The Overwhelmed
Why a Moving Face on the Screen Becomes an Insurmountable Distractor
Kirill, 22, is a senior in college who has been diagnosed with ADHD. During online lectures, he notices the exact same pattern every time: five minutes into the class, his gaze slips to his own window and stays there. Kirill isn't anxious about his appearance. It would be a stretch to say he enjoys looking at himself. It’s also not true that he’s hiding from other people's faces—they don't bother him. However, his own moving image in the corner of the screen hijacks his gaze, and Kirill cannot drag it back to the lecture material. More accurately, he can—for a few seconds. Then the slip repeats. By the end of the lecture, he remembers almost nothing of what the professor said. It has been this way for three semesters straight.
Kirill is nothing like the Controller awaiting a catastrophe, or the Objectified hunting for flaws. The gallery of other faces doesn't oppress him, and admiring himself brings not the slightest pleasure. It’s a paradox: Kirill has no psychological motive to look at himself, yet his eyes are glued to the window. The mechanism operating in the Overwhelmed is the third vicious cycle—the neurocognitive loop: the hijacking of attention by a stimulus the brain is fundamentally unable to suppress.
This archetype is the last of the seven, and it differs fundamentally from the rest. All the others possess some kind of motive—however maladaptive or irrational, it is psychologically understandable: anxiety, shame, the drive for control, the need for validation. The Overwhelmed has no motive. They have a neurocognitive vulnerability, multiplied by a stimulus perfectly designed to exploit it.
The Director and the Guard
To understand what is happening to Kirill, we must distinguish between two modes of attention.
The first is top-down, voluntary attention. This is the attention a person directs intentionally: deciding, for example, to focus on the lecturer's words, a document, or a colleague's voice. It requires significant effort and is fully controllable. The frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex—primarily the prefrontal cortex—are responsible for it. Back in the mid-20th century, Alexander Luria demonstrated that this exact region provides the voluntary regulation of attention, action planning, impulse control, and the retention of goals in working memory. Modern neuroimaging studies confirm and greatly refine this picture [1]. You can think of the prefrontal cortex as the Director, who decides what gets time and attention at any given moment.
The second is bottom-up, involuntary attention. This is attention hijacked by an external stimulus: a sharp sound, movement in peripheral vision, a bright flash. It requires no decision—it triggers automatically, faster than a person can even consciously register what distracted them. This is the Guard, who reacts to anything unusual and potentially important instantly, without asking the Director for permission first.
Normally, the Director and the Guard work in tandem. The Guard signals, and the Director decides whether it's worth the distraction. A sharp sound grabs your attention, you turn your head, realize it was a slamming door and not a gunshot, and return to work. The whole process takes less than a second. But there are certain stimuli that are vastly harder to suppress: hearing your own name in someone else's conversation, movement in your peripheral vision, and a face—especially a familiar one, and the most familiar of all is your own.
Your own face on a screen is a stimulus that triggers the Guard twice. First, as a self-relevant object of the highest priority (as described in Chapter 2, the brain tags its own face as a signal demanding immediate attention [2]). Second, as a moving object: you move, and your image moves with you—continuously, in real-time. Movement in peripheral vision is one of the most powerful triggers of involuntary attention; this is another ancient mechanism that allowed our ancestors to spot a predator in the bushes (yes, pop-science is unthinkable without this phrase, you aren't experiencing déjà vu). Two triggers simultaneously—and both operate in a "cannot be ignored" mode.
In a person with a typical neurocognitive organization, the Director usually copes: they intercept the Guard's signal, evaluate it as irrelevant, and return attention to the task. Yes, this costs resources—we detailed this "switch cost" in Chapter 2—but overall, the system holds. For a person with ADHD, the balance of power is different.
Fixation on the Self-View in ADHD
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is, first and foremost, an impairment of executive functions: the ability to maintain a goal, suppress irrelevant stimuli, and switch between tasks voluntarily rather than reactively [3]. In other words, in ADHD, the Director is weakened. They exist, they function—but their resource pool is smaller and depletes faster. And it isn't just about the volume of resources: in ADHD, the prioritization system itself is impaired. The brain struggles to distinguish which stimulus deserves attention and which can be ignored. Hence the characteristic trait: a person with ADHD might struggle immensely to focus on a crucial assignment, yet easily fall into a "hyperfocus" black hole for hours on a completely irrelevant task—provided that task is sufficiently stimulating.
Now, combine this with what we outlined above. An ADHD brain is faced with the task of suppressing a stimulus that is simultaneously a highest-priority self-relevant object and a continuously moving visual distractor—and it must suppress it not once, but continuously throughout an entire lecture, meeting, or workday. Furthermore, this task requires the exact resource that is already in short supply. The result is predictable: the gaze slips to the self-view again and again, and every attempt to pull it back costs more than the last, because the suppression resource is finite and drains with every attempt.
It is entirely incorrect to reduce this to a problem of motivation, discipline, or willpower. We are dealing with the economics of cognitive resources: the stimulus is too strong, and the suppression mechanism is too expensive for a system already operating at a deficit.
