As a therapist specialising in ADHD and the founder of Attention Allies here in Bristol, I’m always drawn to creative projects that attempt to illuminate what living with ADHD feels like from the inside. IMPULSE: Playing with Reality is one of the most inventive and affecting examples I’ve encountered – a 40-minute mixed-reality (MR) experience that transforms not only the space around you but your relationship with focus, frustration and control.
(3 minute read)
Blending game design, immersive storytelling and psychological provocation, IMPULSE pulls the participant into a world that feels at once playful and unsettling. The interactive “game” elements are brilliantly executed – simple on the surface yet calibrated to provoke the very sensations that so many people with ADHD know intimately: the pull of distraction; the irritation of missed cues; the sudden flood of stimulation followed by the crash of fatigue. As I moved through the MR presentation, I found myself fully engaged at how acutely it captured that cadence of hope and exasperation – of wanting to master the task while feeling it constantly slip away from you.
The narrative unfolds through the voices of two women and two men – each offering a foundation to ground the piece. Their stories offer a kind of psychological landscape, through which to explore impulse, emotion and attention. The creators have succeeded in presenting ADHD as something more textured than a set of symptoms, using metaphor and sensory design to evoke how thoughts can scatter or converge in unexpected ways. While the portrayals may not yet capture the full diversity of ADHD experience – particularly across class, culture and the huge difference ADHDers feel with differing levels of hyperactivity, medication and attentional focus – the MR presentation certainly resists the worst clichés and offers something accessible without oversimplifying. A deeper range of stories might have broadened the emotional resonance but what’s here is both generous and thought-provoking.
What impressed me most was how IMPULSE invites empathy through experiential participation rather than explanation. It doesn’t lecture the audience about ADHD; it lets them feel the effort, confusion and wonder of a mind that doesn’t easily settle. For many non-ADHD viewers, it will be a powerful gateway to understanding. For those who live and/or work with ADHD every day, it may feel like recognition – an imaginative reflection of an inner world that is, at last, being rendered much more visible.
IMPULSE: Playing with Reality is an outstanding example of how immersive art can deepen understanding, evoke emotion and open new conversations about ADHD neurodiversity.
Duncan E. Stafford (Attention Allies Founder)
IMPULSE: Playing with Reality plays at the Watershed (Undershed) until 2 November https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/13537/impulse-playing-with-reality
Click the links if you'd like to visit Duncan's therapy website or his directory entry on Attention Allies.
Published 20 October 2025
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