of hyperfocus

My son loved dinosaurs and dragons so intensely that he found them everywhere — in video stores and in tiny newspaper ads half a centimetre wide. His radar locked onto what he loved.

One day I was in a shop with him, and for one little moment I talked to someone there, and he was gone. Where did I find him? In the video sections, he had found his Dinos and dragons.

Another time we looked at a huge newspaper. On it were ads, about half a centimetre big, and he found them again, the dinos and dragons.

He came back from kindergarten and said, "They are all so boring; no one is interested in dinos and dragons.”

I was studying “boring” homoeopathy books until 4 a.m. for days, chasing health problems until I understood them. That’s hyperfocus.

One caveat: When I hyperfocus, I forget everything else around me — drinking, eating, moving, household chores, appointments, shopping, and sometimes even going to the bathroom. It feels as if I dive into a completely different time‑bubble, slightly removed from reality.

Hyperfocus is flow and intensity

— the kind that can build brilliance or cause burnout.

Einstein is another suspect: wearing different socks, an old coat, and sticking his tongue out at the world — the archetype of the puzzle‑genius. Some of us would be completely lost without secretaries who keep our reality stitched together.

After 40 years of treating ADHD in other people, I recognise the pattern. There is one interesting case that makes me wonder if he had it. It would only be explainable if you take hyperfocus into consideration.

Alexander Humboldt, the explorer and polymath

One historical example that always makes me wonder is Alexander von Humboldt.

Humboldt was a German explorer-scientist who spent five years travelling through South America — climbing volcanoes, measuring climates, and cataloguing tens of thousands of plants and animals by hand.

He climbed Chimborazo higher than any human before him, coughing blood from the altitude, just to take one more reading. Nobody paid him to be that thorough. Nobody made him keep going. He simply couldn’t stop once he’d started.

He became one of history’s first true universalist polymaths, and his book Kosmos changed how people saw the natural world, unifying geography, biology, climate, and human culture into a single interconnected system.

Nobody living can put Humboldt on a couch, and this isn’t a diagnosis. But the pattern underneath that obsessive, sixty-thousand-specimen thoroughness carries strong traits of what we’d today call hyperfocus. It remains speculation, but it’s hard to explain any other way.

He shows characteristics of ADHD: risk‑taking, exploring, universalist polymath, and specialist in everything from plants to climate. He very systematicly collecting thousands of specimens of minerals, animals, and plants and then wrote a multi‑volume book about it.

This could fit ADHD with lots of hyperfocus. But it remains speculation.

Anyways, Humboldt is an example of how hyperfocus could manifest in a very productive way.

Not every wild (ADHD) brain scatters.

How you actually use hyperfocus, instead of just surviving it

You can’t switch hyperfocus on with willpower. But you can stop wasting it. Notice what pulls the volume dial all the way up without you trying — that’s the real signal, not the to-do list you think you should care about.

Some call it 'flow'; Dan Martell calls it his 'golden hours'.

The most productive hours of the day, and he protects them for a good reason!

The same system that won’t start easily also

won’t always know when to stop.

The wild and restless ADHD brains were never broken for not fitting the tax form. Some of them were just built to climb one mountain until it had no more secrets left.

Hyperfocus is like riding a wild horse — and you must learn to take enough breaks and be careful to not get a burnout. Then …

hyperfocus can become a superpower!

If this gave you something to sit with, hit follow — next comes the harder science underneath all of this: what’s actually happening in the brain when the volume dial gets stuck.

Did you find this article interesting? Consider reposting it …

What The Heck Is Hyperfocus, And Can I Actually Use It? | by Louisa Light | ILLUMINATION | Jul, 2026 | Medium

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