ADHD Isn’t A Deficit of Attention…
“He’d do so well if he just applied himself” is something I knew I’d hear at the beginning of every parent-teacher conference. That was my life growing up with ADHD, and it’s not a particularly unique story. However, after years of journaling and meditating, I now understand that everyone, including me, had a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
I didn’t have a deficit in attention. I had an abundance.
My deficit… was in concentration.
Before going much further, I think it’s important to define my terms. Attention, as I’ll be using it, is our raw capacity to selectively notice and engage with stimuli. Concentration is the intentional, sustained control of where that attention goes.
This key distinction is important to understand why people with ADHD are seemingly able to hyper-fixate on something for an extremely long period of time. It appears that, sometimes, their capacity to pay attention is astounding… but that’s not actually what’s happening. They’re not in control of their attention, their environment is.
To explain, I first need to share a little bit of a story.
In school, I was a master procrastinator.
Working on a 2,000 word essay due in 4 hours? Stressful serenity.
Working on a 2,000 word essay due in 4 days? Hell.
But why?
Because fear and urgency are incredibly stimulating emotions. So, when I found my back against the wall – feeling the consequences of an imposing deadline breathing down my neck – I’d inadvertently created an environment that was finally stimulating enough to capture 100% of my attention. Despite my procrastination’s best efforts, the gift of intelligence and the art of bullshitting, carried me to a 3.34 GPA at Purdue University without ever truly learning to control my attention.
My problem with ADHD isn’t a lack of attention. It’s that I needed environments that could utilize all of it. Which meant, when I was in an environment where my attention was underutilized, I was left with two options.
Escape it, or change it.
In the previous example, I did both. Procrastination was escaping the boredom of writing the essay, and playing video games instead was changing my environment to something that captured all of my attention. But, as the deadline started to approach and the fear of a bad grade began to impose itself on me, I could feel my blood pressure start to rise, my chest start to tighten, and mind start to race, until eventually my internal alarm would scream “if you do not start now, you will not finish.” The moment that happened, urgency would flood my mind and spur me into such an intense focus that I could easily crank out what should be a 12-hour project in 4 hours. The result? Usually a high B or a low A.
I never learned to control where my attention went, because I never had to. When we watch a show, scroll on our phone, or just mindlessly play a video game – we don’t have control of our attention. The screen does.
And it wasn’t until I was trying to beat my friend’s time in a racing game that I stumbled onto what I’d been missing my whole life. The goal was simple: optimize your racing lines and try to get the best time possible. While playing passively, I could slowly get better and see real progress, which felt super rewarding!
But here’s the thing. Trackmania is an incredibly precise game: at every turn, with very precise inputs, I could consistently shave tenths of a second off my time. The catch? Doing this every run required intense concentration. So much so, that I felt genuinely drained after just 30 minutes of deeply focused attempts pushing to do every turn perfectly. The result? By the time I got off, my personal-best wound up being within the top 10 for the state Indiana.
Instead of just mindlessly restarting and chasing the next hit of dopamine from getting a new personal best, I’d discovered that attention + intentionality was what I’d been missing out on this whole time. This was concentration: the voluntary addition of effortful discomfort to my attention.
Attention is a constant. Concentration is the multiplier for how much you get out of your attention.
Concentration is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger and more capable it gets. So, if ADHD is more accurately an excess of attentional capacity, our deficit is actually the ‘muscle’ of concentration… When we are unable to contain our own attention, we instead are forced to find/create an environment that does it for us.
The downstream consequences of a life like this are truly heartbreaking. We feel like we have no agency, because in many ways, we don’t. This can spiral into drug abuse, addiction, depression, and many other anti-social behaviors. However, this isn’t hopeless. Many of you can probably relate to parts of what I’ve just said, and all have at least one person in your life who you’ve seen fall into these traps. So, here’s some of what worked for me.
What Can You Do About It?
The most effective thing would honestly be to start meditating, as it’s basically the equivalent of doing a workout for the brain. BUT, I know that for people with ADHD, meditation might be too big of a first step.
So, instead, start doing things in your everyday life with 100% intention. If you’re already going to procrastinate and play video games – do ONLY video games. No phone or YouTube between matches. Catch the impulse, and instead redirect your attention back to the game. “What mistake did I make last round?” “Could I have done something different to avoid a mistake I made?” This uses the already high-stimulation environment as a crutch for you to start building concentration. Want to take it a step further? If it’s a competitive game, watch your replays! If you actually want to grind and get better, sitting through, and analyzing your gameplay will do wonders for you. If you already want a higher rank, this practice leverages your existing desire to get better, and you’ll notice the benefits almost immediately!
This same thing can be done for watching TV, scrolling on social media, or even listening to music – which is my personal favorite. When I concentrate on the music, I can start to hear instruments I’d never heard, catch lyrics I’d never understood, and it really deepens my appreciation for the art… at the cost of exerting effort.
Now, in this practice, when you lose concentration, DO NOT beat yourself up. Every time you ATTEMPT to concentrate while in an activity, that’s a rep. You’re making that muscle of the mind stronger. Just like going to the gym, if you’ve done a good job, you will feel negativity like soreness and pain. Same goes for your mind, you will feel bad when you have the thought “I couldn’t stay focused for longer.” But that’s not failure. That’s progress. Every time you feel that strain, you’re getting stronger.
Eventually, you’ll be able to start meditating. You’ll see your ability to control your attention improve, and you will start to develop the autonomy to live the life you know you’re capable of.
This is my first Substack, it took a lot of concentration to write. I procrastinated on it for months. But every time I thought about it, I gave it a few seconds of very intentional thought with no distractions, until eventually, I became dissatisfied with NOT writing it. It’s entirely possible that almost nobody reads this. I don’t care. This article is proof that it can be done. I know my mind is “capable” of writing something like this within 4 hours easily. However, to choose to do it, and to control my attention for long enough to see it through? It took me months.
I’ll see you next week :)
