Wait, is that not ‘normal’?
I mean everyone talks about conscious and subconscious, i think we’re just waaaaaaaaay more aware of this and we know more precisely where the conscious ends and the subconscious begins.
The average allistic person just has no reason to think much about it, the two systems work in lockstep such that it never affects them, but for neurodivergent people we regularly have to deal with the subconscious stuff not doing what we want it to, and either just deal with it or take over the reigns and do it ourselves which is extremely exhausting.
I guess you could compare it to flying an airplane: when everything works smoothly the computer systems do a lot of the work for the pilot and they focus on the radio and the conditions outside, but if the systems go offline or don’t work as expected suddenly the pilots have to do things manually and work around the weirdness and that makes the job very stressful and tends to lead to mistakes.
I’d describe it that way with my ADHD. My subconscious is literally overriding my conscious in real-time. I’ll be in deep decision paralysis while the thoughts of the consequences of not doing the thing at all become too stressful, then I’ll hyperfocus and cram as much work as humanly possible in a very unhealthy period of time. The guilt also tends to build up, but I just can’t get started without something tangible to scare me up. I called it anxiety-based productivity before knowing what it was lol. It’s a really vicious loop too, cause I got away with it too often as I grew up (the ADHD-PI/somewhat gifted combo that often falls through the cracks).
Sort of. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, but neurodivergent (ND) people have a harder time controlling them. This is also why ND people rarely have luck with typical CBT therapists unless the therapist is experienced with neurodivergence and can suitably adapt to ND thinking styles.
May actually be. Personally ADHD makes it very hard for me to control my actions during the day so I find the post really relatable because the brain basically barely listens to me. If more people without some kind of neurodivergence (or depressions etc.) say that this is totally normal then I may delete the post. There’s also this “neurodivergent” term used instead of “ADHD” making it too broad because there’s a lot of different neurodivergences.
I mean that is sometimes what it feels like. Like there is a second entity that constantly whants something else than I do. When I explained to my wife how this feels I even gave it a voice so she could understand that there is something inside of me that constantly wants something. It is concious logical thought vs strong feelings.
My favourite explaination is how habbits don’t stick because whenever I have to do an uncomfortable task I have to do it is like there is a toddler having a temper tantrum inside of me when I do it. I can ignore it a couple times but it gets harder every time and when I give in all me strength is gone and I can’t do it for a while.
My favourite explaination is how habbits don’t stick because whenever I have to do an uncomfortable task I have to do it is like there is a toddler having a temper tantrum inside of me when I do it. I can ignore it a couple times but it gets harder every time and when I give in all me strength is gone and I can’t do it for a while.
that reminds me of this ted talk
I look at it like my consciousness is a program running in the foreground of the operating system, i can modify a lot of things especially if i look up the documentation but i can’t alter the hardware or really low level software.
So e.g. when i really notice my attention deficiency that feels very much like the OS needs to run some background program for maintenance which takes up a bunch of RAM, leaving a lot less for me to work with and thus i discard information much more readily so that there’s room for anything judged to be particularly important, and when i’m occupied with that there’s simply no room left of anything else.
It’s endlessly vexing that there’s only one first person form in English, or any other language I know of. There’s my body, my conscious experience, my thoughts, my persona, my emotions, my volition, and none of them consistently play nice with each other. And I have to describe this mess with ‘I’ and ‘my’ and ‘self’ and somehow come out with a coherent sentence?
