Are you using a widget component to display the parent widget?
It’s one way to evoke updates when widgets go off-screen and stop ticking:
If you just added a widget to the viewport, it would always be there since it’d live in screen space. You must be doing something specific to:
I am not looking at the widget […] and if I turn away it pauses
In your screenshot, you’re adding a regular widget to a container - Box Stuff.