From Inside The Attention Tunnel

Hyper focus, writing and flow

I’m not saying I’ve cracked it, this continual attempt to balance at life- like wobbling on a Swiss ball. But temporarily I am mostly able to be immersed in my attention tunnel in a state of flow and is it a joy and a relief. I have taken myself away to write some poems for my forthcoming collection and I am tearing myself away from the attention tunnel to write about the attention tunnel so that might not fully count as not being in it.

In the past when I went into the attention tunnel, I might stay there too long and forget to eat or sleep or move about. I did large parts of my PhD in there. I wrote sixty thousand words of a novel in there over nine days when the first five thousand words of it were long listed for a first novel competition and I had to produce the rest (which didn’t exist). They were, those tunnelled words, miraculously, shortlisted. I wrote my final year degree dissertation in the attention tunnel and didn’t sleep either, but I was younger then.

I also perform my poems in an attention tunnel too sometimes. A lovely state of flow in which time doesn’t exist and I am connected to my body and an audience in a way that I usually have to think about very consciously. Performing outside of the attention tunnel can be painful- you look up and there are baffled faces in a pub in Bishop Auckland looking at you as if you’re an alien who has just landed there and one of these half-contemptuous, half-sympathetic people might be about to ring a hitherto secret government agency.

There are less productive attention tunnels- just reading an article on your phone about attention tunnels, immersed with all of your being in those words until somebody calls your name, which you don’t hear at first, and then you do hear but had forgotten it was yours, and then are annoyed at being wrenched away like a barnacle from a rock with some of your attention tendrils still stuck in the attention tunnel. (When you are young, this reading immersion, which many of us lose as we grow up or have lost in these hyper-vigilant times, might have caused parents, caregivers and teachers to either praise or punish your absorption).

This recent study draws a connection between states of hyper-focus (common in autism and ADHD) and the “flow” state which is much studied as an immersive mental state useful for anybody involved in absorbing activity- from sport, to creativity to whatever business-y things business people do and like to think about in terms of “better performance”.

Link to the Study

It points out that these states are enjoyable for neurodivergent people and can make us feel more alive. But we can also struggle - to get into them, to get out of them, to be in the optimum conditions that make them pleasurable and not so all-consuming that we neglect other things we might want to pay attention to (or that other people might want us to pay attention to- which is not necessarily the same thing).

I am better at regulating myself nowadays - and might think to stop for food, rest, movement and sleep. In an ideal world, other people might support us to do that too, having recognised that we thrive in these states. They might gently offer us opportunities to entice us out of the attention tunnel. I’ve put myself in a place and a position where I voluntarily want to do that- my favourite and most self-regulating thing I do is to swim outside in reasonably warm temperatures. Not possible in February by the North Sea where I live. But it is possible in February in Portugal. It’s taken me 48 years to give myself permission (at a moment where I also had the resources and time) to do this. It might be the most neurodivergent-affirming thing I’ve done for myself, ever. I know I needed to get these poems written by a deadline. I knew it would be much better for me to do it in an attention tunnel where I would have fewer interruptions over a period of days. But where the opportunities for food and movement were sufficiently enticing that I wouldn’t just stay in there.

This is all also part of accepting that I am a monotropic being. By that I mean that I am someone who fares better when they can give their attention to just a few things at once and tends to zone out things I’m not interested in. This can manifest in little ways such as how it’s difficult to focus on someone’s eyes and mouth and tone and their wallpaper and the background music and the aesthetics of their shoes (I will notice if they have sparkly shoes though) and their words ALL AT ONCE. That’s just too many brain processing resources to juggle. I’ll drop some. Usually the least interesting ones (I will just not see their brown brogues). It will also manifest in bigger ways - in that I will really struggle to focus my brain interest on my life admin when there’s some interesting thoughts about the future of neurodiversity to process.

Monotropism, which was theorised by Wenn Lawson, Dinah Murray and Mike Lesser,  is also a much better explanation of autism and ADHD than things like “Theory of Mind” deficit stuff. (According to me and increasing numbers of neurodivergent adults and researchers). It is beautifully and comprehensively explained here by the thinker and activist Fergus Murray who happens to be Dinah’s son: Fergus on Monotropism

I’ve managed a temporary flow in writing this, and that is one of the joys of writing for me and many of us. We can be entirely in one place, all at once. Vibrant immersion. So can we then in reading. Though there are so many things that pull us away and for various reasons we might not allow ourselves or feel we’re allowed to get there. To really get there. That flow state. More on that another time- but for now I’ll wish you whatever joyous flows you can get. They’re a need, not a luxury for some of us. If you’re a monotropic thinker they will absolutely revive you.

I’ve enjoyed this diversion, but I’ll just shortcut out of this maintenance tunnel into my current main Attention Tunnel via a sea dip and some grilled sardines - and see you next week on the other side.