Tom Knighton on what is apparently called “interest cycling” in hobbies and other leisure-time activities:
An article from a late 1950s issue of Model Railroader magazine showing a very small HO scale layout plan. The author later admitted that it’s really too small to do much with after it’s built — without some expansion — but the building can take more time than you might expect and you’d need to develop some new skills to do it properly.
Something many ADHD people do — and maybe others, I don’t know — is what I call “interest cycling”.
Basically, I get insanely hyperfocused on one thing, devoting almost all of my time to this One Thing for weeks at a time, then suddenly stop for whatever reason and then jump onto something else.
As a result, I never become truly great at anything. What’s more, since many of these areas of hyperfocus — one article called them obsessions, and with plenty of cause — require money, I end up needing to spend large quantities of money that I really can’t afford to spend.
But, it’s a need.
And it’s a problem. For a lot of us.
See, I have obligations that surround some of my interests. I’m a group leader for the local chapter of an organization I’m part of, for example, that requires not just me to teach a class once per week, but also to advance my own knowledge.
I still teach the class because others are counting on me to do so, but I haven’t been devoting much time to the rest of it, and I should since there are some tangential benefits to what I’m trying to accomplish here at The Knighton Experiment. Sure, some of it isn’t, but that’s just part of the game, so to speak.
What’s worse is that, so far as I’ve been able to find, there aren’t a lot of ways to combat this.
Which suggests that I’m kind of doomed to go through this cycle for the rest of my life.
Now, there are upsides. I mean, there aren’t many people who could detail both how to build a chest of drawers and a 14th-century transitional plate harness, for example. While I can’t necessarily build either with a high degree of proficiency, I at least know what’s involved.
In my own case, those sound like perfectly normal interests — I share both of them — although since my income dropped precipitously several years ago, I don’t spend money as Tom still does. What I have done, however, is to accumulate future stocks of books on those topics I typically cycle through over time so that when the urge strikes I can at least ameliorate some of the need by reading about rather than actively engaging in the hobby/interest/activity. That might be the difference between Tom’s concern and my experience … I cycle among a number of interests, but not brand new ones all the time.
