I start things like a house on fire. A new idea shows up and suddenly it's the only thing in the world. I'm up early, I'm up late, I'm talking about it to anyone who'll stand still. Then, a few weeks or months in, the floor drops out. I can't even look at the thing. And the voice comes in to tell me this is why I never finish anything.
That's the cycle. Boom, then crash. I've been doing it my whole life.
Why does it happen? For a lot of people it's tied to how their brain handles attention and energy. In ADHD, long stretches of hyperfocus are common, and the end of one can feel like falling off a cliff. In autism, running past your limits for too long can end in burnout. It can also be depression, or for some people bipolar disorder, which is worth ruling out. I'll get to that.
What the boom feels like
It feels great. That's the problem.
Everything clicks. I can see the whole thing finished in my head. Ideas connect that never connected before. I don't feel tired, or I do and I don't care. Every other part of life gets pushed to the edges, and from inside the boom, that looks like focus, not neglect.
Some of my big starts stuck. Raincity Studios did. Ceningan Divers, the dive operation in Indonesia, did. Plenty of other starts didn't stick at all, and nobody but me remembers them.
What the crash feels like
Flat. Like someone pulled the plug on the whole house.
The project I couldn't stop thinking about last week now makes me feel slightly sick. Opening the file is too much. I go quiet. And then the shame shows up, because I told everyone about it, and because here we go again.
For most of my life I didn't even see the crash as part of a pattern. It took a diagnosis at 50, to start reading it as something with a mechanism.
Why it happens, as far as I can tell
I'm diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and ADHD. Both are worth knowing about here.
Hyperfocus. A 2019 study by Hupfeld and colleagues built a questionnaire to measure hyperfocus and tested it on two groups of adults (251 and then 372 people). People with more ADHD symptoms reported more hyperfocus, across settings from school to screen time. Long, absorbed, lose-track-of-time focus is real, and it's more common the more ADHD traits you have.
The crash after. ADDitude ran a piece by Douglas Cootey on the ADHD hyperfocus crash: when the hyperfocus ends, the clarity goes with it, and a lot of people land in fog, discouragement or a real low. He suggests expecting it and having somewhere to land. More on that below.
Autistic burnout. This one hit me hardest, because my big crash was a full breakdown in the COVID years, and that's when I got diagnosed. Australian researchers in the Autism CRC burnout project surveyed 141 autistic adults. Exhaustion and pulling away from people were core features. They also found burnout was often misdiagnosed as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. When I read that, a few things in my life rearranged themselves. (There's more in what autistic burnout actually is.)
My guess, and it's a guess, is that for me the boom isn't only excitement. It's also me running on adrenaline and masking at full volume, spending energy I don't have. The crash is the bill.
When it might be something else
If the high part comes with barely sleeping and not feeling tired, plus big risky decisions, and it lasts for days, tell a doctor. That can be what mania or hypomania looks like, and bipolar disorder is very treatable once someone actually names it. I wrote a whole post on telling bipolar apart from a neurodivergent energy cycle, because I had to ask myself the same question.
And if the crash part stretches into weeks of low mood where nothing interests you, treat it as depression until a professional says otherwise.
What I'm trying
I haven't fixed this. I've gotten a bit better at seeing it coming.
Stopping while I still have gas. This feels completely wrong in a boom. It's also the single most useful thing. If I quit for the day while I still want to keep going, I come back the next day. If I go until I drop, I often don't come back at all. People in chronic illness and autism circles call this pacing.
Planning the landing. Cootey's advice is to expect the crash and plan what comes after, so the end of a project isn't just a drop into nothing. For me that means knowing the boom will end and deciding ahead of time what a soft landing looks like. A walk by the lake. A smaller, boring task, and not a brand new obsession.
Writing down the start. When a new idea hits, I note the date and how I feel. It's a small thing. It helps me see the pattern instead of living inside it every time like it's the first time.
Making peace with half-finished things. I have a list of them. I used to read it as a list of failures. Now I'm trying to read it as a list of things I learned from. Some days that works.
If the cycle is wrecking your work or your relationships, bring it to a doctor or psychologist. A proper assessment for ADHD, autism or a mood disorder can change what you do about it. In Québec, your doctor, a CLSC or Info-Social 811 can point you in the right direction.
The crash is also when I'm most likely to wreck the things that were going well. If a crash ever turns into thoughts of not wanting to be here, the Get help now page has numbers for your country.