I have an attention disorder with hyper focus. Most of the time for people like me (at least the other ones I have talked to). The focus is on items that interest your mind, it can be a blessing and a curse. Obviously it works well if hyperfocus hits you while you are programming, not so well when it decides to focus on something like say sexual desire as hyperfocus is an almost compulsive behavior.

But honestly, at least for me, the hyperfocus is not really that debilitating, it's the lack of being able to focus on anything mundane or boring, your mind will literally just not latch on and it's like pulling your hair out to continue to force yourself to try to mentally latch on.

This is where medicine comes in, specifically amphetamine based stimulants, which honestly are one of the real true success stories of modern mental health science. There are few other drugs in the mental health sector that have the efficacy of amphetamines and its ability to regulate the issues associated with ADD/ADHD.

So the problem with those of us that have attention disorders is our minds latch on hard to what we are interested in and just fog on the uninteresting parts. This leads to a few issues, one can be sloppiness, one just flubs over the details that they don't like, no follow thru is another big issue, so one starts a project does all the details they are interested in and then loses interest in the project. Avoidance of task until it becomes a big problem is another. As a note on the latter, for some tasks that one cannot focus on are almost physically painful and extremely stressful to even think about. Before I sought treatment a big one for me was just doing the dishes, I don't know what it is about dishes but I find it to be one of the most boring and mundane tasks you can do. So I would avoid it, until the sink hit critical mass, and then I had to drag myself kicking and screaming to the sink and in the processes I would get distracted by every single little thing. What should have been a 30 minute job would stretch out 2 to 3 hours while I found every other thing I could to distract myself in the kitchen. The whole time, I knew the dishes needed to be done, I knew as they where stacking up it would be easier to just deal with them now, and it would be worse later, it caused me a lot of stress knowing it was building, but yet I was locked in this pattern each and every week yet my pathological behavior never changed.

Now back to the medicine, ADD/ADHD medicine provides those of us that suffer from it, with the ability to turn on and off focus as well as allows us to remain focused on more mundane tasks. When I am on my medicine it is like I have the ability to turn hyperfocus on and off, on whatever subject I want to, it becomes like a superpower as well I am able to break that focus as it is not so compulsive. As a contrast, now I can be extremely focused on a task, realize that I am getting eye or wrist strain remind myself that I need a break, get up walk over to the sink and wash a few dishes as an activity to do while I take a breather. Where off the medicine, I am extremely single task focused, and have to drive that task to completion, any distractions from that single task are almost physically painful and stressful to even think about.

The way I always explained it, is it's like taking a road trip where all you focus on is the destination, you dream about the destination, you speed to get to the destination, you don't get off any exits until you are so low on gas that you can't ignore it, but in the end the destination was far less interesting than the trip to get there but you missed all that, because all you could do is focus on getting to the destination. With medicine you can still be extremely focused on the destination but realize that the sign of the roadside oddities and emporium at the next exit actually looks pretty cool and might be worth a slight detour. It allows you to see opportunities along the trip and view the trip as an experience in and of itself.