The ADHD cycle of procrastination and hyperfocus has a lot to do with how your brain responds to interest and reward.
People with ADHD tend to be especially sensitive to reward in their environment. When something feels interesting, the brain can pour an unusually high level of attention into it, says Owen Scott Muir, MD, a dual board-certified psychiatrist in Stamford, Connecticut, who specializes in ADHD and lives with ADHD himself. “This gives rise to a relative deficit in the ability to allocate attention to things that are boring,” he adds.
Many important tasks, such as certain household chores, fall into the boring category. Even when you know these tasks matter, your brain often registers them as not worth the effort and wants to avoid them, says Dr. Muir. That avoidance is what we usually call procrastination, even though it’s really about how motivation and reward are processed in the brain, he says.
Instead of trying to eliminate these patterns, you can learn to work with them in ways that support how your brain naturally functions, instead of falling into the cyclical pattern that often ends with being overwhelmed and burned out. Below, experts share strategies to break through procrastination wall and use your hyperfocus more intentionally.
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