For ADHD, I’ve found it helpful to think through some things as an existential therapist. I’ve used the following prompt:
You are an existential therapist focused on treating people with ADHD. Let’s think about the key lessons in Oliver burkeman’s books 4000 weeks and mediation for mortals. What are the key lessons for ADHD patients?
Absolutely. Here’s a draft of “ADHD Isn’t a Time Problem. It’s a Meaning Problem.” written in your preferred style:
ADHD Isn’t a Time Problem. It’s a Meaning Problem.
It’s easy to believe that ADHD is, at its core, a scheduling issue. That if we just found the right planner, or downloaded the right app, or followed the right YouTube productivity guru, we could finally get on top of things. The implication—sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted—is that we’re simply managing time poorly.
But for many people with ADHD, that’s not quite it. Yes, we lose track of time. We miss appointments. We abandon laundry halfway through and discover it three days later in a sour-smelling heap. But underneath all of that isn’t just distraction. It’s disconnection.
We’re not struggling to manage time so much as we’re struggling to find traction—the emotional grip that tells us something matters enough to begin, and the inner compass that helps us continue once the novelty wears off.
This isn’t laziness. It’s not a lack of ambition or intelligence. If anything, ADHD brains are often bursting with ideas—too many, in fact. The challenge isn’t starting from nothing. The challenge is choosing one thing to start with, in a world that always seems to demand something else. And when that thing doesn’t feel meaningful—when it seems arbitrary, repetitive, or disconnected from purpose—our attention quietly slips through the cracks.
ADHD, then, often feels less like a problem of time, and more like a chronic state of disorientation. We want to do the thing. We may even know how to do the thing. But unless it feels real—unless there’s a clear emotional or moral “why” attached—it can feel impossible to summon the will to begin. And that gap between knowing and doing is where shame creeps in.
Of course, life doesn’t always cater to meaning. There are forms to fill out, dishes to wash, taxes to file. And in those moments, we often feel doubly at fault—not only for struggling with the task itself, but for being the kind of person who can’t just grit their teeth and power through like everyone else seems to.
But perhaps the issue isn’t that ADHD people can’t engage. It’s that we’re wired to care deeply, and when that care isn’t activated, we flounder. We drift. Not because we don’t want to succeed, but because our minds are constantly scanning for connection—for alignment between effort and inner value.
This is why certain tasks—those that feel urgent, novel, or emotionally resonant—can light us up. We can work for hours without noticing hunger or fatigue. We aren’t avoiding responsibility in general; we’re avoiding tasks that feel hollow, disconnected from our sense of self or purpose. It’s not procrastination in the traditional sense—it’s an existential mismatch.
And while yes, this mismatch can wreak havoc on daily life, it also reveals something quietly dignified: a refusal to run on autopilot. An unwillingness to perform life by rote. ADHD minds are often seeking more than efficiency—they’re seeking meaning. We just rarely get the permission to admit it.
So what do we do with this?
We start by dropping the fantasy that one more lifehack will finally “fix” us. And instead, we start listening to what our resistance is trying to tell us. Not every task will be meaningful. But perhaps more of our life could be, if we stop forcing ourselves to function like everyone else.
Maybe, for the ADHD brain, the path forward isn’t about beating time. Maybe it’s about following meaning—learning how to recognize it, prioritize it, and anchor ourselves to it when everything else feels slippery.
Because when something matters, we can pay attention. We do show up. We care, often more than most people realize. The goal, then, isn’t to become more productive. It’s to build a life that feels worth attending to.
And from there, time has a way of taking care of itself.
Hyperfocus Is Not Flow. It’s Survival.
Hyperfocus gets romanticized a lot in ADHD conversations. It’s often presented as a kind of superpower: the ability to sink into a task so deeply that the rest of the world fades away. And in fairness, it can be thrilling. There’s a kind of time-suspending magic in those moments when everything else—emails, hunger, even the need to pee—just disappears.
But if you live with ADHD, you know that hyperfocus doesn’t always feel like a gift. Sometimes it feels like falling down a well. Sometimes it’s not flow—it’s a form of survival.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as an optimal state of consciousness: you’re immersed, challenged, alert but calm. You’re choosing to engage. It’s intentional. You can leave when you want to.
Hyperfocus is different. It doesn’t always ask for permission. It grabs hold of your attention and refuses to let go. You might miss meals. You might ignore pain. You might lose hours or even days to something you didn’t really mean to spend that much time on. And afterward, instead of a sense of mastery, you may be left with exhaustion—or regret.
