It’s tempting to constantly try to change how you feel.

The Inability to Understand the Basics of the Human Body

Since I got into psychiatric hospitals because I didn’t understand the basics of the human body:

What is a feeling?

A feeling is something you go to and can feel. That is not the same as thinking about a feeling, or observing a feeling. In a lot of traditions, Buddhism for instance, this goes wrong the whole time.

You feel with that specific place in your body. If I feel anxiety, I feel that where it’s located. For me, that’s mostly inside my inner thighs, in my right leg. For you, it’s maybe somewhere else.

Let’s say you are a man, and you grow up with a harsh father.

Your father says: “Are you scared? Who gets scared watching a movie?” You pretend not to be scared. In fact, you pretend that everywhere you go, you are not scared. But you are scared. Of feeling the feeling within you.

This goes well for a long time.

“What a courageous person,” others may say. But inside you, you see that you are scared.

Or: “You have to perform in life. Performing in life is more important than what you feel.”

Do you see where I am going?

I literally have seen others besides myself going into psychiatric hospitals because of these mechanisms. I don’t mean it judgmentally. It’s easy to teach yourself the wrong way, especially when you grow up in a bad environment.

These are things that are virtually impossible to understand for people who don’t do this internally.

The only thing you do wrong is not feeling that feeling inside yourself, with your body.

It took me at least five years to fix this. After a psychosis, depression, and whatnot. All because of these learned behaviours.

Reality is a painting

Let's say reality was handing us out frames.

Some people, with autism, with a lot of attention to detail, move through the frames slower. They spend more energy per frame.

Somebody with ADD/ADHD moves through a lot of frames very fast until they see a frame they like and then spends a lot of energy on it (hyperfocus).

So, in the same amount of time, the one with ADD/ADHD cycles through the most thoughts, and the one with autism cycles through the least.

This has nothing to do with intelligence. This is important if you want to understand the position of the other person. People with autism appear slow, but a lot is going on under the hood. From their perspective, people with ADHD can look superficial, which is not true at all.

Another way to explain this

  • Let's say the average office worker works on a 1.0 voltage.
  • Somebody with autism works on a 1.25 voltage per frame.
  • Somebody with ADD/ADHD works on a 0.25 voltage for 55 minutes, and then goes into hyperfocus for 5 minutes, at a 2.5 voltage.

I have not calculated any of this, but let's, for the sake of argument, say we all spend the same amount of energy.

Why this is important

Because there is no right or wrong. There are numerous valid strategies to live life, based on what you find interesting and want to think about.

ADHD and autism are completely logical and valid ways of looking at reality based on the interests a person has. I know this is kind of common knowledge, but it doesn't feel like that.

A lot of psychiatric diseases appear to have something to do with body voltages. Manic episodes, for instance (overspending for months and then collapsing).

Also, a lot of people look at reality in a task-oriented way. Folding the laundry is seen as a linear task that should go from A to B. But if you are ADHD-ish, you know you are going to fold the laundry for 3 seconds and then do something else. This makes perfect sense because you extract information that way.