We Should Stop Running
Let’s say you sit down and you feel bad. Your reaction is: because I feel bad, I'm going to the gym to work out.
And it works—every time you work out, you feel better.
But the problem is that you’re not actually fixing anything.
You’re rejecting one uncomfortable emotional state and masking it with working out. It’s almost the same as feeling bad and going gambling. It only looks different because working out is healthy and socially accepted.
These kinds of loops are the same loops people teach themselves with eating disorders: every time a bad feeling shows up, you control what you eat. The goal is the same—you don’t want to feel bad. So you reject the negative feeling by masking it with something that feels good, like eating clean or being skinny.
The correct way is this:
First you feel bad. Then you decide what to do.
Allowing yourself to feel bad—really feeling what you feel—actually gives you answers. This doesn’t mean you can’t work out. It just shouldn’t be the instant solution to every uncomfortable emotion.
I have to say: I can’t stand Buddhism, but here I agree. Western society is incredibly good at hiding negative emotions and instantly switching to clean eating and working out without ever accepting the “bad.”
We don’t want to feel sad, so we start running. Literally.
And let’s be honest:
When is the last time you actually allowed yourself to cry?
Why people with ADHD perform way better in extreme environments
I have ADHD — and a very slow office job.
When there’s suddenly a lot to do, I can prioritize way better than others. But when there’s nothing to do, everything feels too unimportant. Then I become the worst performer.
I think it’s a misconception that people with ADHD are bad at prioritizing. I think people with ADHD can actually prioritize much faster than others — which is useful when many important things are happening at the same time.
The problem is that a lot of what we do in an office isn’t really useful. It’s not important in a literal sense. I’m staring at electrical plates that signal back 0’s and 1’s — it couldn’t be further from life.
If something comes up that involves people (like a fire, an emergency, or a conflict), I’m the one who responds and takes the lead. But when we’re back to staring at 0’s and 1’s, I don’t stand a chance.
I think that’s also why a lot of kids with ADHD are distracted most of the time — because they find other people more interesting than electronics or textbooks. Which makes perfect sense.
If you see that in something, it becomes that — at least a little bit.
Do you think you’re worthless? Then you start behaving that way. And then you become that too.
I think even particles at the smallest level behave that way because we see it in them. We see a pattern — something moving from A to B — and then it becomes that, at least a little bit.
What could also be true, is that everything actually moves freely in all directions. But we place expectations on it — we expect it to move from A to B. That’s because we project our expectations onto reality, while in truth, reality itself moves in every direction.
I often feel that my brain works the same way. My mind wants to fly in all directions. I drift through all kinds of places, forward and backward in time. And then I have to work, and I’m forced to make my thoughts move in a certain way. But underneath it all, everything still moves in every direction. “Normal” and linear thinking is something humans need to make sense of a reality in which nothing is truly structured.
That’s why I don’t find structured or linear thinking — or being able to focus on your breathing for a long time — impressive at all. You simply don’t understand how reality works. It’s supposed to be a little chaotic.
When people with ADHD do something they love, there is nothing like that. The intensity per minute is so high that it makes perfect sense that they are distracted the other 95% of the time.
I think we look at psychiatric diseases the wrong way. In order to understand what something is, you also have to look at the intensity someone works in, or how someone responds in extreme emotional states.
If people with ADHD in hyperfocus work at 100% intensity, then it’s safe to say that the average person in a 9-to-5 job works at 60–70% capacity. You can’t compare these two.
When you work at 100% some of the time, you need more time where you’re bored and distracted.
People with ADHD use every fiber of their body when they do something they like.
Why people with ADHD never seem to finish anything
I do. But I work in different circles. A “normal” person works task by task — you start with the laundry and finish with the laundry. I don’t. I start with the laundry, and one minute later I’m calling someone, getting something from another room, doing seemingly unrelated stuff. But when you look at my progress over a longer period, I still finish everything — just in different cycles. So in day-to-day progress, it looks hopelessly chaotic from someone else’s point of view.
Every form of energy in nature moves cyclically.
Meaning: we move through (sexual) cycles of energy.
I’m not a woman, but I think you get the point.
The reason why we look at psychiatric diseases the wrong way is because they are cyclic as well. You don’t experience the same amount of psychosis throughout the day. You don’t have the same amount of ADHD during the day. You don’t have the same amount of anxiety during the day — everything is cyclic.
For instance, you might go into a state of hyperenergy and hyperfocus for two hours. Then, you don’t do anything for the rest of the day. Those six hours after that aren’t “distraction” — they’re compensation.
You can’t say that somebody is distracted without seeing the whole cycle. If you say you have ADD (the inattentive type), I’d expect you to be distracted 100% of the time. But I already know you’re not. You’re balancing.
I have ADHD — pretty severe. It runs in my family; most are either in crime or dead.
What I’ve noticed is that a lot of people with ADHD categorically undervalue themselves.
Let’s say you’re in hyperfocus 1% of the time, and bored or distracted 99% of the time. You think that working in hyperfocus is “normal.” That becomes your point of reference. So for the other 99%, you feel worthless because you’re online shopping at work.
But it doesn’t work like that. Working in hyperfocus is like working at 500%. You need to recover after that. How? By working at a low intensity.
Most other people work in the 60–70% range. They’re working, but at a turtle’s pace. I work a basic 9–5, and I can guarantee you that from my point of view, nobody seems to be doing anything — even when they are working. But from their perspective, I’m the one doing nothing, because I’m chilling 99% of the time. In the end, we both get about the same amount of work done.