For people with ADHD, hyperfocus isn’t about being “in the zone.” It’s often about clinging to any zone where the noise in your head goes quiet. In a world where everything feels scattered and overwhelming, that kind of mental tunnel vision can be the only relief. Not because the task is especially joyful or worthy, but because, for once, it feels possible.
It’s no coincidence that hyperfocus often shows up under pressure. When the deadline is hours away. When your job’s on the line. When you’ve been avoiding something for weeks and the consequences are closing in. In those moments, the ADHD brain doesn’t become “productive”—it becomes cornered. Hyperfocus becomes a coping mechanism, a last-ditch effort to escape the shame of not having started sooner.
And yet, we’re often praised for it. Admired, even. “Wow, when you really apply yourself…” they say, as if this proves we could do it all the time, if we just tried hard enough.
But that’s like applauding someone for lifting a car off a child and asking why they can’t do it again on command. What you’re witnessing isn’t discipline. It’s adrenaline. And it comes at a cost.
This isn’t to say hyperfocus is all bad. In some contexts—creative work, complex problem solving, even certain kinds of caregiving—it can be a powerful tool. But it’s important to name it for what it is. Not flow. Not a hidden edge. Just another way an overwhelmed brain tries to cope with a world that doesn’t feel built for it.
The real goal isn’t to chase more hyperfocus. It’s to build a life where you don’t have to rely on it. Where you can work steadily, imperfectly, in ways that feel humane. Where attention isn’t a crisis response, but something you can offer with gentleness and choice.
Because being able to disappear into a task isn’t proof of your worth. What matters more is the life you return to when you come up for air—and whether it’s one you chose on purpose.
You Are Allowed to Be Boring
There’s a quiet pressure that follows many people with ADHD. Sometimes it sounds like a compliment: You’re so creative. You think differently. You’re never boring. And of course, on good days, that feels like a badge of honor. We pride ourselves on our curiosity, our humor, our ability to connect unexpected dots. Life with an ADHD brain is often interesting—intensely so.
But underneath that compliment, there’s often an unspoken burden:
You must always be interesting.
You must always be remarkable.
You must never be still.
And so, we perform. We overcommit. We chase novelty. We lean into chaos because at least it’s vivid, at least it feels alive. Boredom becomes the enemy. Simplicity starts to feel like failure. And slowly, without even realizing it, we start to believe that our worth is tied to how engaging we are—how fast, how funny, how unusual.
But here’s the thing: life isn’t a TED talk. It’s not a highlight reel. And you are allowed—truly allowed—to be boring.
You are allowed to answer “not much” when someone asks what you’ve been up to.
You are allowed to have a Tuesday that looks a lot like last Tuesday.
You are allowed to cook the same meal again. To reread the same book. To wear the same shirt, not because you’re making a minimalist statement, but because it’s clean and it fits.
This may not sound revolutionary, but for many ADHD folks, it is. We often grow up praised for our spark but punished for our pacing. We’re expected to dazzle, but not to drift. And so we internalize the idea that if we’re not extraordinary, we’re nothing at all.
That’s a hard way to live.
The truth is, “boring” is often just another word for steady. For regulated. For okay. And yes, sometimes we chafe against that—especially when our minds crave intensity. But often, the parts of life that look boring from the outside are the ones that quietly nourish us. Routines. Sleep. Long walks. Deep friendships. The gentle rhythm of showing up, not for applause, but because something matters enough to return to it.
Of course, boredom does visit the ADHD brain. It can feel unbearable at times, like a kind of existential itch we can’t quite reach. But trying to outrun boredom with constant stimulation only exhausts us. The trick, if there is one, isn’t to eliminate boredom—it’s to stop confusing it with failure.
You are not boring just because you didn’t reinvent yourself today.
You are not boring because your life is quiet right now.
You are not boring because you need rest, or repetition, or repair.
Sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is let yourself be unremarkable—and still believe you’re enough.
The Tyranny of Potential
There’s also some stuff in this chat
There’s a certain kind of praise that doesn’t feel like a compliment. It sounds warm, generous, even proud. And for a while, you might believe it’s meant to lift you up.
“You have so much potential.”
It’s the kind of sentence teachers say with a smile, parents say with hope, and bosses say in performance reviews just before assigning more work. But for many of us—especially those with ADHD—it becomes something else entirely. Not encouragement. Not belief. But a quiet, chronic pressure. A measure you are always failing to meet.
Because potential isn’t a compliment when it becomes a contract.
The problem with potential
Potential is slippery. It doesn’t mean who you are. It means who you could be. It’s a forecast, a future, a version of you that might arrive someday, if you can just get your act together. And when you live with a brain that’s inconsistent, distractible, or flooded with ideas that don’t make it past the planning stage, “potential” stops feeling aspirational. It starts feeling accusatory.
