ADHD: Hunter's Rest? Hah!
Hunters gravitate toward work where intensity, unpredictability, and immediacy are part of the deal.
Most people think rest is the default human state. Sit still, relax, unwind, unplug, quiet the mind. But for those of us wired as Hunters, rest can feel wrong in our bodies in a way that’s hard to explain to the Farmers around us.
We’re built to scan the horizon, track movement, listen between the lines, and stay ready to move. When the world gets quiet, our nervous systems don’t relax: they get jumpy. Peace and calm aren’t soothing; they can feel like something’s about to go wrong.
There’s a reason so many people with ADHD say they do their best work the night before a deadline or feel more focused during a crisis than during a routine afternoon. Our brains evolved for threat detection, novelty response, and rapid adaptation.
There’s solid neuroscience behind this. Research shows that the ADHD brain has reduced baseline dopamine and increased sensitivity to stimulation, which makes urgency, danger, or high stakes feel regulating rather than disruptive. Farmers, by contrast, have nervous systems optimized for predictability, repetition, and slow rewards. They don’t need adrenaline or novelty to keep their attention online.
This is why a quiet afternoon with nothing pressing can feel unbearable to a Hunter. It’s not laziness or even restlessness, it’s biology. Our nervous systems equate “nothing happening” with vulnerability.
When crops fail, Farmers recalibrate, but when a storm comes over the ridge, Hunters mobilize. In crisis, our brains finally match the environment around us, and that click into alignment can feel like relief. The cortisol and adrenaline rush that stresses Farmers can make a Hunter’s mind sharpen and settle. It isn’t pathology, it’s wiring.
Think about firefighters, war correspondents, ER doctors, company founders, investigative journalists, first responders, and certain kinds of artists and activists. These aren’t random career choices. Hunters gravitate toward work where intensity, unpredictability, and immediacy are part of the deal.
It’s also why so many of us have been called “chaos magnets” or accused of creating drama when life gets too calm. But we’re not addicted to chaos: we’re calibrated for motion.
Stillness is not the same thing as restoration for a Hunter. Sitting still with nothing engaging the mind can feel like being trapped in a stalled car with the engine idling and no gears to shift into. The popular idea of self-care—lounging, silence, doing nothing—often makes us more anxious, not less.
Farmers restore through stillness; Hunters restore through movement, variety, imagination, or intense focus on something compelling. For some, that might be hiking, playing music, diving into a project, repairing something, learning a new skill, or immersing completely in a fictional world. For others it might be working out, paddleboarding, or getting lost in research at 2 AM. What looks like “doing” to a Farmer might actually be rest for a Hunter.
And real rest does matter. Without it, burnout comes fast and hard. But Hunter-rest is active, not passive. Our version of recovery often looks like switching gears rather than shutting down entirely.
It might be rapid-fire conversation with an interesting person, traveling somewhere new, reorganizing a workspace while listening to a podcast, or immersing in a hobby with total focus. Flow is the Hunter’s sanctuary. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow states makes the case that humans feel grounded when a challenge is just hard enough to fully capture attention. Hunters tend to live at the doorstep of that threshold.
The other challenge is that many of us grew up being told to “calm down,” “sit still,” “stop overreacting,” or “relax.” We learned to equate our own regulation system with being dysfunctional.
But look at where humanity needed Hunters: tracking prey, navigating danger, scanning for threats, ranging across territory. You don’t do those things by zoning out and breathing slowly for 20 minutes. You do it by staying alert, moving fast, reacting quickly, and trusting your instincts.
The trick isn’t to learn how to be a Farmer. It’s to learn how to let your nervous system downshift in ways that work for it.
That might mean interval rest rather than long stretches of inactivity. It might mean controlled novelty instead of total disengagement. It might mean embracing the fact that your version of calm is a quiet hum instead of silence. A lot of so-called “bad habits” are actually regulation strategies that were shamed out of us: stimming, pacing, fidgeting, talking to think, bouncing between tasks, or seeking stimulation. When recast as intentional rather than impulsive, they become tools instead of liabilities.
There’s nothing wrong with you if peace feels like pressure and pressure feels like clarity. The world still needs Farmers to stabilize systems, but it needs Hunters to respond when systems fail, shift, or surprise.
The goal isn’t to suppress the wiring; it’s to recognize it, honor it, and learn how to rest in motion rather than shutting down to prove you can. The nervous system you have isn’t a flaw. It’s a survival design. The more you live in line with it, the less exhausted you’ll be by pretending otherwise.