Learning to Take Back Control of Your Attention

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was young, although my relationship with the diagnosis has changed considerably over the years. There was a period where I read everything I could about ADHD, learned about the different ways it manifests, and generally tried to understand myself through that lens. Some of that was incredibly useful.

Eventually, though, I became less interested in asking, “How do I fix my ADHD?” and more interested in a different question: Given the mind I have, how do I become better at directing my own attention?

That question has probably helped me more than anything else.

This isn't an article about how to treat ADHD, nor am I suggesting anyone should or shouldn't take medication. I'm certainly not qualified to give that advice. It's simply what I've learned from spending a large part of my life struggling with my own attention and eventually realizing how important attention is to almost every area of life.

My Experience With ADHD as a Child

I was put on ADHD medication when I was in school, and I hated every fucking minute of being on it.

I want to be careful here because my experience of medication is exactly that: my experience. There are people who find ADHD medication enormously helpful, and decisions around medication should obviously be made with appropriate medical professionals.

But for me, the experience was miserable.

What bothered me wasn't only how the medication made me feel physically. There was also something happening psychologically that I couldn't articulate properly as a child.

The adults around me were trying to help me focus, perform better at school and be less disruptive. I understand that now. But I don't think that's how I experienced it at the time.

What I heard was something closer to: Who you are when you take this pill is more acceptable than who you are without it.

That may not have been what anyone intended to communicate, but it was the meaning I made from it.

Looking back, I think this contributed to something that took me years to unlearn: the idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way my mind worked.

There were certainly things I needed to learn how to manage. But management and rejection are not the same thing.

Learning to Work With My Attention

As I got older, I started becoming much more curious about how my attention actually worked.

There were things I could become completely absorbed in for hours, while other things seemed almost physically painful to concentrate on for fifteen minutes. I started far more projects than I finished, accumulated ridiculous amounts of random knowledge, and regularly had ideas halfway through unrelated tasks that suddenly felt more important than whatever I was supposed to be doing.

For a long time, I saw most of this as something I needed to fix.

Eventually I started asking better questions. When does my mind work best? What environments make distraction worse? What helps me settle? What causes my attention to scatter? What deserves my attention in the first place?

Over the years, meditation, exercise, managing my environment, removing distractions and becoming more deliberate about how I work have all helped enormously. I still have a mind that moves quickly, but I've become considerably better at working with it rather than constantly fighting it.

More importantly, I've realized that attention is much bigger than ADHD or productivity.

The Modern Attention Problem

Almost everyone is now living inside an environment designed to fragment attention.

Your phone wants it. Social media wants it. Advertisers want it. News wants it. Streaming platforms want it. Porn wants it. Dating apps want it.

There are trillion-dollar companies whose business models depend on becoming better at capturing and retaining human attention. We carry their products around in our pockets and then wonder why concentrating on one thing for an extended period has become difficult.

This is particularly interesting to me because whatever repeatedly captures your attention eventually influences your inner world.

Attention affects what you think about, what you desire, what you notice, what you create and ultimately what you experience.

And this is where my interest in attention has expanded far beyond ADHD.

Attention and Men

I think modern men need to take their attention considerably more seriously.

A man can have enormous ambitions for his life while spending huge portions of his day allowing algorithms, notifications, sexualized content and other people's priorities to decide what enters his mind.

That has consequences.

If you repeatedly consume sexualized images of women, you're training your attention in a particular direction. If every moment of boredom results in reaching for your phone, you're developing a particular relationship with discomfort. If you continually switch between stimulation, messages, videos and information, you're practising fragmentation.

This is one of the reasons I've become increasingly interested in the relationship between attention and desire.

What we repeatedly look at matters.

Not because noticing an attractive woman or enjoying stimulation is somehow wrong, but because attention can become habitual. Something that initially captures your attention can eventually become something your attention automatically searches for.

I know this particularly well from my own history with addiction, stimulation and generally finding ways to escape discomfort. For a long time, I thought the problem was primarily the things I was consuming. Eventually I realized I also needed to understand the part of me that kept reaching outward in search of something else.

Taking back control of my attention became part of taking back control of my life.

Attention Is a Form of Self-Leadership

I used to think attention was primarily a productivity issue.

Can I concentrate long enough to finish this task? Can I stop procrastinating? Can I get more work done?

Those things matter, but I've come to think attention is much bigger than productivity.

It's part of self-leadership.

If I say something matters to me but repeatedly give my attention to something else, there is a contradiction worth examining. If I want a meaningful relationship but spend enormous amounts of my attention consuming images of other women, that matters. If I say my spiritual life is important but struggle to sit in silence without reaching for stimulation, that tells me something too.

Attention is one of the ways our values become visible. You can learn a surprising amount about a man by looking at what consistently receives his attention. And perhaps even more by looking at what he wants to give his attention to but seemingly cannot.

This is where discipline becomes relevant. Not discipline in the sense of forcing yourself through every moment of life, but developing enough command over yourself that every impulse doesn't automatically get a vote.

You notice the distraction without necessarily following it. You experience the desire without necessarily acting on it. You feel bored without immediately needing stimulation.

That space between impulse and action is something I've had to develop over many years, and it has become increasingly central to how I understand freedom.

Don't Let a Label Become Your Identity

There was a period where understanding ADHD was extremely useful for me. It gave language to experiences I'd had for years and helped me understand why certain things seemed considerably harder for me than they appeared to be for other people.

Eventually, though, I found that continually thinking about ADHD wasn't helping me anymore.

I stopped reading as much about it. I stopped following ADHD content. I stopped using the diagnosis to explain every quirk, struggle or behaviour I had.

This was a personal decision, not advice that everyone with ADHD should do the same. I simply didn't want a diagnosis to become the primary lens through which I understood myself. There is a subtle but important difference between understanding yourself and reducing yourself to a label.

For me, the more useful question became: Given the mind I have, what am I responsible for doing with it? That question gave me significantly more agency.

Taking Back Your Attention

My mind still wanders. I still get distracted. I still occasionally open a browser tab to do one thing and somehow emerge twenty minutes later researching something that has absolutely nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing.

I'm not trying to achieve perfect control over my attention.

What has changed is that I've become considerably more aware of where my attention is going, what is trying to capture it, and whether I actually want to give it there.

We tend to talk about freedom in terms of money, location, relationships and the ability to do what we want. But there is another form of freedom that is considerably less visible: the ability to decide what gets access to your mind.

Your attention is one of the most valuable resources you possess. Where you repeatedly direct it shapes what you think about, what you desire, what you build, who you connect with and, eventually, a large part of the life you experience.

For someone who spent a large part of his life believing attention was simply something that happened to him, discovering that I could become more deliberate about where I place it has been one of the more liberating realizations of my life.