> Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back.
Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me.
I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to be my last day.
I have at various points of my life been diagnosed with downs syndrome, chronic depression, anxiety, ADD, tourettes. Almost certainly undiagnosed PTSD and tests indicate maybe mild autism. I do not think anyone actually knows, and I stopped letting such fuzzy labels define me. I can say for me the drugs never fixed the root causes. They just made me care less about having control. A passenger in my own life.
Once I recognized constant connectivity and internet media as mild poisons like alcohol, and regulated those, I found myself a lot happier without drug dependence. (YMMV, every brain is different)
I can focus on whatever I want now. A mechanical puzzle, work, an open source project, a video game, my family, my friends, or typing this comment to a stranger on the internet I empathize with. My motivation is seemingly endless now too.
Get rid of the doom scrolling poison and give your brain time to reset and recalibrate. Spend several hours a day away from the internet. I cannot promise it is the only change needed for you but I promise strategic life change experiments will provide a better chance of a positive outcome than waiting to die.
I am not a doom scroller. Like I say, I try to regulate my news intake to things that are valuable and I have for years. I use social media only for creative-interest-based groups — I have no "friend feed" at all and I haven't in more than a decade. I have some places where my limited focus is enough to share expertise, and that is more or less it.
Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.
I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.
I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.
But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.
As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.