Attention, Focus, and the ADHD Flight Response
Attention and Safety: Rewriting the Story
We talk a lot about attention these days — how easily it slips away, how fractured it feels. But maybe the story isn’t only about shrinking attention spans. Maybe it’s about living in a world that demands more from our nervous systems than they were ever designed to hold.
A higher narrative asks us to zoom out. To see attention not as a personal failing, but as a measure of how safe and connected we feel in our environments. When the world is too fast, too loud, too uncertain, attention doesn’t just wander — it seeks refuge.
From Disorder to Survival Strategy
ADHD is often framed as a deficit, a dysfunction. But what if we reframed it as an intelligent — though costly — survival adaptation? Gabor Maté calls it a trauma response, and that perspective opens a doorway to compassion.
What we call distractibility may actually be a nervous system scanning for safety. Hyperfocus can be a way to anchor in what feels alive, while tuning out what feels empty or threatening. Even the quieter, more “invisible” version of ADHD — the overthinking, the detachment — can be seen as the flight mode of a sensitive system. It’s not the absence of attention, but attention reorganized around self-protection.
The Roots Beneath the Restlessness
The early chapters of our story are written before we can use words — in the womb, in infancy, in the spaces where emotional attunement is either given or absent. When that attunement is missing, we learn to intellectualize safety. We live in the head because the heart feels too exposed.
This isn’t just an individual story; it’s a cultural one. Capitalism, migration, war, generational trauma — all shape environments where emotional presence is scarce. As Pierre Bourdieu might say, our habitus is formed here: those deep, embodied patterns that dictate how we perceive, react, and relate for the rest of our lives.
The Gift Inside the Challenge
A higher narrative doesn’t romanticize hardship, but it also refuses to see people only through the lens of their wounds. ADHD minds often think in nonlinear, original ways. They feel deeply. They challenge systems that confuse conformity for order. These are the very qualities we need to imagine a more human future — one that values presence over performance, and connection over compliance.
Shifting the Focus: From Fixing to Healing
We don’t need to “fix” the ADHD person; we need to reshape the environments that crush diversity of thought and emotional expression. That shift is both personal and collective.
If you live with ADHD, your nervous system may have been built in an ecosystem that didn’t offer enough safety to rest into. Healing means not only offering yourself the attunement you missed, but also building communities, cultures, and systems where no one’s way of being is treated as a flaw to erase.
In the end, hearts heal in connection.