An ADHD diagnosis likely means you struggle to focus on important tasks, pay attention to details, and see the full picture in conversations, which may even hurt personal relationships. 

Your attention span can feel like a light switch you can't control and regulate. The light flickers all over the place, sometimes beaming intensely for hours and then stopping for a whole day. 

Inattention is a central part of the ADHD experience, especially for people diagnosed with the inattentive sub-type of ADHD. This article will explain why inattention happens when you have ADHD and the most common consequences. 

Understanding Inattention

The condition is called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

However, ADHD doesn't mean you have a deficit of attention. Rather, it's an issue of being unable to regulate and control your attention.

Inattention is the inability to pay attention to something for a long time due to a strong tendency to get distracted by internal or external stimuli. It's why inattention often means getting stuck daydreaming, zoning out, or picking up another task (1)

Having ADHD means constantly living out of tune, out of synch, trying to but rarely being able to fully focus on the moment for enough time.

At any given moment, you have multiple thoughts running, like TV channels in the background. Unless you are intensely stimulated, it can feel like you can never ground yourself in the present because a part of you always remains in your internal world. 

People with ADHD can pay attention, but they are constantly bouncing from one object of attention to another. This is a perpetual state of irregularity and inconsistency. Like a radio constantly changing frequencies, you are never quite in synch with the present.

Your internal world doesn’t have to be the only reason you involuntarily pull away from the present. 

Distractions can be sounds, visuals, and events in the external world. 

They bug your brain just enough that you get the urge to give them your attention, even if they are unimportant and trivial matters. Furthermore, the ADHD brain struggles with the processing of all the data it receives at any given moment, so it may focus on what seems most attractive right now instead of what matters the most. 

The struggle to regulate attention and control distractions may be rooted in executive dysfunction.

One mental skill crucial for optimal executive function is self-control - the ability to organize, control, and resist the need to entertain your thoughts, emotions, and the sensations you experience. If your ability to block out distractions is hindered, then paying attention for a prolonged period becomes very challenging. 

Inattention and distractability can lead to some of the following negative experiences:

1. Finding yourself constantly spacing out in conversations, zoning out into your own internal world, and constantly daydreaming and entertaining imaginary scenarios. 

2. Forgetting important events, names, or placement of items because you didn't pay enough attention or got distracted when taking a note. 

3. Being anxious in conversations because struggling to pay attention can give a false impression that you are not interested or don't care.

4. Procrastinating and avoiding mentally straining tasks, like big projects or homework, due to fear of struggling due to inattention. 

5. Missing details, characteristics, and nuances of a subject because you keep zoning in and out or over-focus on a single detail.

6. Struggling to retain your attention in academic and professional settings, especially if the work is boring and mundane.  

ADHD Hyper Focus 

Having ADHD means that your attention likely fluctuates between the extremes. 

Some days, you may be zoning out constantly, stuck in daydreams and imaginary scenarios, or always turning to your phone and other distractions. On other days, you could fully concentrate on your work with laser-sharp focus and unwavering attention. 

Hyper focusing is the ability to maintain your focus for extended time sets without paying attention to anything else, and it comes with the cost of neglecting other needs and obligations (2)

Reaching a state of hyper-focus usually requires special circumstances, like having an urgent assignment and work that must be completed very soon, or the task is very enjoyable and intrinsically fulfilling. However, once you've reached it, you can be very productive, time-efficient, and entirely focused on the current activity. 

Hyperfocus can feel great. You satisfy the intense craving for your brain to work optimally at maximum capacity for once. Maybe you will finally get a taste of all those deep work and flow state concepts that productivity gurus on YouTube, TedTalk speakers, and workaholics on Linkedin are discussing. 

Some go as far as to claim hyperfocus is one of ADHD's "superpowers." However, we should be careful with such labels because being able to hyperfocus is far from always beneficial.

While the problem is that you usually can't start with a task, hyperfocus creates the opposite problem and makes it challenging to stop. This can be a huge problem if you neglect other pressing responsibilities or don’t take care of yourself by going out for a walk, eating properly, and not sleeping enough. 

Furthermore, just because you can hyper-focus doesn't mean your attention is glued to the right activities. 

Many ADHD people hyperfocus on video games, binging shows, and other activities that are certainly stimulating and fun but not necessarily aligned with their goals. Even if it's relevant to the work in question, putting effort without breaks can make you miss details, neglect nuances just to finish more work, and tunnel vision to the point where you are not resting enough.  

Key Takeaways

Despite being labeled as a disorder leading to a deficit in attention, ADHD can more accurately be understood as an impairment in attention regulation. Having ADHD means you can be very distracted due to a flickering attention span or hyper-focused on certain tasks or subjects. 

No matter in which extreme of the attention spectrum you are stuck, the fundamental issue is the inability to control and regulate the direction and intensity of your attention.