Reclaiming Your Attention: Navigating the Micro and Macro Pulls of the Attention Economy
Neurodivergent Notes: New Year Reflections Series, Part Two. Neurodivergent Notes is a Sunday Newsletter / Essay I send out to readers each Sunday. These essays tend to be more reflective, personal as I chew on current events, psychology and neurodivergence. To sign up for Neurodivergent Notes you can subscribe here.
Over the past month, I’ve been reflecting on intentions, values, and cultivating spaces that support the actions I want to take. To wrap up this series, I want to focus on one last (and arguably most important) area where I’ve been striving to bring more intention into my life: where I direct my attention.
This matters on both a micro and macro level. By micro, I mean how we manage our own internal focus; by macro, I mean how we navigate the forces constantly vying for our attention. (And, of course, these two levels are more intertwined than my framework suggests.)
Micro Attention (Attention of Self)
When I talk about micro attention, I mean the daily struggle of trying to direct — or wrestle — my own mind. Socializing is hard for a lot of reasons, but one of the most painful has to be the post-event mental playback. Many of you likely know how this one feel: you’ve put yourself out there, and afterward, your mind decides to dissect every potential mistake or awkward moment. Or there’s the post-presentation loop, which I’ve been in lately, where your brain replays everything you said and analyzes it for errors.
For ADHD and Autistic brains, this kind of rumination can feel extra sticky. We’re more prone to falling into repetitive loops, and when those loops turn inward with self-criticism or anxious catastrophizing, it’s the perfect breeding ground for mental health struggles.
A 2023 study shed some light on this connection between ADHD traits, rumination, and mental health. Researchers found that the more someone’s ADHD impacted their daily life, the more severe their anxiety and depression were likely to be. But here’s the really interesting part: this link was largely driven by excessive mind wandering, rumination, and reduced mindfulness.
While mind wandering is completely normal (and even helpful in the right contexts), when it becomes excessive, it can lead to that restless, overactive feeling many of us know all too well. Add in the fact that ADHD brains often struggle to pivot away from that loop, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for spirals that feed anxiety and depression.
While this study might feel discouraging at first glance, I found it surprisingly normalizing and hopeful. It helped me have more compassion for my struggles to direct my attention away from unhelpful scripts, while simultaneously making me feel hopeful as it provides a pathway for support – I learned that the more we can cultivate agency in our attention, the more protective it is. Mindfulness, at its core, is about learning to direct our attention with intention. If we can get better at noticing when we’re stuck in a loop so we can pivot away from it, we can interrupt some of the patterns that feed anxiety and depression.
To be clear, I’m far from great at this. I still get pulled into plenty of rumination loops — the anxious ones, the self-deprecating ones, the intrusive memories that descend at all hours of the day. But as I’ve gotten better at meta-awareness they have less power over me. For me, this looks like calling out the loop as it’s happening. Sometimes it sounds like, “Oh hey, post-presentation rumination, we’re not doing this today. Thanks though.”
After that, it’s about figuring out what my brain actually needs. Some days, it’s sensory distraction — vibrations, heavy weight, loud music, or a TV show I can fall into. Other days, I need to face the thoughts head-on and sit with them intentionally instead of letting them run rampant in the background all day. And sometimes, I just need to sit with the emotions that come up and let them move through me.
It’s messy and imperfect, but every time I catch myself in a loop and manage to pivot, it feels like I’ve gained an inch of agency over my attention. Whether it’s naming the rumination to defang it, telling my brain to “leave it,” redirecting to a sensory experience, falling into a special interest, or diving into monotropic focus, this is the messy toolkit I’m working with to bring more intention to where my mind goes. It’s clunky, but it’s moving me in the right direction.
Macro Attention (Navigating Those That Want Our Attention)
Owning my attention in my environment — resisting the constant tug of a world eager to pull me in every direction — has been even harder than managing my internal focus.
