I’ve been working with young people on the spectrum for about seven years, and hyperfixations pop up now and again. I’ve never quite been able to “get” it, partly since I guess I’ve never really had a strong interest or drive of my own, or at least not to the extent of these folks. It seems exhausting and a little irritating (to me anyway), but that’s obviously me from the outside as a non-spectrum person (as far as I know).
It’s fascinating!
I don’t know if I’ve personally had any actual hyperfixations, although there are times I get immersed in a project or subject, but I have two kids who definitely do! It was far more irritating and exhausting for the adults around them than for them when they were children, before they learned the social graces necessary to conceal their enthusiasms a bit.
If you think about it, like many other behaviors typical to people on the autism spectrum, hyperfixation has a truly useful side. When it’s a child who can converse only about her bug collection, it’s kind of tedious. But when that child grows up and fixates on, say, molecular genetics, as long as she develops the ability to corral it a bit, it’s a whole new ballgame.
My son (age 9) who is on the spectrum is hyperfixated on Lego and Lego / brick based videogames. It can be a bit tedious as it’s often the only thing he wants to talk about. But as far as fixations go, at least it’s something that our family can enjoy with him (compared to say, being fixated about turtles or garage doors or whatever).
The main downside is that our kids have Legoscaped our apartment with a sprawling city, much like The Lego Movie.
How do you unfixated people get anything done?
Our daughter was fixated on names for about a year when she was 6. She spent all of her free time reading lists of names, creating lists of names, and asking everyone she interacted with things like “What are your top ten names for boys?” and “How many names that begin with E can you think of?” She filled notebooks with categorized lists of names in tiny writing.
We found her obsession tedious and annoying but she loved it. I think the answer to your question about how do people who are hyperfixated feel about it is that they find intense joy in it. Not being able to spend time on your fixation is the difficult part. The time spent on it is bliss.
Even relatively average minded people can go through phases like that, particularly as children. Ask any parent of a horse-crazy girl. Or a little boy who isn’t engaged by anything except trucks and tractors.
Perhaps those are minifixations?
That did make the push to get them to do schoolwork an uphill climb at times. It’s hard to fight that kind of enjoyment.
I was always inclined to fixations, perhaps hyperfixations. For example when I was learning to type, I started picking up on patterns of how letters in phrases fell onto different rows of the keyboard. For a more specific example, in the unlikely phrase “Chucking indochina in Dickinson”, the letters land successively on bottom - middle - top rows over and over again.
AFAIK I kept my fixations to myself mostly, except when around other people deeply interested in the same thing. My most recent one was computational fluid dynamics.
I’ve consciously embraced this trait as a vehicle for earning a good income and having an enjoyable life, meanwhile aware that many people appear not to do this. The embrace works for me, perhaps because I really couldn’t undo it anyway.