ADHD: The Hard Part Isn’t Focus—It’s Choosing the Station

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I think the medical establishment has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) all wrong.

It hit me the other day in the shower: The truest description of the ADHD mind isn’t a deficit at all—it’s a radio. I’ve spent my career studying attention and creativity, and while I’ve never been formally diagnosed, I know this dial intimately, from the inside. Let me tell you what it actually feels like. I suspect a lot of my readers will relate.

When I finally lock onto something, the world narrows to a single bright band of signal. The room goes quiet, not because it’s silent but because I’ve stopped receiving it. Hours collapse into what feels like 20 minutes. Someone can say my name twice, and I won’t surface. I am not trying to concentrate; there is nothing effortful about it. I am simply, completely, there. People sometimes call this discipline. It isn’t. It’s closer to being pulled under.

That’s one half of my attention. The other half is the part nobody romanticizes: I often can’t choose which station to tune to in the first place. Using the language of Kierkegaard, I too often drown in the sea of possibility. I’ll sit down with 12 worthy things to do, and the dial just spins—a smear of half-caught signals, none of them resolving, a low anxious hum of everything-at-once. For me, and I suspect for so many of my readers, the trouble was never a shortage of attention. When I’m tuned in, I have more of it than almost anyone I know. The trouble is the tuning itself: choosing the frequency, and then leaving it there.

I think this is the part we get backward.

Regulating Attention and Hyperfocus

We named it “attention-deficit,” as if the problem were an empty tank. But as the authors of one serious review put it, “despite its seemingly self-descriptive name, ADHD is not solely a disorder of attention.” It is a disorder of regulating attention—of selection, of getting the dial to land and hold. And the flip side, the part the diagnostic manuals barely mention, is what those same researchers call hyperfocus: “the forgotten frontier of attention.” People with ADHD don’t only lose focus more easily. They also lock on harder, and more often, than everyone else.

What a signal it can be! When the station is the right one, what pours through isn't just concentration—it's a particular kind of mind. A growing body of research is finally taking the strengths seriously instead of only the struggles. A 2026 systematic review by Biqing Chi, Rebecca de Leeuw, Marieke Fransen, and Martine Hoogman at Radboud University—"Character Strengths in People With ADHD: A Systematic Review"—pulled together 59 studies and kept surfacing the same cluster: elevated curiosity, creativity, and a restless kind of zest (alongside the real costs, like lower self-regulation and perseverance). While it's still a preprint (so hold the findings lightly), I find this to be a very important line of research with promising results.

I wrote about this in “The Creative Gifts of ADHD” for Scientific American—a mind that won’t stay on the assigned channel is also one that keeps catching the faint, faraway frequencies everyone else has tuned out. Darya Zabelina has found that real-world creative achievers tend to have a “leaky” attentional filter: They let in the noise the rest of us screen out, and some of it turns out to be signal.

This is why I’ve never thought “creative” and “scattered” were opposites. A wandering mind is not always lost. In Wired to Create, Carolyn Gregoire and I argued that the creative mind runs on a both/and: It generates wildly, and it evaluates ruthlessly, alternating between the two. The generating half—the part that throws off sparks and chases tangents—looks an awful lot like the ADHD mind on a good day. The hard part, for all of us, is the switching: knowing which station, of all the ones now lit up, is the one worth staying on.

Because there is a real cost here, and I don’t want to wave it away. The same research that finds the curiosity also finds the other half of the ledger: lower self-regulation, less perseverance, a harder time with the boring-but-necessary tasks of everyday life. The gift and the difficulty are not two different people. They are the same dial. The thing that lets you disappear into the signal is the same thing that won’t let you change the channel when dinner is on the table and your kid is calling your name for the third time.

Comparing Hyperfocus and Flow State in ADHD

Here is where I part ways, a little, with some colleagues. When I’m in it, it certainly feels like flow—what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described in Flow: the self dissolving, time bending, the sense of being used by the work rather than doing it. The “Imagination Network” is my name for the brain’s default mode network—the wellspring of daydreams and self-generated thought, and the network an ADHD mind has the hardest time quieting. In research I published with Roger Beaty, we found that creative idea production depends on the coupling of that imaginative network with the brain’s executive-control system. The same network that floods an ADHD mind with signal is the one creativity runs on, and the one that carries flow. The researchers behind that hyperfocus review landed in a similar place, concluding that flow and hyperfocus “appear to be the same phenomena, just with different names.”

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But plenty of careful scholars are adamant they’re different, and their point isn’t trivial. Flow is voluntary and redirectable; you can come up for air. Hyperfocus can look more like perseveration: you can lock onto something pointless as easily as something sublime, and lose three hours you needed. So the clinicians warn, reasonably: Don’t romanticize the lock-on. Sometimes the station you can’t leave is just noise.

I hold both at once. The truth is probably a spectrum—shallow flow shading into the kind of absorption that won’t let go—and the experts are right to flag the failure mode. But the inner experience is real data, not an illusion to be corrected. We don’t have to choose between the neuroscience and the experience. We can keep both.

Honestly, the longer I sit with it, the less the precise label seems to matter, and the more I want to just describe the experience—because I don’t think it belongs only to the people with the diagnosis. A lot of you know this dial. If you know, you know! You know the glory of being tuned all the way in, and the misery of standing in front of the receiver, every station lit, unable to commit to one. You’ve felt both, maybe in the same afternoon.

So I’ll leave the diagnosis to the diagnosticians. What I can tell you is the shape of it, from the inside: The problem was never that I can’t pay attention. It’s that my attention, once it catches a frequency, becomes the whole sky—and the real work of my life has been learning, slowly, which station to choose, and how to forgive myself for the generous static in between.