Am I posting too much on Instagram? Great, I’ll delete it for a few days. It manifests in a few ways, so I’ll remove the medium of manifestation. I don’t know what the clinical way of dealing with hyperfixation is, but I try to combat it in the ways I know work for me. You can hear yourself talking about the object of your obsession, rambling, watching as your friends tune out or giggle nervously, but it’s better than worrying about anything else in your life, right? In the recesses of your mind, you maybe acknowledge that it’s sometimes easier to hyperfocus on something than deal with the problems invading your life. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be -” until you cry yourself to sleep. Outnumbered and outgunned, you let yourself slip into this shifted reality of hyperfocus, twitching and telling yourself “I’ve gone through this before - it’ll only last a few months.
#Hyperfixation vs hyperfocus full#
It’s two sides of your brain, armored up and warring with one another, but the one side has a full army and the other one is just you with a butter knife. And you know that it’s 100% debilitating and that it’s going to end up hurting you, but while you’re screaming about it, the radio is cranked up, drowning you out.
You can hear and feel yourself zeroing on something, obsessing about it. So you lean back, look out the window, and hope for the best? That’s what hyperfixation feels like.
Have you ever been riding in the passenger seat of a car with a friend, family member driving - someone that you really trust? The person in the driver’s seat is steering erratically and unsafely, but you’re powerless to do anything. At that point in my life, I was spinning so out of control that my brain needed something to latch onto, and the fixation was born. I feel the lump in my throat - it’s still something so difficult to talk about, but this fixation caused pain and depression and anxiety and gallons of tears for a year and a half. It involved specific high school events, an unforgiving administration, an emotionally manipulative teacher, and a group of enablers who were my friends at the time.
#Hyperfixation vs hyperfocus skin#
Even writing about it now makes my skin crawl and my hands tremble. I’m quiet about it, and will still take the specifics of it to my grave, because it is something that I am so embarrassed about, although it is something that I didn’t (essentially) have much control over. My first “fixation event” I can recall was one that I still hold close to my chest, and is probably the first instance of this controlling force based in the chemical imbalance of my brain chemistry. My hyperfixation became a prevalent, noticeable issue during my senior year of high school. Or it can also be an ugly thing that rears its head when you least expect it, one that leaves you crying in your bed at two in the morning, praying for the first time in weeks that some higher power will scoop your fixation out from your brain and leave your mind silent at least for an hour or two. Hyperfixation can be a coping mechanism (thank you, The Lightning Thief Musical hyperfixation for getting me through part of this 2020 pandemic). I’ve hyper fixated on people, places, and things, as well as phenomena, events, and an immeasurable number of other things. Hyperfixation, as I call it, has controlled my life at more points than I can count.
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