🧠 Maybe Your Brain is Addicted to Curiosity
🔎 Evaluating ADHD With a Hypercurious Lens
☀️ Sol Bites: 7 Approaches to a Hypercurious Mind
📹 Video Bite: Karly Grant on Adult ADHD
🦉 Words of Wisdom
Welcome to Wisdom & Sol! If you haven’t subscribed, join our community of 95,000 intelligent, curious folks who want to boost their emotional well-being by subscribing here.
Maybe Your Brain is Addicted to Curiosity
Let’s say you’re working on a presentation, and you have two hours to finish it. You log on to your computer to fix one graph, then get distracted by a new article alert. You click on it, start coming across other articles you want to read, and all of a sudden you have 11 browser tabs open and three ideas scribbled down that are completely unrelated to your current presentation.
If that scenario sounds like your actual life, you’re definitely not alone. You may have worried that you’re lazy or have an attention deficit, but what’s driving your behavior could be something else entirely. A growing line of thinking suggests that what we call ADHD might be less about a broken ability to focus and more about a brain that is pulled toward new information—in other words, the brain is hypercurious.
Evaluating ADHD With a Hypercurious Lens
When you look at ADHD through the lens of hypercuriosity, several seemingly unrelated issues might make more sense.
With ADHD, you might be hyperfocused on interesting problems. The reward signal is huge, so your attention locks in.
Boredom feels physically painful. Repetitive tasks offer zero reward, so your system basically refuses to be bored.
Your thoughts race at bedtime. The “What if . . .?” The engine doesn't have an off switch.
You lose track of time. When something is focused on novelty, time tracking gets deprioritized.
Small talk is difficult. There’s nothing new to learn, so your brain checks out.
Hypercuriosity has a special feature: It isn’t a disorder that’s the same across all environments. Put a hypercurious person in a restrictive work setting without autonomy, and they will have a difficult time surviving. They also may end up burning out, or perhaps even self-medicating into compliance. Place that person in a freer environment—a laboratory, a startup company, an art studio, an emergency ward —and they will flourish.
The “ADHD is a gift!” rebrand has not only gotten kind of cringe, but it’s also not helpful at all. Having ADHD can make life very difficult and lead to big problems. In the same way, it’s important to note that hypercuriosity has real costs, too.
It may turn into a compulsion.
It can make task completion difficult.
It can contribute to risk-taking behavior, impulsive purchases, and addiction.
It may prevent you from resting.
If you don’t have ways to use your hypercuriosity, it may tank your well-being.
The point isn’t that hypercuriosity is actually great. But knowing you may have it could change your approach to work and life.
Sol Bites: 7 Approaches to a Hypercurious Mind
If you have a brain wired for hyper-curiosity, the goal is not to try to turn yourself into something else, but to start understanding how you function best. Here’s what you can do:
1. Begin observing when you experience the “scout brain” (scrolling your feed, hopping between browser tabs, scanning headlines) versus the “steward brain” (reading a chapter end-to-end, working through a problem, listening fully to a conversation). Identify the kinds of activities that lead to your lack of concentration and the types that keep you focused. Your tendencies indicate how your system of attention is designed.
2. Stop treating your attention issue as a problem of self-discipline. You’ve likely wasted many years assuming that all you needed to do was try harder. This narrative is most likely doing more damage than your challenges.
3. Bring novelty into tedious tasks. You may never turn routine admin duties into something exciting. However, you could alter the conditions in which you complete your tasks, such as doing it in a new environment, listening to a podcast while you work, using a stopwatch to turn the work into a timed game, or body doubling on a call with your friend so you can stay focused on tasks. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy—your brain requires an information stimulus in order to activate.
4. Create a "container" for exploration. If you find yourself distracted by all of your browser tabs, give yourself permission to spend time on them for a set amount of time each day. Try making a rabbit hole journal, and allocate some time every week to explore anything. Or, create a "park it until later" list.
5. When it comes to a job, carefully look at office elect environments rather than focusing strictly on a career path. Two individuals might share the same title, yet have entirely different jobs due to the novelty, autonomy, and ambiguity of their occupation. In assessing your next job, educational institution, or relationship model, the answer to this question should carry more weight than any official title: “Does this environment support my attentional style or undermine it?”
6. Safeguard downtime as if it were a full-time position. High-level curiosity brains don’t automatically shift into neutral. If you don’t proactively create periods of dullness and low stimulation, you'll find yourself relying heavily on coffee, adrenaline, and the three trauma reactions—fight, flight, or freeze.
7. Get curious about your curiosity. Pay attention to what is actually distracting you—not so you can berate yourself, but so you can notice any trends. Your distractions might not necessarily be distractions. They might be telling you things that you need to know about yourself and the kind of work you must pursue.
Perhaps your brain was built to flourish in worlds of novelty, ambiguity, and mystery, and you’re trying to make it work in spreadsheets and tedious morning meetings.
You may experience burnout, deadline pressure, and wake up at 2 a.m. wondering why you can’t be like everyone else. But the solution will not be about turning yourself into someone else. It will be about putting less energy into sitting still and thinking straight, and instead considering the question: What kind of world would allow this brain to thrive?
Simple tools that steady your mind when the world feels too loud.
Video Bite
Sol TV Creator Karly Grant shares a quick hack that can help you stay focused and build effective habits.
Words of Wisdom
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Help us make this newsletter even better for you! Was this issue useful? What would you be excited to read about next? Reply to this email with your thoughts and suggestions. We read every response!
Want More: Tools to Manage ADHD
This Edition’s Sponsors: 1440
Daily news for curious minds.
Be the smartest person in the room. 1440 navigates 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased news roundup — politics, business, culture, and more — in a quick, 5-minute read. Completely free, completely factual.
Along the Same Lines…
We love you,
Mona & The Sol TV Team ❤️
Lastly, some housekeeping…
If you can't find this newsletter, check your spam folder. If it’s there, mark it as “not spam.”
Whitelist our email. Add our email address [email protected] to your contact list or your Primary inbox in Gmail.