A couple days ago, I spent the entire day doing web design, work that I genuinely enjoy and am interested in. But afterwards, instead of mental satisfaction and creative fulfillment, I felt like shit. Like a physical, visceral, UGGHHHHHH I don’t wanna do this anymore.

A similar thing happened last year, when I spent the whole year enrolled in a type design certificate program learning how to draw letters and make fonts. Calligraphy is a passion of mine, and I saw being a type designer as a potential career path. But by the end, I felt that sticky ughhhh feeling and decided it wasn’t for me.

Why? What does it mean when something I enjoy also makes me feel repulsed by the end of it? And why does this feeling only happen with some activities and not others?

I spent a whole session trying to articulate this phenomenon to my therapist, and found a key in the connection between mind and body.

Hyperfixation

When I’m hyperfixated (as a person with ADHD) on an activity like design, my mind is elated. Firing on all engines. I’m completely sucked into it, zoomed in, tunnel visioned, tweaking this and that like no tomorrow. Like actually, time disappears and there is no concept of today or tomorrow.

Sounds a lot like the definition of being in flow, right?

The problem is that my mind is SO hyper stimulated that it has forgotten my body exists. Losing track of time is wonderful, but losing touch with the signal that you need to pee, or rest your eyes, or stretch, is not.

What happens is that when I sit down to start designing, things are great. Over time my body begins to feel things, all of which my mind ignores: my throat starts feeling dry, my shoulders and neck start hurting, my eyes start getting tired, a headache starts coming on.

By the end of the day my body is screaming, and my mind literally doesn’t even notice. It is fully tunneled into the rabbit hole, and there is no reason for it to stop. It only stops when the activity becomes less interesting (unlikely) or the physical pain is so great that it becomes unbearable (likely, usually in the form of a migraine).

Flow state

Many of my other creative activities don’t result in this kind of sticky, hyperfixated feeling. Chinese brush calligraphy, dance, darkroom photography, neon bending. Time disappears for a few moments, maybe an hour, but it never disappears for 8 hours straight.

When I’m practicing calligraphy, my mind is deep in focused precision work. But it’s also necessarily hyper attuned to my body, because of how calligraphy requires precise hand movement. So my mind notices every ache and discomfort in my body. And when my shoulders or hand starts to feel tired, I stop.

With darkroom photography, there’s what I call “forced patience” built into the practice. This practice forces me to wait a set amount of time for exposing the paper, and then for processing it in each chemical. My mind is paying careful attention to the timer, and as a result I notice the physicality of everything around me and of myself.

With dance, there’s a natural and obvious limitation of my own body and athletic ability. The body is also listening for the mind — it reacts to the mind’s interpretation of the music, concepts, and emotions.

In hyperfixation, my mind and body are fighting each other, pulling in opposite directions until one gives. In a non-hyperfixated flow state, my mind and body are working together. Once my body feels a slight “stickiness”, my mind also feels it because they are attuned to each other.

Food for thought

Notice that all the activities I mentioned that enforce a mind-body connection are analog, and all the ones where I can easily slip into hyperfixation are digital. I’m not going to make a case for/against either since I appreciate both their benefits, but each will require setting a different type of boundary.

When I finished my type design program and thought it wasn’t for me, I blamed the screen time. “I just can’t have a job that requires staring at a screen for 8 hours a day.” And while that is still very true, I’m also considering alternative ways of working that won’t have me throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Maybe I set a timer and enforce breaks from the screen. Maybe I only do design work two days a week. Maybe I do design only as a small part of my practice/business/career. Maybe that means my design projects will take double, or triple, the amount of time as most designers. Maybe I only take on clients that respect this limitation. Maybe I let myself spend multiple years working on a single typeface. Maybe it will be an awesome typeface because of, not in spite of, the amount of time I spent on it.

Maybe digital activities that I once enjoyed (type design, web design, coding) don’t actually make me feel like shit. Maybe what makes me feel like shit is repeatedly allowing my mind to slip into unhealthy hyperfixation, and not setting proper digital boundaries. Leading to my mind ignoring my body’s cues and pushing it to its limit. Maybe this is what some people call “burnout”.

Maybe my reluctance to listen to my body and take more time with a project is internalized capitalist, productivity culture. Maybe the digital world being an easy trap for hyperfixation is by design, not a coincidence. Maybe taking more time, more rest, and making more of life analog, are tiny acts of resistance against capitalistic extraction. Maybe it will inspire others to follow.