Knowing Where You Are

I know I’m not telling you anything new, but I’m writing this because I have often made this mistake myself.

A body and brain have an acceleration pedal.

1. You exert yourself. You add tension.

or

2. You relax.

There are actually two mistakes you can make.

1) You never relax.

Relaxing means feeling that sense of freedom where you really don’t have to do anything for a moment. That something is finished. That, for a moment, you are in paradise.

Where there was nothing to solve, people hadn’t invented work yet, PDFs didn’t need anything from you, and everything was simply okay as it was.

2) You are afraid to exert yourself.

I often see people who are afraid of stress. Being afraid of stress means being afraid of tension in your body.

But having too little tension can also happen when things are too easy for you. They don’t feel exciting. They don’t require any effort from you.

This often happens with intelligent people.

The Art of Switching

The art is learning how to switch between the two. How do you do that?

A useful trick you can use for this is religion—even if you are not religious.

You can either work for six days and take Sunday off,

or take a few breaks throughout the day.

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People with ADD often do this in short cycles. They either exert themselves very intensely (hyperfocus) or very little (and are constantly distracted).

Most people use a more moderate strategy.

Someone with autism may exert more effort per minute because more information is being processed at the level of detail.

Highway

A brain has a gas pedal.

Somebody with ADHD or ADD in hyperfocus drives the car at 220 km/h.

Somebody with ADHD or ADD who is not in hyperfocus, which is most of the time, drives the car at 50 km/h and looks out of the window, bored.

“Normal” people mostly drive at 70 km/h.

Somebody with autism drives a heavier truck. It takes more energy to get from A to B, but it has a lot of advantages. But because of the attention to detail, and treating all incoming signals as equally important, it is harder to switch gears and change lanes.

I don’t want to oversimplify this conceptualization, since we are talking about real people. But we make things psychiatric anomalies way too early. A neurotypical person has by far the most potential because they are more polarized towards specialization and unique ways of looking at the world.