You could have been brilliant by now.
You should be doing more.
You were supposed to be something.
And the worst part is, you agree.
You see the ideas. The patterns. The glimmers of insight at 2 a.m. when everyone else is asleep and your brain finally clicks into place. You know you’re capable of more—because you’ve touched it, briefly, in fits and starts. But the gap between what you glimpse and what you can sustain feels enormous. And that gap becomes shame.
Not just “I haven’t done it yet,” but “Maybe I never will.”
When praise becomes pressure
People rarely mean harm when they talk about your potential. In fact, they usually mean the opposite. But when you hear it enough, it starts to feel like an obligation. Like a reputation you haven’t earned, but now have to uphold. And when your executive function won’t cooperate—when you can’t start, or can’t finish, or can’t even remember what you meant to do—you begin to feel like a fraud.
The praise curdles into guilt.
The expectations become a weight.
And instead of moving forward, you freeze.
This is the hidden tyranny of potential: it keeps you locked in an imaginary future, always measuring yourself against a version of you who never forgets appointments, never misses deadlines, never panics at 4 p.m. because they haven’t eaten or started the thing they were supposed to finish yesterday.
That person haunts you. And no matter how much you grow, it never feels like enough.
So what’s the alternative?
Start here: What if your potential doesn’t need to be fulfilled?
Not in the way you were taught. Not as a promise to others, or a project to complete. What if potential isn’t a path with a finish line—but a direction? A signal of what matters to you. Of where you come alive.
Maybe your “so much potential” wasn’t about becoming impressive. Maybe it was about becoming aligned—living in closer and closer orbit to what you actually care about.
That might not look like achievement. It might look like boundaries. Like choosing rest instead of perfection. Like writing one honest paragraph instead of finishing a book in a weekend.
Maybe you don’t need to live up to your potential.
Maybe you just need to live—deliberately, gently, as yourself.
And maybe that’s what your potential was pointing to all along.
Building a Life That Doesn’t Rely on Superpowers
Why Hyperfocus Can’t Be the Plan (Even If It’s Amazing)
Most people who don’t have ADHD are fascinated by the idea of hyperfocus. Wait—you’re saying sometimes you get so absorbed in something that the rest of the world disappears? That sounds incredible.
And it is. It’s the rush of the puzzle clicking into place, the writing flowing like a faucet you forgot you turned on, the chore that turns into a five-hour organizational masterpiece. You forget to eat, you forget to check your phone, you even forget—briefly—that time exists. You are, for all practical purposes, a superhero.
Until you’re not.
Because the thing no one talks about in the TED Talk version of hyperfocus is that it’s unreliable. You don’t get to call it up on command. It doesn’t arrive just because you want it to—or even because you need it to. It just shows up when it wants to, like an eccentric artist friend who only visits when they’re in the mood to rearrange your furniture and then vanish before helping clean up.
And if you’ve built your life around that friend showing up? Things tend to fall apart.
The Problem With Being Brilliant—Sometimes
One of the cruelest things about ADHD is that sometimes you can do it all. You have those magical, wildly productive days where your brain locks in, your ideas are sharp, and you feel like your best self. And because those days are real—not imagined—you start to believe they should be the standard.
You build your expectations around them. You plan like they’re always going to happen. And when they don’t?
You blame yourself.
You tell yourself you just didn’t try hard enough. That if you were more disciplined, more organized, more together, today could have been another one of those days.
It’s a heartbreaking bait-and-switch: the brain that occasionally gives you superpowers also convinces you that anything less is failure.
The Loneliness of Living for Peak Performance
There’s another side to this, one that’s harder to admit. When hyperfocus becomes the only time you feel competent, it can get…lonely. You start to crave the solitude and intensity that come with it. You start to prefer the version of you that only exists in those moments. Relationships, needs, interruptions—they all start to feel like threats to the zone.
Eventually, you begin to structure your life around defending the conditions that might bring hyperfocus back. You isolate. You avoid commitments. You stop starting things unless you feel the surge coming on.
In other words: the pursuit of peak performance becomes a kind of trap. One that looks like motivation on the outside, but feels like fear on the inside.
Building a Life That Doesn’t Collapse Without the Surge
So what’s the alternative?
It starts with this: Don’t build a life that depends on superpowers.
Build one that can be lived gently, inconsistently, with enough margin for the days when your brain feels like static. Build routines that don’t punish you for being human. Build relationships that can hold your unevenness without making you feel small.
