Motivation and Focus for Neurodivergent University Students

I have, at times, thought about taking my private tutoring in a direction that more explicitly specialises in neurodivergence. However, without being flippant, I feel as though private tutors end up specialising in neurodivergence by default, given that neurodivergent students are especially likely to require extra help (Wolpe, 2024).

In my own case, I did not fully come to terms with the impact that my ADHD was having on my studies until I started my master’s course in 2023, despite having been diagnosed back in 2019. Ever since, I have been fascinated by the impact of neurodevelopmental conditions on motivation and attention.

Earlier this year, I spent a lot of my free time working on my non-fiction writing, until I began to feel like I was hitting a wall of fatigue. Soon afterwards, I developed a sudden fixation with poetry writing. I could barely tear myself away from my amateur verses and found it to be a Herculean struggle to prioritise more important tasks. The upshot of this was that I ended up posting 10 poems to my Substack, while many more littered the cutting room floor. You might imagine that by now I would be a skilled poet on my way to getting published. However, you would instead find that for the past month or so, I have spent most of my free time making video game ambience videos for my YouTube channel. This involves editing together ambient sounds/soundtrack from a video game to create an immersive soundscape for listeners to spark up while working, studying, or relaxing. 

Why am I telling you about my own nerdy hobbies? Well, no matter how idiosyncratic they may seem, I believe that my tendency to get side-tracked by these bouts of intense interest helps to expose the complexities of ADHD hyperfocus.

Although we tend to associate ADHD with a lack of focus, people with ADHD, alongside those with other neurodevelopmental conditions, such autism, are, in fact, prone to experiencing ‘hyperfocus’ (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021). This refers to a state of intense concentration on a particular activity, at the expense of attending to other stimuli (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021). Hyperfocus tends to attach itself to tasks that are perceived as enjoyable or interesting, as well as activities that offer a level of challenge that occupies the sweet spot between too easy and too difficult (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021). The obvious question is, how can neurodivergent students exploit this capacity for hyperfocus?

It is increasingly acknowledged that neurodivergent individuals often struggle to focus on activities that we do not find inherently interesting, which can be an issue in work and study environments (Dwyer et al., 2024; Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2023). In response to this, we are finally seeing an emerging trend of allowing neurodivergent students to focus their learning on their own special interests (Bayoumi et al., 2025; Tansley et al., 2021). However, it is unclear how helpful this is for those like me, who experience a wide variety of intense interests that evolve over time. How are neurodivergent people to cultivate hyperfocus when we have to contend with a complicated blur of surface-level interests, underlying interests, and individual activities that just happen to be fun? 

It is difficult to discuss how neurodivergent students can exploit their own attentional styles while relying on the empirical literature, as this literature is in its infancy and struggles to distinguish between different attentional constructs (Dwyer et al., 2024). Nevertheless, I can attempt to extract some general advice from my own experience and introspection, while taking heed of the empirical knowledge that we do have. 

Personally, I like to think of the capacity for focus as a non-Newtonian fluid. If we apply sudden force to a mixture of cornstarch and water, it behaves like a solid, while an absence of pressure allows the mixture to remain fluid. Similarly, employing brute force against my own nature and trying to complete a task without mustering a shred of interest is a recipe for hitting a brick wall. Nevertheless, we should not treat our objects of hyperfocus as if we have no control over them at all. Instead we can cultivate enthusiasm by engaging in the duel process of gently moulding tasks to suit our interests, as well as gently moulding our own mindset to suit the task.

Although university assignments tend to involve strict parameters, we should not get so caught up on the monotony that we miss subtle opportunities for creativity. Academics do not want to read 50 identical essays, and there are often ways of drawing on your own interests, even if this is just incorporating a paragraph about the benefits of music listening in an essay about emotional regulation. Furthermore, it is worth making your best attempt to mentally reframe the task in a way that makes it more engaging. Having to learn the steps of a statistical procedure or the parameters of the SMART framework before engaging in a research project may seem insufferably dry. However, these preliminary stages can be seen as analogous to learning the rules of a game. Whether we are talking about basketball, chess, or Helldivers 2, grappling with a set of rules or strategies allows us to develop skills that used to appear unattainable. This generates the thrill of mastery.

This reframing of academic tasks can be complemented with all the standard study techniques for neurodivergent students, such as studying in an appropriate sensory environment (Doyle et al., 2024), studying in the company of others (Arnold et al., 2025), incorporating a healthy amount of breaks and fun into your day (Weinhardt et al., 2025) and exploiting timing strategies, such as the Pomodoro technique (Kreider et al., 2019).

It is far from easy to maintain consistent study habits when you are struggling to direct your attention in the right direction, but in piecemeal steps, you can build up your abilities in this area and achieve your goals.

References

• Arnold, V. X., Min, A., Bonang, C., Park, S., Hayes, G. R., & Piper, A. M. (2025). Beyond individual accommodations: The collaborative practices of ADHD students in post-secondary education. In ASSETS ‘25: Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3663547.3746324

• Ashinoff, B. K., & Abu-Akel, A. (2021). Hyperfocus: The forgotten frontier of attention. Psychological Research, 85, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01245-8

• Bayoumi, S. C., Kim, G. Y., Dwyer, P., Srinivasan, H., & Smith, K. (2025). Promoting classroom engagement of autistic students using focused interests. TEACHING Exceptional Children. https://doi.org/10.1177/00400599251346719

• Bertilsdotter Rosqvist H, Hultman, L, Wiklund, S. Ö, Nygren, A, Storm, P, & Sandberg, G. (2023). Intensity and variable attention: Counter narrating ADHD, from ADHD deficits to ADHD difference. The British Journal of Social Work, 53(8), 3647–3664. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcad138

• Boyle, A., Healy, O., Paterson, J., Lewis, K., & Treanor, D. (2024). What does an ADHD-friendly university look like? A case study from Ireland. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 7, 100345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2024.100345

• Dwyer, P., Williams, Z. J., Lawson, W. B., & Rivera, S. M. (2024). A trans-diagnostic investigation of attention, hyper-focus, and monotropism in autism, attention dysregulation hyperactivity development, and the general population. Neurodiversity, 2. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241237883

• Kreider, C. M., Medina, S., & Slamka, M. R. (2019). Strategies for coping with time-related and productivity challenges of young people with learning disabilities and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Children (Basel, Switzerland), 6(2), 28. https://doi.org/10.3390/children6020028

• Tansley, R., Parsons, S., & Kovshoff, H. (2021). How are intense interests used within schools to support inclusion and learning for secondary-aged autistic pupils? A scoping review. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 37(3), 477–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2021.1911520

• Weinhardt, J. M., Mai, I., & Young, S. (2025). Attentional control as a dynamic personal resource: The role of daily ADHD symptoms, job crafting, and work engagement. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-025-10065-0

• Wolpe, S. M. (2024). Promoting success in college: A scoping review of autistic students’ postsecondary education experiences. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-024-00448-z