The quiet art of attention

Cognitive control is one of the most important issues of our era, IMHO:

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back

There are many techniques to increase our CC. The ADHD community is a trailblazer in this respect.

I used to think that once I started browsing the internet, it was time for a break. One technique I've implemented, which I haven't seen mentioned is "walking pomodoro technique": for every 25 minutes of work, I get up and take a brisk 5-min walk (or lately, a jog) and come back. One of the most surprising things is that by mandating my own breaks, I browse the internet a lot less.

tl;dr: more talk about “dopamine” and addictive devices. I prefer the submission.

I suffer from RSI and definitely do not move enough when I am invested in some piece of work (personal or professional). I recently installed workrave[0] and have noticed marked improvements in just a couple weeks of actually taking breaks when it indicates.

I take a 25 second break every 5 minutes, and use this time to do one hand and wrist exercise (I keep some resistance bands and hand exercise balls at the desk). I take a 5 minute break every 25 minutes. I will either do some stretches, or a quick chore (e.g. vacuum one room).

https://workrave.org/

Fun article, thanks for sharing! It always blows my mind how much work people will put into this stuff without consulting/citing the thousands of years of cognitive scientists that have been working on the problem, but that’s more of a systemic problem; it’s what we get for describing the history of science as “first there was silly philosophy, and then in 1600 we finally figured out empiricism and actual/real/true science started”. I absolutely agree that cognitive science in general is about to take the world by storm as we learn more about our neurology (Google “DeWave”), and systematize philosophies.

The DOJ recently filed the first big post-Covid telehealth suit against a California ADHD treatment company (aka Adderal distribution) called Done, and it’s honestly fascinating to read the blog posts written by the founding doctor. His professional and philosophical opinion is that ADHD is a wildly underdiagnosed neurological state that can come and go over a lifetime, especially in reaction to attention-degrading “exocortices” as your article calls them. Obviously his credibility is damaged by the fact that he made ~$2.5M off that stance, but still, I think there might be something there. His favorite citation is Hippocrates, though I’ve never actually looked for the primary source he’s referring to.

The big exception to my complaint above is, in 2024, of course Stoicism, probably because it’s so damn cool (a book by an ancient general on how to be stronger? Sign me up!) and can be downright utopian when summarized in the right way, promising you eternal control. The article above clearly takes the general Stoic framework for granted in the very first paragraph, so I was more than a little surprised not to see it cited directly.

The universally accepted ADHD community’s technique seems to be called Adderall. It is difficult to pinpoint another universally accepted technique. Breathwork is not always good for ADHD from my personal experience and is not universally accepted. So really wonder what this trailblazer thing is about.

Another very apparent shortcut to ADHD treatment, also not universally accepted, is called endogenous adrenaline - the simplest drug molecule as somebody (Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash if memory serves right) designated it, and extreme sports provide a lot of it for free. This article though, does not seem to be about any of these - adrenaline or sports. Extreme sports such as snowboarding, downhill biking, paragliding (not really a sport), motorbiking, etc… are all about said state of flow and attention. No other activities I can think of that impact ADHD so quick and profound. Cause you loose your attention only once with these things.

In Denmark where I am from mindfulness is actually a rather big part of ADHD mastering (or whatever they call learning to live with it these days). Exercise and medicine are also part of it, but learning skills to help you function are bigger. I think breathwork as you point out is individual. Here they tend to have you try out various ways of gaining focus through mindfulness though. The one which worked best for me is holding hands under water, like washing hands, others meditate, others again so the whole breath focus thing and so on.

I do think this article plays a little light on what you can do, and how much of it you’ll need to do, to actually tame your attention. I do a lot of things. I don’t keep my mobile phone near me when I don’t want to use it. I do mindfulness. I plan to head out at 9:00 if I’m really supposed to head out at 9:15 because that means I’ll get out at 9:13-9:17 and not stress about it leaving more energy to focus my attention. I do the drugs, in my case Lisdexamfetamin is the least shitty. I ride my bike everywhere. I walk in the woods. I do a lot of things like that and it helps, but it’s not like it’s quite as simple as this article might make it sound. Even if you do it in small steps.

I think the biggest difference between how we deal with ADHD and attention here and the article is that we don’t focus on attention. We view ADHD as an “energy deficiency”. This is because you pay attention to too many things with ADHD, which means you run out of energy sooner than regular people. At which point you can’t pay attention to things that aren’t interesting to you. What is worse is that you’ll hyperfocus on things that, are, interesting and that will drain your energy as well. You’ll probably also forget to eat because you don’t really feel hunger, again draining you. Anyway, to live with ADHD in Denmark is in large parts about managing a fuel tank which is simply much smaller than everyone else’s. Because you need the fuel to pay attention.

Attention is good. Building the habit of paying attention is hard. Many people who get good at meditation underestimate the effort required. Highly recommend BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits for more on how to get started on anything important. Similar to the OP's separate article on kaizen:

https://tinyhabits.com/about/

what is CC?

How do you get more energy? aka fuel

I just got diagnosed with ADHD in 2023, but been addicted to adrenalin all my life. And I must say it had tremendous effects. The times where I was doing active extreme sports (Downhill mountainbiking or Motocross in my case) have been those where I had my mind in the clearest possible state. It's not only that my mind would calm down in that exact moment, but it lasted for quite a few days.

At first there was the adrenaline spike, when it wore off then the body exhaustion kicked in, and when my body started to recover, the week was almost over again and I could get another dose.

