I really need som tips on how to avoid getting trapped by my own hyperfokusing.
I very often i get completely consumed by either youtube shorts or something similar and i loose complete sense of time and spends literally 5 hours on just doom scrolling and wasting time. The worst part is that I’m hyperly aware that I’m doing it the whole time and I really want to stop but I just won’t shake myself off of it. I feel so bad because i should go walk the dog or go do my hobies instead. It happens the most often when I’m supposed to work from home and it makes the guilt feel even worse. If only I could do something for myself at least while not actually working. The only way I’ve found working so far is blocking the websites from me using blockers but I know that I’ll just either circumvent them or find something else that’s equally bad for me to hyperfokus on. And I do have legitimate reasons to use YouTube sometimes for work for tutorials etc so blocking it doesn’t really work so well for me.
How do I get out when I find myself in that trapped state? Let me know how you are dealing with it.
I wanna add that I’m medicated with methylphenidate but it doesn’t really work on getting out of the trap if I’ve first gotten in.
My husband deals with that, and one thing that has helped him quite a bit is setting alarms. If he knows he is taking on an extended task, he will set an alarm on his phone for every hour or so. When it goes off, it distracts him from whatever he was doing and interrupts anything he is watching, so he is reminded to get back on task.
Another tool is accountability to another person. If he is having a bad focus day, he will sometimes ask me to bug him if I notice he is distracted for too long. Use this sparingly. I have been this person for a few people with ADHD, and using this too often has resulted in me being responded to like a parent asking their kid to stop playing games and eat their dinner. You don’t want to end up viewing your friends and partners as though they are an authority figure.
As someone with ADHD and who also works from home 4 days a week, alarms are your friend. I have specific alarms set for tasks i need to get done every day aside from my main duties.
Depending on your job, setting up automations can also help. Anything to make your life easier will give your brain more bandwidth which ive found helps me focus better. For me, i have a script that automatically refreshes a webpage that i need to monitor all the time. I always keep this tab separate so that when it does refresh, i almost always notice.
I’m an automation engineer so this is literally my job. I’ve automated everything I can but since it’s my job it literally never ends.
Ah yea i see how that would be an issue. Someone else in this post made a comment about switching meds. Might be worth talking to your doc about it.
That said, its not uncommon for those of us with adhd to try to find dopamine when doing things we dont wanna do. Sometimes having a video on in the background can help and distract your brain a bit. The key is finding something that doesnt distract you too much.
Stuff you watched before can be good.
As another eng, let me suggest two things:
- Macrodroid can be configured to announce the hour every hour:
I find that helps me a ton.
2. Consider looking at getting a “Time Timer”. They are a little pricey for what they are but they a) move the alarm from digital – which is a mental space for me – to physical, and that seems to matter for my noticing it; and b) seems to be the only commonly available timer that ticks in a way that matches an analog clock, which allows you to align it with the current clock and see the hour burn down in front of you.
If you find something that helps you avoid “well… What’s 15 minutes more? This would feel good to be done…”, let me know. I’m now very aware of how much time I’m spending on shits and giggles.