One more factor exacerbates the situation. A video call is an environment with low stimulation regarding parameters that matter to an ADHD brain (the ability to move, change posture, switch modalities), and high stimulation regarding a parameter that is irrelevant to the task (a moving face). This is a completely hellish combination for someone with ADHD: boredom and distraction simultaneously. The lecture or meeting isn't captivating enough to hold the top-down attention, while the self-view is vibrant enough to hijack the bottom-up attention. Perfect conditions for focus to leak exactly where it shouldn't.
If you read forums where people with ADHD discuss their video call experiences, the descriptions are strikingly uniform. "A huge chunk of my mental energy goes entirely into not looking at myself," writes one user. "I cannot simultaneously listen to a person and ignore my face in the corner of the screen—my brain chooses the face," says another. A third articulates exactly what this book argues: "The camera version of me requires colossal energy. After calls, I am literally shaking." The experience is described not as an emotional problem, but as a neurocognitive hijack (which is exactly what it is): the eye "sticks," attention "leaks," control "cannot be maintained."
The Mask of "Appropriate" Behavior
Alongside ADHD on the neurodiversity spectrum is autism—and for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a video call with an enabled self-view creates a different, but equally exhausting, kind of burden.
For many autistic people, nonverbal communication is a voluntary, conscious process, not an automatic one. Maintaining an "appropriate" facial expression, imitating expected reactions, controlling intonation and gestures—everything a neurotypical person does without thinking requires deliberate cognitive effort from an autistic person. In autism literature, this is known as masking or camouflaging—the conscious suppression of autistic behavioral patterns and the imitation of neurotypical ones [4]. Masking, naturally, is incredibly exhausting. Its cognitive cost is well-documented: increased fatigue, anxiety, headaches, and in the long term, severe emotional burnout and a loss of contact with one's own experiences.
The self-view radically increases the cost of masking. Without a self-view, a person masks neurodivergent patterns relying on an internal sense: "I assume I look sufficiently interested right now." With a self-view, they get visual confirmation—or refutation—and an additional control cycle is launched: "I see my face isn't expressive enough → I need to exert more effort → check the result → adjust → check again." This cycle incinerates the cognitive resources meant for processing the content of the conversation.
On top of this, many autistic individuals experience difficulty identifying their own emotions through external manifestations. In the literature, this is described as alexithymia—a difficulty recognizing and naming emotions, which is common in a significant portion of people with ASD (though not exclusive to them). The self-view presents the person with their facial expressions in real-time—but it doesn't help interpret them. What are they supposed to do with this feedback if they struggle to recognize emotions in the first place? Instead of useful feedback, the person receives an ambiguous (and mostly useless) signal that demands decoding, while simultaneously distracting and confusing them.
As a result, a person who already spends a massive portion of their computational power maintaining socially acceptable behavior loses another massive chunk of that resource monitoring the results.
Descriptions of this experience in autistic communities share common threads: "After a video call, my face feels cramped, my head aches, and my anxiety spikes. I am constantly monitoring my expressions, holding a pleasant face. It is so exhausting; it sucks the soul right out of me." The camera itself—which a neurotypical colleague turns on without a second thought—can be equivalent to a secondary full-time job for an autistic employee, running parallel to their actual work and consuming resources that no one, including their manager, realizes they are spending. And an active self-view doubles this load: now you not only have to "mask," but constantly QA-test the quality of the "mask" in real-time.
The Overwhelmed vs. The Fascinated
Of all the archetypes, the Overwhelmed is easiest to confuse with the Fascinated. From the outside, the two look identical: both hypnotize their own reflections for extended periods without displaying obvious anxiety or shame. Internally, however, these are two completely different processes. While the Fascinated enjoys the experience (for them, the window is a source of pleasant reinforcement), the Overwhelmed is drawn to the screen out of powerlessness. Their gaze is held by a magnet against their will. Take the self-view away from the Fascinated, and they will be upset, as if deprived of something valuable. Take it away from the Overwhelmed, and they will experience colossal relief. Relief is the most reliable diagnostic marker of this archetype.
Kirill once accidentally clicked "Hide Self-View" during a lecture. The first few seconds felt strange, as if something important was missing. Then he noticed that for the first time all semester, he was hearing what the professor was saying without exerting superhuman willpower. It was as if background static had suddenly vanished. The attention that was previously leaking into the corner of the screen returned to the task. Not perfectly (his ADHD didn't magically disappear), but the baseline improvement was stark. "It was like taking off a heavy backpack I’d been carrying so long I forgot it was there," he said later.
Neurodiversity and Design Injustice
All seven archetypes described in this book are, to some extent, artifacts of interface design: the self-view is enabled by default, and this was a decision made by developers, not users. But for the Overwhelmed, this interface decision exacts a special toll.
All major video conferencing platforms—Zoom, Google Meet, Yandex.Telemost, as well as mainstream messengers—are designed around how attention operates in a neurotypical brain (and even then, an idealized, non-existent version of it). The assumption is that the user is capable of voluntarily ignoring irrelevant interface elements. For a person with ADHD or ASD, this assumption is false. The self-view, which is a poorly manageable distractor for neurotypical users, is an utterly insurmountable one for neurodivergent users.
