ADHD attention regulation is often misunderstood as a simple lack of focus, but that’s not quite what’s happening. Someone with ADHD can lose their phone three times a day, keep six pairs of sunglasses scattered around the house, and still sit down and concentrate on one task for hours without looking up.
Those two things sound like a contradiction. They’re not. The difficulty isn’t paying attention, it’s regulating it. Attention that’s hard to summon on demand for one task can be almost impossible to pull away from on another. Same mechanism, different direction.
Why ‘but you concentrated fine on that’ isn’t a gotcha
This is the bit that trips people up, including well-meaning colleagues and managers. If someone can focus intensely on a project they love, the assumption is they could do the same for the report they’re avoiding, if they just tried harder. But ADHD attention regulation doesn’t work like a dial you can turn up through willpower. The intensity is real in both directions, and it’s not something the person is choosing.
We see this a lot in the people we work with, particularly academics and researchers who’ve spent years being told they’re brilliant at the thing they love and hopeless at the thing they don’t, as though that’s a character flaw rather than how their attention actually behaves. It isn’t laziness and it isn’t a lack of discipline. We wrote a while back about self-discipline or self-kindness, and this sits right alongside that idea: the answer usually isn’t pushing harder, it’s understanding what’s actually going on underneath.
Once you see attention as something to be regulated rather than forced, a lot of the self-blame starts to loosen. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth talking it through with someone who can help you work with your attention rather than against it.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
