AD(H)D individuals control their entire body differently.
AD(H)D individuals use their bodies like kickboxers do. They do nothing 95% of the time, but during the 5% of the time they are active, they operate at a higher intensity than the rest (hyperfocus). This isn’t necessarily good or bad.
People without AD(H)D traits control their bodies more like marathon runners. They work at a lower intensity but can sustain it for longer periods.
My concern is mainly with children growing up in difficult environments
If you grow up in a chaotic household, you learn to use your body like an AD(H)D individual. You are constantly on alert. The moments when you’re not on high alert, you immediately switch to very low intensity. You then have to learn how to bring your body into a state that is neither tense nor fully relaxed. You’re used to constantly being a little on edge.
We also live in a society that is very ADHD-ish
We do very few things in moderation. Either we lie on the couch watching something, or we are working out very hard. This is very binary, almost two opposite states. Either your whole body is in a state of doing nothing, or in a state of doing whatever it takes. The hard part is going to the states in between—the “I am working in the garden while thinking about other things” state.
You could also draw parallels between our whole bodies and other “psychiatric” conditions. I have seen people with anorexia, for instance, who roll their whole body inward when facing certain emotions, almost cramping together.
Cliffs:
ADHD isn’t about the brain; it’s about how you control your entire body.
Basic Mechanism of the Human Body
Try to feel things in that specific location in your body.
For instance: when you have pain in your knee, feel that pain with your knee — within your knee. Don’t feel it with your head.
How to do this
Close your eyes. Now, try to determine where that sensation is located. From that point — where it actually is — you feel.
Emotions are on lines
Emotions are not points in your body; they exist along lines. For instance, an emotion might go from your knee to your head. It’s the space in between.
In that sense, emotions are a little bit different from just local pain, like only pain in your knee. I think a lot of feelings of depression have an underlying emotion that is the real problem — like loneliness, for instance. When you ignore loneliness for a long time, it can transform into other things as well, such as fear or frustration.
So, to summarize: emotions are stuck between point A and point B in your body — like between your knee and your head. This can have long-term effects when you don’t deal with them.
I went to the doctor.
I said, “I don’t like my nose, doctor.”
“I can give you a different nose,” the doctor said.
“I don’t like my feelings, either.”
“I have a pill for that,” the doctor said.
“And I move a lot. I don’t seem to be able to sit still,” I said.
“I have a pill for that too,” the doctor said.
“Do you think we’re fixing the issue?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the doctor.
It’s supposed to feel like this.
We live in a time and age where everything is about not feeling anything.
Pain? Take a painkiller.
Scared? You have anxiety.
Sad? You have depression.
Life is supposed to feel like this. That doesn’t mean all pain is good or that it’s always there for the right reason. But the pain itself should feel like that.
Grief is also something like this. I had to learn to grieve — that it should be there. Because I feel like that. And it should feel like that.
I think we’ve all fallen into substance abuse, overeating, gambling, or over-exercising to counter the pain. You can do that, but sometimes you have to relearn how to experience the same pain — to understand that it’s a part of life, just like anything else, and that it’s righteous there.
Some natural medicine
Do you know what psychosis doesn’t like? Doing the opposite. Bake a cake. Create homeliness. Light a candle. Take care of your own body. Say sweet things to yourself.
Depression, on the other hand, doesn’t like true grief. Let the tears out — you’ve been holding on for too long.
And anxiety? Anxiety can’t stand people who just admit they’re scared. Life doesn’t have anything on you when you admit you’re scared — when you allow yourself to feel scared. Even if the big man would fly down on you, he wouldn’t have anything on you.
Nature at a fundamental level is intuitive, not probabilistic
Intuition has the same problem as probability. You are right, yet every single outcome you are wrong.
For instance: there is a 0.33 percent chance of something happening, yes versus no. In reality, it’s either yes or no — the outcome is never 0.33.
Intuition is like this too. It’s like an arrow: you have an intuitive feeling about what the solution to a problem is, but you don’t yet know the detailed solution.
Both intuition and probability don’t work the same forward in time as backward in time.
Let’s say you think about something that already happened. The past, in one sense, is fixed. It could have happened in many ways, but it happened in only one.
The way it happened, however, is interpreted differently by different people (or other living beings).
The future, on the other hand, you can’t grasp in probability, because you don’t know all possible outcomes. If I debate whether I want to do something or not, I can only think in terms of thoughts and experiences I already have. My mind — me — can’t know what it doesn’t know.
It’s like flipping a coin. You can’t say the chances of a fair coin are 50/50, because you don’t know all other possible outcomes. A meteor could fall from the sky. You could meet your soulmate and forget about your experiment. You could lose the coin, or all coin factories could shut down.
It’s impossible to narrow reality down like that beforehand.
You can set up your thoughts intuitively
What I mean by that is that certain thoughts hit me in a rhythm toward my desired outcome. You can prepare your thoughts in advance. For example, I already know the thoughts I need to get out of bed tomorrow morning and work out. You can prepare those thoughts, but you can’t know the exact outcome — because if you did, they wouldn’t work anymore. That’s exactly how intuition works.
For instance, let’s say that in order to work out tomorrow morning, I need a fantasy about me saving the world. If I know that thought is coming beforehand, it doesn’t work. It only works when it comes as a surprise — an “ah yes, this is really possible” moment.
The problem with knowing too much
Knowledge limits your ability to look at something with fresh eyes. I know a lot of people who know a lot about a given subject — quantum mechanics or neurobiology, for example.
The problem is that it’s very hard to see that you’re inside a niche of a niche. It’s like being on a branch of a tree without realizing there’s a whole tree.
Intuitive thinking is knowing that you can jump from branch to branch — and that you deliberately go back to the root of the tree sometimes (which is, by the way, what a “monkey mind” does — it’s actually super useful).
People with ADD-ish brains form new connections much faster — like I’m doing now — in order to see the whole tree.
I love the monkey
Maybe you are reading this and thinking, “Where is this person even talking about?” It goes from A to B to C. It doesn’t make any sense.
For me, it does. You’ve just jumped across three branches in my tree. We used the monkey to jump from probability, to setting up your thoughts intuitively, to knowing too much. We used the monkey to jump.
Am I right? Since this kind of thinking is intuitive, I’m wrong about a lot of things. But like with many things, there’s also truth in them.