This is not a fabricated issue riding the wave of "trendy" neurodiversity discourse. According to various estimates, 5% to 7% of children and 2.5% to 4% of adults live with ADHD [5]. The prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders is estimated at 1-2% of the population. Factoring in the ubiquity of video calls, this means tens of millions of people worldwide are dealing with an interface that systematically creates unequal conditions by defaulting the self-view to "on." A neurotypical employee loses a portion of their cognitive resource to the self-view—unpleasant, but relatively manageable. A neurodivergent colleague loses a resource they already barely have enough of—and the difference between a "productive meeting" and a "wasted hour" might come down to a single setting they don't even know exists.
It’s worth adding that ADHD and autism frequently co-occur—like with Kelsey, who described her experience on a video platform's blog: "Autism plus ADHD is a double burden on every call." For individuals with comorbid neurodivergence, the self-view compounds both effects: the sensory hijack by a moving stimulus and the added cost of masking. The result is a cumulative overload that, after a few hours of video calls, feels not just like fatigue, but like a complete inability to function.
What to Do
The recommendations for the Overwhelmed differ slightly from those for other archetypes—precisely because the mechanism works differently. The Controller is helped by a repeated behavioral experiment: testing a prediction and confirming a catastrophe doesn't occur. The Overwhelmed doesn't need to test anything; they simply need the stimulus gone immediately.
First and foremost: Hide the self-view (one could call it "radical hiding"). Not "sometimes," not "when listening," but as a default on every single call. For the Overwhelmed, the self-view serves absolutely no useful function—it only drains resources. If you need to check your framing, do it once at the start of the call and hide the self-view immediately.
Second: Display mode. Use Speaker View (showing only the active speaker) instead of Gallery View to significantly reduce visual noise. Fewer faces on the screen means fewer stimuli competing for attention, leaving more resources for the content.
Third: Physical environment. For a person with ADHD, the ability to move during a video call is the most accessible way to maintain prefrontal cortex activation. Tactile stimulation (a stress ball, a textured object, a fidget spinner), the ability to stand or pace, and turning off the camera during segments where visual presence isn't critical—all of this reduces the total load and frees up resources for core tasks. Some people with ADHD find they listen much better when they doodle or take notes by hand. On a video call, this might look like "inattention," but it is actually a method for sustaining attention. Here, as in many other cases, the gap between what looks productive and what is productive is massive.
Fourth: For individuals with ASD who consciously resort to masking/camouflaging behaviors to fit the context, it is worth considering a deliberate reduction in "visual presence" demands. Use audio-only mode when permissible, or establish explicit permission from management to turn off the camera without needing to explain why. The paradox is that masking, which is designed to make the person look "more present" to colleagues, actually makes them less present in terms of engaging with the conversation's content. By removing the need to mask (or at least monitor the masking on the self-view), we return the cognitive resource to its rightful owner.
This archetype concludes our typology. Unlike the other six faces in the digital mirror—driven by fear, shame, ambition, social duty, exhaustion, or the pursuit of pleasure—the Overwhelmed's motive lacks a psychological subtext. It is purely neurocognitive. Their brain is simply wired in a way that cannot ignore this interface. And that is exactly why the solution here is the most straightforward: there is no need for therapy involving behavioral experiments, motive awareness, or the cognitive restructuring of maladaptive beliefs. Hide the self-view—and there it is, an immediate, palpable breath of fresh air for the Overwhelmed.
You may have recognized yourself in one of the seven archetypes described, or discovered that your motive is mixed (a primary archetype intertwined with one or two secondary ones). This is normal: the boundaries between types are not rigid, and the mechanisms and cycles constantly overlap. What matters most is that you now know exactly why you are looking at yourself. Which means you can transition from understanding to action (assuming, of course, you haven't already done so while waiting for even more unambiguous and substantiated recommendations). That is the focus of Part III of the book.
References
[1] Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G. L. (2002). Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(3), 201–215.
[2] Tacikowski, P., & Nowicka, A. (2010). Allocation of attention to self-name and self-face: An ERP study. Biological Psychology, 84(2), 318–324.
[3] Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin, 121(1), 65–94.
[4] Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). "Putting on my best normal": Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.
[5] Faraone, S. V., Banaschewski, T., Coghill, D., Zheng, Y., Biederman, J., Bellgrove, M. A., ... & Wang, Y. (2021). The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 evidence-based conclusions about the disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 789–818.
Понял вас! Никакой графики и разметок для изображений — оставляем только чистый, сверстанный текст.
Вот перевод вступления к третьей части и одиннадцатой главы:
We have examined the mechanisms of attention hijacking and the motives that sustain fixation on the digital mirror. Now we move to the most important part: how to break these cycles. However, before discussing action protocols, we must evaluate the risks of inaction. Self-view fixation has a threshold beyond which cognitive load transitions into a qualitatively different state—a dissociative one.