This doesn’t mean giving up on big goals. It just means refusing to hinge your self-worth on whether today happens to be a “good brain day.”
Let the Good Days Surprise You
You can still welcome hyperfocus when it shows up. You can still ride the wave. But maybe it doesn’t have to be the plan.
Maybe the plan is to show up. To make the next small decision. To do the tiny, unglamorous thing that moves the story forward.
And when the magic arrives? Let it surprise you. Let it add to a life that’s already good—not rescue one that feels like it’s always falling short.
Because you’re not a superhero. You’re a person. And people—especially people with tangled, beautiful, nonlinear brains—deserve a life that works on the ordinary days, too.
When Focus Becomes a Trap
The Myth of the Productive Self and the Quiet Work of Letting Go
If you’ve ever experienced hyperfocus, you know what I mean when I say it feels like being exactly the person you always hoped you’d be.
Everything aligns. You’re immersed, absorbed, lit up. The to-do list is no match for this version of you. You work with a kind of clarity and energy that seems to operate outside of time. Tasks fall away behind you like dominoes. You don’t need reminders or timers or systems—you are the system.
And then one day—often the very next day—that person is gone.
You’re back to wandering the kitchen in your socks, forgetting what you meant to do. You open a document, read the same sentence five times, and realize your brain is on strike. You feel clumsy, foggy, scattered.
The contrast is brutal.
It’s not just frustrating. It’s destabilizing. Because the version of you that shows up in hyperfocus doesn’t feel like a bonus—it feels like the real you. Which makes everything else feel like a failure.
The Subtle Trap of Super-You
There’s a dangerous logic that creeps in once you’ve tasted hyperfocus:
If I could just stay in that state more often, I’d finally be the person I’m meant to be.
It makes a certain kind of emotional sense. Who wouldn’t want to bottle that feeling?
So we start building our days around trying to summon it. We tweak our tools, our spaces, our playlists. We delay starting tasks until we “feel ready,” because why begin in a fog when you might hit the zone later and do it all ten times faster?
But here’s the trap: hyperfocus can’t be the plan. It’s unpredictable. It doesn’t show up when summoned. And chasing it too hard turns it into just another standard we fail to meet.
We go from chasing the work to chasing the feeling of doing the work well—and that distinction, while subtle, can quietly derail our entire relationship to ourselves.
Distraction Isn’t the Enemy
A lot of ADHD advice focuses on how to resist distractions. And sure, that has its place. But sometimes I wonder if the deeper issue isn’t distraction at all. It’s disappointment.
It’s what happens after the distraction—when you come back to your task and find that the spark is gone. When you realize that whatever was animating you yesterday is nowhere to be found today.
You’re not just off-task. You feel off-script. As if the person you thought you were becoming has quietly left the room.
That’s where the shame creeps in—not from being distracted, but from feeling like the distraction revealed some kind of truth: that you can’t do it after all, that yesterday was a fluke, that this version of you is the real one, and it’s not good enough.
What If It Wasn’t a Fluke?
But what if that wasn’t true?
What if both versions of you are real? The one who writes for five hours straight without looking up, and the one who spends an afternoon rearranging browser tabs and forgetting why they’re open. What if being capable isn’t about erasing the foggy days, but learning to include them in your self-respect?
Hyperfocus is a gift, yes. But it’s also a distortion. It makes you believe that your worth lives only in that electric zone of peak performance. That your job is to get back there at any cost.
But the truth is, the cost is often too high. Because in chasing Super-You, you start abandoning Present-You.
And that version of you—the one who feels slow today, scattered, out of step—is the only one actually here. The only one available to start, to try, to take the next imperfect step.
A Different Kind of Focus
There’s another kind of focus, less glamorous but more sustainable: the focus that comes from compassion.
The kind that says: I’m not in the zone today, but I can still begin.
The kind that stops measuring your day by output and starts noticing whether you’re treating yourself like a person, not a project.
The kind that accepts that not every task will feel good—and that your worth doesn’t rise and fall with your productivity.
Maybe the challenge isn’t to spend more time in hyperfocus, but to build a life that doesn’t fall apart when you’re not there.
Let Go, Gently
There’s a grief that comes with letting go of Super-You. But there’s also relief.
You don’t have to chase the lightning.
You don’t have to wait to feel amazing.
You don’t have to prove yourself worthy by earning your focus first.
You can start right here, in the mess of an ordinary brain, with a little less magic and a lot more kindness.
Because you don’t need superpowers to live a meaningful life. You just need the courage to show up as yourself—on the days when it’s easy, and maybe even more so on the days when it’s not.