Attention Has Gravity: ADHD, Meaning and Frankl’s Third Dimension

I have fifteen half read books in my house. I have a folder of half written blogs, several of which were, at the time, the most important thing I had ever thought. I also, and this is hilariously ironic, have a half written book that is actually called How to Never Start Writing a Book, which is about the ways we get in our own way and lose the thread of things that once had our whole heart, in my office for the past 18 months.

The book is unfinished and I go back and forth with being ok with that and not so much. Either it is the exact failure it describes, or it is the most committed piece of method writing in recent history, and I have decided to hold both, because it helps me to compartmentalise my lack of achievement, with the meaning behind it.

If you are anything like me, none of this comes from a shortage of ideas or ability. Every one of those projects was started at full speed, with fire behind it. What happened is that somewhere along the way the meaning drained out for me, and once that was gone, no amount of discipline could get the engine to turn over again.

Attention orbits mass

We all know that not all tasks are created equally. Some have meaning and some have almost none. The more interesting thing is in which of us move towards what we pay attention to. The half written blog I wrote semi-recently had meaning in the hour I began it. Six weeks later it had none, because its relevance to what matters most became distilled and my attention behaved accordingly.

Most of us are trained to override this. We do the weightless thing anyway, out of duty, and we call that being an adult. An ADHD mind is often more honest than that. It declines to pretend something matters when it does not, and it commits with total conviction when something does. That is a very accurate instrument, and instruments that accurate are rarely restful to live inside.

Two models of the future

Russell Barkley gave us the standard account, and I think it’s a good one. He describes ADHD as a matter of performance rather than knowledge, and executive function as the capacity to act across time, holding an intention steady between the moment it forms and the moment it is needed. A bridge between now and later. The logic that follows is engineering: reinforce the bridge, externalise the future, add scaffolding.

Viktor Frankl was working the same territory from the opposite end. In his account we are pulled rather than pushed, drawn forward by a meaning waiting out ahead of us, and he was firm that this pull is not manufactured through willpower. We find it in the specific situation in front of us.

One model asks how we cross the gap. The other asks what is standing on the far side, calling us over. Coaching that only ever does the first ends up building beautiful bridges to nowhere in particular, which is an enormous amount of work for a structure nobody wants to cross.

The dimension the diagnosis does not reach

Frankl’s less quoted work is where I find the most relevance for ADHD and meaning based coaching. He described the person in three dimensions: the physical, the psychological, and what he called the noetic, the dimension of meaning, values, conscience, humour and commitment. His claim was that whatever is happening in the first two, the third remains intact. He named our capacity to take a stand towards our own condition the defiant power of the human spirit.

I love to sit with that and anchor a lot of my to do list around that principle. Which is why mine in particular has sections titled ‘do now’, ‘do later’ and ‘do whenever (but probably never’. Dopamine, working memory, time perception and delay all belong to the machinery. The part of us that decides what is worth caring about is not the machinery. It has its own orientation towards meaning, and the diagnosis has no key to it. This is why coaching moves things that troubleshooting alone cant. We are not repairing equipment, we are meeting the person operating it.

Frankl also picked a fight with his own profession, which I love. Psychology at the time (the1930s -1960s) treated tension as the enemy and equilibrium as the goal. He disagreed, arguing that mental health requires a certain tension, the pull between where a person stands and the meaning asking something of them. He called it noö-dynamics, and considered its absence far more dangerous than its presence.

The conventional advice for an ADHD brain is to lower everything. Fewer inputs, less stimulation and calmer conditions. Sometimes that is right just like with what they have strangely named neurotypical brains. But anyone who has watched an ADHD mind come alive three hours before a deadline knows that tension is not the enemy. Deadlines are simply the cheapest tension available. Meaning is the good stuff, and unlike panic, it is also renewable.

What ADHD actually brings.

I want to be specific here, because vague celebration is not my aim.

Frankl held that attention finds itself when aimed at something beyond the self, and that chasing focus directly makes it vanish. It actually shows up most, when we are lost in something that matters. That is a precise description of ADHD at full tilt: the self drops out, time stops registering, and the work gets everything. People spend years on retreat reaching for a fraction of that state. Some minds have a direct line to it. Impressive right. I sometimes wonder if it should actually be called Meaningful Attention, Focus, Super Power (MAFSP)

Then there is associative range. Ideas that have no business sitting together somehow in the same second, which is where original work comes from. There is speed of engagement, the ability to be all the way in within minutes rather than warming up or deliberating over how to put a triangular peg and a circular peg in a square hole at the same time for over a fortnight.

There is the crisis gear, the strange calm that arrives when everything is on fire and the tempo of the room finally matches the tempo inside. Theres a sincerity, since a mind that cannot fake interest tends to produce people who cannot fake much else, and that makes for unusually direct, unusually trustworthy company. Which means there is often a wide generosity towards other people’s difficulty, earned the hard way by having been misread for years.

None of this is universal. ADHD arrives inside one particular life with one particular history, and any general claim is only a hypothesis about the person in front of me.

Where meaning based coaching earns its place is in the aiming. Absorption is an asset without a steering wheel until we work out what deserves it, and that question is a values question long before it is a productivity one. Novelty seeking stops looking like inconsistency once we treat it as a delivery mechanism, since the same value can be served through twelve different doors and variety becomes a strategy rather than a symptom.

Interest itself turns into data: the things that pulled hardest are telling us what matters, and reading that pattern is some of the most useful work we do together. Then we build tension deliberately, making the far side of the bridge vivid enough to pull, rather than waiting for a deadline to do it at three times the price.

Said honestly

None of this makes admin easier. The costs are real and they are usually paid in energy, in relationships, and in the long tax of things that never gained weight until they became emergencies.

I would also retire the idea that meaning is a moral upgrade. Handled carelessly, “find your why” turns into “if this mattered, you would have done it”, which is the oldest and least useful sentence ever said to anyone with ADHD. Meaning is fuel. It is not a verdict, and it works alongside what is personally right for the individual. This could be medication, structure and decent accommodations rather than in place of them.

On a random day.

In practice this is really unglamorous and messy. We take a weightless task and walk it upwards until it touches something real, then back down to one physical act small enough to start. We treat absorption as an asset to point rather than a habit to break. We ask what the interest is telling us, and we take the answer seriously even when it is inconvenient.

As for the book, I know exactly why it stalled. I started writing it to be clever about the problem, and it only came back to life when I understood it was for the people who keep starting things that matter and losing them halfway.

So the question I would hand over, coach or client or both: which of the things sitting undone is simply weightless, and which one has simply never been introduced to the version of yourself it really belongs to?

If any part of this resonated, it may be worth reflecting on the difference between the relationship with yourself you are trying to manage and your relationship with meaning.

Sometimes the most meaningful forms of care is not advice, correction, or performance. Sometimes it is attention, steadiness, presence, kindness to yourself and the experience of being accompanied honestly through uncertainty.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work we do begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about care, dignity, human connection, coaching psychology, meaning, self leadership, and what it means to create spaces where people no longer feel pressured to perform their way toward worthiness.

If you’d like to explore any of the ideas in this piece further, or speak with the writer about coaching through Logos Coaching, you can get in touch here.

Related Reflections:
• The Courage to Be Kind: Why It Matters Most When It’s Difficult
• The Loneliness Epidemic: Hiding Inside Busy Lives
• Ontological Coaching: Working With Who You Are, Not Just What You Do
• When Insight Stops Feeling Kind
• The Web of Needs