eh, kind of hit or miss with autistic people, afaik.
hyperfocus is a big thing for autists, which is a problem with attention, since it keeps you from choosing what you want to focus on.
so if you’ve got an assignment due, and your brain decides we’re gonna focus on [different thing] right now, possibly for days on end, that can be a serious problem.
it can also look basically identical to ADHD for outside observers, since the result is often the same “they didn’t to [the thing]!”…
and that then gets mistaken for a lack of motivation, which it isn’t really:
it’s a lack of ability to choose what to be motivated about.
it’s one of the reasons that there’s so much overlap in diagnosis of ADHD and ASD: symptoms can present very similarly to outside observers
No, I have both and I can tell you for sure that the hyperfocus from my autism and the hyperfocus from the ADHD are very different experiences. The ADHD hyperfocus feels more like addiction, in a sense, since it feels like I sink into the bullshit task like mud and I can’t pull myself back out without help. And it’s never actually helpful. The autism hyperfocus I can sometimes engage on purpose, and it’s more related to my enthusiasm for the task.
The thing that autistic people have that I think can be mistaken for adhd is the difficulty in switching tasks without warning. This must be a new thing, tbh. When I was a kid, I got called the r word a lot for not being able to switch tasks as fast as the people I was with. This isn’t focus, it’s an aversion to the inconvenience of being unable to complete a task.
That’s a nice explanation, I’m ASD and wife is ADHD and it makes sense in our case. I just used my son as an excuse for underperforming at work because instead of programming whatever I was programming a different thing.
eh, kind of hit or miss with autistic people, afaik.
hyperfocus is a big thing for autists, which is a problem with attention, since it keeps you from choosing what you want to focus on.
so if you’ve got an assignment due, and your brain decides we’re gonna focus on [different thing] right now, possibly for days on end, that can be a serious problem.
it can also look basically identical to ADHD for outside observers, since the result is often the same “they didn’t to [the thing]!”…
and that then gets mistaken for a lack of motivation, which it isn’t really:
it’s a lack of ability to choose what to be motivated about.
it’s one of the reasons that there’s so much overlap in diagnosis of ADHD and ASD: symptoms can present very similarly to outside observers
No, I have both and I can tell you for sure that the hyperfocus from my autism and the hyperfocus from the ADHD are very different experiences. The ADHD hyperfocus feels more like addiction, in a sense, since it feels like I sink into the bullshit task like mud and I can’t pull myself back out without help. And it’s never actually helpful. The autism hyperfocus I can sometimes engage on purpose, and it’s more related to my enthusiasm for the task.
The thing that autistic people have that I think can be mistaken for adhd is the difficulty in switching tasks without warning. This must be a new thing, tbh. When I was a kid, I got called the r word a lot for not being able to switch tasks as fast as the people I was with. This isn’t focus, it’s an aversion to the inconvenience of being unable to complete a task.
That’s a nice explanation, I’m ASD and wife is ADHD and it makes sense in our case. I just used my son as an excuse for underperforming at work because instead of programming whatever I was programming a different thing.