We live in the "attention economy." People literally pay for our attention. Superbowl commercials cost millions because they know they have us for 30 seconds. Social media platforms design algorithms and features (like the infinite scroll) to keep us hooked, ensuring we spend more time on their apps. I’ve even heard social media marketing trainers recommend posting something controversial to spark debates in the comments — because arguments drive engagement, and engagement means the algorithm will push the post to more people.
When I started building Neurodivergent Insights, I sat through some of these trainings, and it got me thinking critically about attention. I hated the manipulative tactics often recommended and started to ask myself: Where am I giving my attention, and is this where I want it to go?
A few years ago, I made the decision to step back emotionally from social media. My team still creates visuals and graphics (because I’m passionate about making education accessible), but I’m no longer actively engaged. For me, the cost of being on social media became too high — for my mental health, my nervous system, and my time.
Here’s an example: I’d post something, then open the app and see a comment that sent me spiraling. Maybe someone disagreed with me, and suddenly, I was down a 45-minute research rabbit hole, re-reading the studies I’d based my post on to make sure I could stand by what I said. My OCD tendencies loved this, but my nervous system? Not so much. I’d spend hours in a state of hypervigilance, worrying about what people on the internet were saying about me and my work — while being far less present for the people I love most. It’s hard to comfort an anxious child when your own nervous system is stuck in high-alert mode.
Beyond that, I never knew what I’d encounter when I opened the app. Sometimes it was news headlines that sent me down another rabbit hole, leading to learning but also to emotional exhaustion. Most of the time, I realized I wasn’t using my attention the way I truly wanted to.
Stepping away gave me back so much mental bandwidth — and let my nervous system breathe. I don’t think social media is inherently good or bad, and I know it provides connection and community for so many disabled people (I’ve made great friends through it!). But for me, at this point in my life, it’s not where I’m investing my attention.
Lately, I’ve been more intentional about slow consumption. I avoid short, chaotic bursts of news and instead seek long-form content from outlets I trust to be thoughtful and measured. This week, though, I slipped. After receiving some texts about current events, I went down the rabbit hole of social media and the kind of news outlets that get money by grabbing our attention with enticing headlines). I could feel the shift in my body as the political chaos took up more and more mental real estate.
I remembered how I felt when the previous administration took office — the relief of not waking up every day to doom-scrolling headlines. That freedom gave me back so much energy and focus. Now, I feel the tug to re-enter the chaos that this administration thrives on. But one act of resistance I’m practicing is not handing over my attention on a platter.
Balancing this isn’t easy. I want to stay informed, support communities more vulnerable than mine, and remain engaged. Even as I write this, I cringe at the privilege embedded in having the option to thoughtfully moderate my news consumption. So, I’m working to figure out how to protect my mental real estate from the frenzy while staying informed and active. Like most things in my life, it’s an imperfect and ongoing process. And this week, I teetered in a direction that didn’t feel good. But I’m noticing — and recalibrating. Finding the balance between being informed (planning and supporting others) and being intentional about giving my attention away will take time.
I’ve shared my process of resistance by reclaiming my attention — but this will look different for everyone. For me, it means stepping away from social media; for others, it might mean engaging with it more intentionally. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. The message I hope you take away is this: where you direct your attention matters. And this is so hard right now, as there are large forces at work in the world, trying to flood our brains, intentionally creating chaos. Sometimes, the chaos is intentional — designed to grab and hold your focus — and reclaiming your attention can be a quiet, powerful act of resistance.
If you’re reading this, it means you’ve trusted me with your attention, and that’s no small thing. Thank you for that trust. While I’ll be imperfect with it, I’ll continue to do my best to honor the attention you’ve given me.
Spend your attention wisely.
Kandeğer, A., Odabaş Ünal, Ş., Ergün, M. T., & Yavuz Ataşlar, E. (2023). Excessive mind wandering, rumination, and mindfulness mediate the relationship between ADHD symptoms and anxiety and depression in adults with ADHD. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy, 10.1002/cpp.2940. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.2940