Over the past couple years I tried to avoid the risk a little and been just doing "easy" mountainbike tours. And oh boy, that's the thing for me. I think only my brother can relate how that feels to me. It starts out like a normal bike ride, but my eyes are always on the outlook for some fun spots (where can I jump up/over/down? How long can I wheelie today? You name it..). This combined with hours of just mundane paddeling is the way for me. Keeps stress levels low and my mind at ease, plus a few fun adrenaline spikes.

BUT ritalin is still a great great relieve for me. Though I wish I would not need it. For now it works, but I'll try to find habits that will hopefully make it obsolete one day. And the diagnosis was a good starting point for that, because now I know why my brain behaves different than others

Ritalin is not something everyone can take, contrary to amphetamines which seem to be super adopted, and particularly in the form of pseudo-ephedrine. My friend in Europe gets nausea from Ritalin and is considering obtaining Adderall from the black market. Even though this automatically means he stops driving cars. He is also potentially interested in micro-dosing psylocibine where anecdotal evidence exists it relaxes the adhd condition. Surprisingly even MAPS (maps.org) don’t do research in this particular direction even though they are pushing hard for FDA approval for many studies.

Everything else totally matches my experience and also resonates very strong and could potentially imply link between adhd and extreme sports. Would love to see an article on this topic, but I’m not trained in medicine so I can’t do it with reasonable credibility.

Whoever does it may cite comments here. A waiver.

With awe and inspiration perhaps. I don’t think author of comment above means a particular substance. You can also get energy with sleep, you see.

This reminds me of a popular saying by Vivekananda

‘Everybody’s mind becomes concentrated at times. We all concentrate upon those things we love, and we love those things upon which we concentrate our minds.’

This search/yarn for attention/concentration is a core principle of yoga, and only more relevant with the bombardement of information we have to take on daily base.

Source: https://vivekavani.com/swami-vivekananda-quotes-concentratio...

As a disclaimer: I’m baptised as an Orthodox Christian (in an autocephalous church which is neither Russian, nor Greek), so you can take the above from a philosophical not religious perspective.

That’s what the drugs are for, but if you’re asking how I get enough then the answer is that I don’t.

Basically everything else is about energy preservation.

> The universally accepted ADHD community’s technique seems to be called Adderall.

I wouldn't call it technique. ADHD is the one condition of the mind that can be treated with medication with greater success than any other, and yet it is under-diagnosed in children and adults.

I tried Pomodoro more than once, but so far always failed. I guess I have to follow Russel Barlkeys advice to externalize the internal and replace the Pomodoro app with a physical timer that sits on my desk with sad eyes when I don't use it for more than a day.

How did you fail?

I failed at first by either not setting the time or igoring it, but just kept trying to come back to it more and more. Eventually I stuck to it and then it became a habit. I even do it in the evenings now so that I don't sit too long or get overstimulated but that's a bit harder to stick to consistently.

This microbreaks idea is something I've come to myself. I noticed that when reading very difficult stuff (serious math or complex APIs) then I get to that point where I repeatedly read the same sentence over and over again. I realized that at that point I should be taking a break even before my usual 25 minutes is up. Maybe you 25s/5m would help me. I like the numerical aesthetics.

It seems I wrote my own keycounter for RSI last year but I never added timers/lockouts. I'll have a look at this workrave. Thanks.

> to live with ADHD is in large parts about managing a fuel tank which is simply much smaller than everyone else’s

Isn't the fuel dopamine? What you said reminds me of this explanation of ADHD from /r/explainlikeimfive¹:

“When you know you have to do something, your brain requires a certain amount of chemicals (including dopamine) for you to start and stay engaged in that activity. A person without ADHD will go "I need to write my essay." And the brain will go "ok, here is 1 unit of "starting a task" chemicals to get you started." A half hour later the person says, "hey I found interesting information on something else, but I need to stay focused on my paper" and the brain will go "you're right. The paper is more important. Here is a unit of concentration chemicals, use them for the paper" And this repeats basically until their task is complete, then the brain goes, "yay! You finished! Here's some happy chemicals, and an extra shot of dopamine" the dopamine hit solidifies a positive relationship with getting the paper accomplished.

A person with ADHD will go like this: "I need to write my paper. Brain, can you give me concentration chemicals?" And the brain says "I'm sorry I don't have any, no." So they struggle with getting focused. If they manage to force themselves to sit, they may see something else and think, "this is really interesting, but I need to stay focused on my paper." But the brain goes "hey I found some concentration chemicals, but you can only use them for this other thing. If you so much as look at your paper I will destroy all the concentration chemicals we have! Plus, I'll send out unhappy chemicals and you will be miserable and possibly even feel pain, but yeah I'm going to dump an ungodly amount of concentration chemicals on this other thing so good luck"

So basically even if the ADHD person WANTS to write their paper, the brain will not produce them chemicals necessary for them to stay focused on it and even if they DONT want to do "the other thing" their brain chemicals won't let them stop focusing on it.”

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vn1je2/e...

I have some graduated resistance hand exercise balls and bands for various exercise (different variations on squeezing, mobility, and extending fingers). I stare out the window at things far away while doing hand exercises.

I did pick the times because of the symmetry of the numbers (:

cognitive control, apols.

There are a bunch of different ways. The best nootropic is sleep, the second-best is exercise.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/a-few-ideas-that-made-my-life-...

Another good thing to do is block out the energy-suckers; ie distractions, especially the screen-based ones.