I really need som tips on how to avoid getting trapped by my own hyperfokusing.
I very often i get completely consumed by either youtube shorts or something similar and i loose complete sense of time and spends literally 5 hours on just doom scrolling and wasting time. The worst part is that I’m hyperly aware that I’m doing it the whole time and I really want to stop but I just won’t shake myself off of it. I feel so bad because i should go walk the dog or go do my hobies instead. It happens the most often when I’m supposed to work from home and it makes the guilt feel even worse. If only I could do something for myself at least while not actually working. The only way I’ve found working so far is blocking the websites from me using blockers but I know that I’ll just either circumvent them or find something else that’s equally bad for me to hyperfokus on. And I do have legitimate reasons to use YouTube sometimes for work for tutorials etc so blocking it doesn’t really work so well for me.
How do I get out when I find myself in that trapped state? Let me know how you are dealing with it.
I wanna add that I’m medicated with methylphenidate but it doesn’t really work on getting out of the trap if I’ve first gotten in.
Training probably? It’s a shitty answer but it’s something that I’ve only gotten good at with time.
I try to keep distracting devices away during work hours and I’m not too hard on myself if I get briefly diverted - I’ll let myself indulge for about fifteen minutes before I try and clamp down and refocus. I do think there’s a danger in trying to be too strict with yourself because your brain will be shit if you try to maintain continuous focus but you also can’t continuously indulge wander brain (at least - not unless you’re rich).
If I do indulge in 15 min distraction i have no stop button and i keep going for multiple hours and its so bad. I can only win of i don’t ever start, but it’s so hard.
That’s very fair - my brain is pretty responsive to alarms so I can use a timer to limit how long I’ll be submerged for. A trusted partner can also help.