Hyperfixation
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Not to be confused with hyperfocus.
I only figured out I'm autistic in 2022. I'm still learning. Writing these articles is how I learn things. They're all works in progress, to various extents. No-one can speak for an entire minority group. These are just my personal experiences, things I've found out from talking to my friends, and discussions I've seen on autistic forums. Please don't take me as authoritative. I'm not.
I dropped turtles when I fell in love with ice age fossils. Collected the shit out of them.
β (Fictionalised) John Laroche, Adaptation, 2002
A hyperfixation is an ADHD and especially AuDHD trait that essentially combines autistic special interests with the ADHD crave for novelty.
Speaking from personal experience, it seems that every few months my unconscious finds a new seemingly random thing to obsessively research, catalogue, write about, and collect, before moving on to the next one a few months later, each hyperfixation leaving as suddenly as it arrived.
You don't get to choose what your next hyperfixation will be about, nor when it will start or end. You may even find some of them downright embarrassing.
Each one seems to involve having a whole new field of things to learn about without much effort. This presumably gets the brain excited about having seemingly achieved something, even when your life is otherwise in even more disarray than usual, due to the accidental neglect.
This can lead to a lot of collections lying around, which is unfortunate. I've occasionally tried getting rid of collections relating to old hyperfixations, but the risk there is that examining them might reignite the hyperfixation, causing that particular collection to actually increase for a few months, before going back to gathering dust.
My hyperfixations have included Shavian, mechanical keyboards, and chess. The chess hyperfixation was accidentally started by playing a single game with my partner on a whim once.
In short, hyperfixations are a string of obsessions that you have pretty much no control over.
ADHD: Hyperfixation | Hyperfocus
AuDHD: Hyperfixation
Traits: Arithmomania | Hyperfixation | Hyperfocus | Perfectionism
