How to curve a hyperfocus

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Hi:

All my life I have been known to have certain things become a hyper focus. Most of those things have been movie or tv show related. How do I keep myself from going overboard?

What do you mean by going overboard? What specific kinds of excesses do you need to curb? For example, are your interests interfering with your work performance?

If your main issue is that your intense interests are interfering with your social life, but NOT your work performance, then I would suggest finding ways to re-arrange your social life so that your intense interests become an advantage and not a disadvantage. For example, get involved in organized fandoms.

Hyper focus may not be a bad thing. It is possible to go too far, but if you pursue your hyper focus in your spare time, it may not be a problem.

No, it does not interfere with work and I don’t talk about it all the time. That said, I spent some time enjoying a movie and a related TV show. I have also started geeking out about one of the characters because of the great CGI on his facial expressions.

As far as going overboard, I am talking about thinking about going through a phase where I think about talking about those things all the time. I want to create a balance so I think more of an adult but at the same time I don't want to be someone that I am not.

I wish I knew.

I've managed to get enough control of it to stop my entire life collapsing from neglect while I spend ages messing about in some rabbit hole or other, but it's only a compromise, and it's one that causes me quite a bit of distress. I feel constantly caught up in a war between my brain's natural tendency to glue itself to the matter in hand, and the need to be practical and to keep the time I allocate to them in healthy proportion to their importance. When the matter I'm not currently focussing on is clearly essential to my well-being or to my goals in life, it gets my attention (although often only at the last minute after worrying about it for ages), but when it's not quite that clear-cut, not so much.

I waste far too much time doing things I've just stumbled on when I had other plans, and I always seem to expand and complicate those things, and pursue them with ridiculous detail and perfectionism, seemingly unable to just bring them to a pause and crack on with the official agenda. And often when I do manage to break out of the detours, I leave tons of loose ends that make those things hard to resume later.

How is thinking about and talking about those things all the time a problem?

As much as I love this movie/series genre, I have other things in my life that I need to take care of. I don’t want to get so caught up in this series

Additionally, there are lots of people who make this assumption that the average autistic lives in their own world and can only have a few interests at a time.

One thing to do is flip it - try to hyperfocus on those other thing.

Recently I was hyperfocussing on a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle - I realized this and started to try to stop but then I saw another piece that fit sow I put it in. Then I started to try to stop again and it repeated. I tried closing my eyes for one second then two then four then eight usually when I get to 64 or 128 I can break focus but I opened my eyes around 32 and saw another piece that fitted - the pieces not fitted seemed to need fitting - the unfinished puzzle seemed to meet fixing and I seemed to need people to know I could make - at least - significant progress fixing it. I stopped counting and me and the needs seemed to feel better about things while I scanned the unfitted pieces and let my mind fall back into being an organic piece finder.

Then it occurred to me that my 12 year old son would be disappointed if I finished the puzzle - he would want to be the piece finder. The more I thought about this the more the water in the hyperfocus bath tub seemed to let out - I picked up an unusual looking piece and started to try to find its place on the box lid. And again I thought “this is HIS piece”.

I repeated this and eventually was able to go to bed around 3 or 3:30am. The puzzle was “only half done”

I get that hyperfocus too. Sometimes it's a good thing, I think. As a fraud detection analyst it helps me pick up on patterns and details in data that others would miss.
Other times it's not so helpful, as you know. There's a saying 'Can't see the forest for the trees'. That is, people focus in on the trees and can't see the forest. I'm the kind of person where all I end up seeing is the bark - every crevice, nuance of color, tiny bore holes made by beetles - and don't see the tree, let alone the forest.