The "attention tunnel" theory
Over the last few months, I’ve adapted to the impending truth that I’m going to become a father, exited my first business, moved into my first house with my fiancée, left an apartment tenancy early, and dismissed a director.
Each situation involved emotional entanglement, relational complexity, legal navigation, strategic considerations, and at least one person — but in reality, more — who felt my actions were unjust, unduly, and “blissfully ignorant” to the correct or diplomatic way to do things.
During this period — which I’ve navigated as best as I could, and acted in the best interests of my future self, while having my self (“no ambition”) and my work (“just a Directory”) attacked — productivity became an alien concept.
Creative projects stalled. Joyous expansion, to any degree, seemed impossible. Even predictable enjoyment — watching football, playing video games, speaking with family, being with friends — felt inaccessible, way beyond my grasp.
The vigilant parts of me that are used to inhabiting — and strategizing within — uncertainty served me well through each crisis. But it also kept me stuck in what I call the management of the mundane: the necessary navigation of change, upheaval, conflict, and disharmony that prevents the preferred immersion in anything else.
I recently discovered monotropism — a theory of autistic attention developed by autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser in the early 2000s. It explains my experience more accurately than any clinical description of ADHD or autism I’ve encountered.
The core concept: autistic people tend toward monotropic attention: few interests receiving intense focus; while non-autistic people tend toward polytropic attention: many interests receiving diffuse focus. This isn’t about ability to multitask or concentrate. It’s about fundamental differences in how attention distributes itself.
Think of attention as a tunnel rather than a spotlight.
For monotropic attention, the tunnel is narrow and deep. Whatever occupies that tunnel receives complete focus. Everything outside the tunnel becomes less real, less urgent, harder to access. For polytropic attention, the tunnel is wider and shallower, allowing multiple things to coexist with manageable levels of engagement.
Why "management of the mundane" consumes everything
When my attention tunnel filled with unresolved conflict — a parasitic former business partner claiming unearned ownership, abusive landlords and letting agents disputing early exit conditions to siphon funds and destabilise a family, a dismissed director threatening legal action for a minor procedural error — there was no capacity left for anything else.
This differs fundamentally from how polytropic people handle the same situations. They can compartmentalise more effectively. Deal with the landlord dispute for an hour, then genuinely shift attention to creative work or leisure. The conflict exists in one part of their attention distribution, but other parts remain accessible.
For monotropic attention, unresolved conflict stays at the centre of the tunnel until it’s resolved. Everything else becomes inaccessible — not because I’m choosing to ruminate, but because the attention architecture doesn’t allow simultaneous engagement — for my own safety, even if maladaptive.
The standard advice for handling stressful life events assumes polytropic attention.
“Don’t let it consume you.”
“Try to switch off from it.”
“Make time for yourself, still.”
“Compartmentalise work stress from personal time.”
These suggestions aren’t just unhelpful for monotropic people — they’re neurologically impossible.
You can’t compartmentalise when you don’t have compartments. You have a tunnel. And when the tunnel fills with high-stakes uncertainty, nothing else fits.
How monotropism differs from multitasking advice
Monotropism isn’t about task-switching ability or time management skills. It’s about attention allocation at a fundamental level.
Non-autistic — “neurotypical” — productivity advice often frames focus as a choice: you decide what to pay attention to, then apply discipline to maintain that focus. Distractions are external interruptions you must resist.
Monotropic attention doesn’t work this way. The tunnel doesn’t respond to discipline or willpower. What enters the tunnel is determined by a combination of interest intensity, novelty, urgency, and unresolved cognitive load. You can’t force something into the tunnel while something else occupies it. You can’t split the tunnel into sections.
This explains why autistic people often describe hyperfocus as involuntary rather than chosen. When something captures the tunnel, it stays captured until completion, exhaustion, or interruption forceful enough to dislodge it. And when something won’t leave the tunnel — like ongoing interpersonal conflict with people who keep escalating and demanding instead of accepting the reality that they no longer fit in — nothing else can enter. Which makes sense, especially with those decisions that are taken to remove and correct something or someone being in your reality, for your own good, but they’re insistent on remaining. As the tunnel doesn’t know if your reality is safe for things beyond it.
The polytropic person experiencing the same conflicts can attend to them periodically while maintaining access to other domains. The monotropic person cannot. The tunnel is full. Everything else must wait. until it is safe to expand again.
Object permanence and the tunnel effect
I intuited a connection between my experience and object permanence, though I couldn’t articulate it clearly, up until now. Thankfully, monotropism provides the framework.
Object permanence in developmental psychology refers to understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight. Most discussions of object permanence and autism focus on early childhood development — it’s seen as a key gate children must pass through in order to correctly perceive reality; hence peek-a-boo, etc. But there’s an attention-related aspect that persists into adulthood.
When something exists outside the attention tunnel, it can feel less real, less urgent, less present. Not because you’ve forgotten it exists intellectually, but because it’s not experientially accessible.
This explains why autistic people can lose track of relationships that aren’t currently in the tunnel and experience something called interoception disconnect: the difficulty or inability to notice, interpret, and respond to internal bodily sensations (like hunger, thirst, discomfort, and needing the toilet) or emotional signals (like anxiety, disconnection, isolation, and loneliness).
Paradoxically, things inside the tunnel can feel overwhelmingly permanent and all-consuming. An ongoing ambiguous and bullshit dispute will not feel like “one issue among many” — it feels like the entire reality until it’s resolved, making it super difficult to focus on the whole of the donut and not just the hole. This isn’t catastrophising or poor perspective. It’s accurate description of monotropic experience.
The tunnel contains what’s real right now. Everything else exists theoretically but not experientially, outside of that.
Why this framework matters
Monotropism was developed by autistic researchers examining autistic experience from the inside. It challenges deficit-focused medical models by reframing autistic traits as differences in attention allocation rather than impairments.
Deep focus on specific topics, difficulty with task-switching (going from one thing to another), sensory overwhelm when attention is pulled in multiple directions, social challenges when interaction requires distributing attention across many simultaneous external cues while maintaining awareness and connection to the internal ones — monotropism explains these as features of attention architecture, not symptoms of dysfunction.
The theory remains relatively obscure in clinical and research circles despite resonating strongly with autistic people. This obscurity itself reveals something about how autism research has historically centred non-autistic perspectives over autistic ones.
Understanding monotropism validates experiences that standard productivity advice pathologizes. It’s not a personal failing that I couldn’t “just focus on other things” while navigating six months of interpersonal conflict and upheaval. It’s neurological architecture. It’s a brutal focus on clearing the weeds before I could begin to sow any seeds.
The tunnel was full. That’s not weakness. That’s how the tunnel works.
For anyone navigating similar periods — where management of the mundane blocks creative work, where conflict prevents enjoyment of predictable pleasures, where the vigilant strategizing part serves you well but can keep you stuck in place until it’s safe to move again — monotropism offers explanation without pathology.
You’re not doing it wrong.
You’re monotropic, mate.
Citations
Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism — Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, Wendy Lawson
Foster, A., & Ellis, N. (2024) — TikTok-inspired self-diagnosis and its implications for educational psychology practice
Lawson, W. (2025) — Research by Autistic Researchers: An “Insider’s View” into Autism. The Autistic way of Being (provisionally accepted, Frontiers in Psychology)
Murray, D. (2018) — Monotropism: An interest-based account of autism
Lawson, W., & Dombrosky, J. (2017) — Object permanence and theory of mind: Links to autism and typical development
