The Superpower of Distraction

I’ve focused a lot so far on the struggles I have with my brain and how I cope with them. That’s important, but I don’t want to ignore the benefits of how my brain works. Today I’m going to talk about how my distractability can be a very good thing.

I can be distracted fairly easily from basically anything that I’m not currently hyperfocused on. That sounds like a bad thing, and--to be honest--a lot of the time it is. However, knowing and harnessing that makes it much easier for me to extract myself from bad mental spaces, brainsucking loops and even just grumpy moods.

If I’m upset about something, and I realize that my upset state is not productive, I have a set of patterns that allow me to process as much as is productive, and then actively utilize distraction to take myself away from it. As previously mentioned, I’m a high-energy, high-intensity, high-enthusiasm person. As long as I can find something to be excited about right now, I can engineer a switch to a more positive emotional state. Since there are some common defaults (going for a long bike-ride, seeing a friend I don’t see often enough, going out for a food that I really like but haven’t had in the past couple months) that’s usually pretty easy. Once I’m into the distraction, the negative emotions wear off pretty quickly. 

If the thing underlying them is serious, they will come back, but it may be easier to process then, or I can do that processing in little bits by repeating this pattern. Emotions are very strong, and I can totally get overwhelmed by them if I’m not paying attention, but they’re also only a little harder for me to distract and reroute than thoughts, and sometimes much easier if it’s an obsessive thought train.

This is also another piece of how I address the bits of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria that I do have: I just distract myself from the thing and stop thinking about it. It’s not perfect, and it does come back around, but I can usually remind myself that it’s silly and distract myself again. The real key on both of these pieces is doing an honest assessment of whether dwelling on this thing is useful: sometimes the dwelling is useful and necessary, but I think, more often, it’s not.

This pattern also makes me very good at interrupt driven work, which is an accurate description for teaching, cooking (at least how I prefer to cook), and much lab work. While I know it’s not true for all ADHD people I store state relatively well. I’ll wander off three topics in a conversation, but will find the original one, eventually. That doesn’t mean I can call a state up on command (remember the disorganize brain part?) but given the right cues, I can generally get it back, and with this sort of work, I’m pretty good at knowing the right sorts of cues to find.