Just the other day, I was writing about the pitfalls of a particular deep dive I took into all things spiritual that lasted, pretty intensely, for about a decade of my life; an area of hyperfocus that became my entire spin on life for that period of time and which frequently took me off down rabbit holes. You could say the same about the topic of chronic health because (I’m sure I could self-justify…) I’ve been forced to research matters of health for all the years I’ve been dealing with these but then, I’ve come to appreciate, I don’t necessarily go into topics of research like the next person. When I do it, I plunge in and I’m relentless, enticed and beguiled into pursuing threads of intuition to see where they lead or try and back-up or make sense of tidbits of information I’ve happened upon and which catch my eye, coercing me to join the dots to form some bigger picture of things. I’m relentless and I’m hyperfocused and it can really take its toll on my health.

This, I now know from (guess what) all my research, is a classic trait of people that are gifted and especially those who are twice exceptional, that are intense and probably super sensitive too. It’s just simply something that we love to do, it can even be really good for us as it lights us up, gives us passion for life and is a gift we have…it’s important to make that point because it’s not all bad, at all. We follow gut feelings that we have, when we intuit something or pick up on an incongruity that piques our attention, or we search relentlessly for a paradigm or box in which to fit something we are trying to make sense of. Something we learn from an article, a video or a podcast that we happen upon makes us desperate to know more so a moment’s glimpse of something interesting can send us off on a whole new tangent; and, suddenly, we’re deep in the water of this topic though we had no idea we were even interested in it a couple of hours before, something which happens to me all the time. In my own case, I’m highly impulsive like this which I feel is, in part, driven by my ADHD which includes, for me, the very strong trait of being in “the tireless pursuit of novelty”, but also my dread of losing hold of the thread since my working memory can be fairly compromised so there seems to be nothing for it but to drop everything and go in for the chase!

With great timeliness, since this seems to be my topic of the week, I happened upon a brand new episode of yet another podcast I follow, Somebody Gets Me, on this very topic today; its entitled “The Consequence of Deep Dives” (link below). It discusses what can happen when you get so preoccupied by these deep dives that take you over, hooking you into the pursuit of some subject or question mark that takes over all your time and energy, but which may have various unintended consequences.  

Unawareness makes this into an extra precarious leaning to have so, for me, its been enormously helpful to realise I have it…largely as a result of getting to know my neurodiverse traits a whole lot better these last years…as there was a time when I so-naively believed that everyone went off into these dives, assuming it was completely normal and therefore nothing to be concerned about, thus I didn’t even look for my own brakes to slow myself down. For a good few decades there, I was oblivious to the fact this was a vulnerable area for me, something I was especially prone (perhaps the most challenging and defining of my neurodiverse traits) whereas at least my daughter, who also has this trait very strongly, is aware of her own propensity to do this and the dangers of unintended consequences, including just how much strain she puts on her relationship with her partner through expecting him to be just as interested as she is in her latest fixation, wanting to talk about it all the time (I used to do this with my other half but, I’m sure he’s much relieved, I have now learned to ease off and internalise what I used to spew outwards at him). He used to term it “getting on my soap box” and he would sit back and buckle up for the ride of some highly convoluted hypothesising but he seldom engaged, he was just being my outlet…not every relationship could take the strain of this.

For a lot of years, I continued this spewing process into the domain of my first blog which, as mentioned in my earlier post, I have now decided to make private because that’s where its best positioned, much more like a personal diary or notebook, something I now write into offline. I look back and see how, when I first got majorly into my spiritual pursuits, I must have been such a bore as it was all I wanted to talk about plus I also put a lot of distance between myself and some important people in my life because they clearly weren’t interested in it, thus I wasn’t prepared to give them my time of day if they weren’t prepared to be on the same page as me…it makes me grimace now to think of it but, thankfully, no permanent damage was done, its just a reminder to me that that is how intense I can get.

The other major pitfall is that deep dive behaviour can mean you forget to take good care of yourself; ironic in my case since just so many of my biggest dives were a case of me going off in search of information and understanding about my chronic health situation yet I would sit there for hour after countless hour, not caring about or even noticing my basic needs or forgetting to give myself a respite for days, sometimes even weeks, of tireless research and question pursuing. Its no wonder I would burn myself out.

Blogging is another risk area, as alluded to above: it’s not the fact that I share my ideas in a blog, which can be a positive thing, but the intensity with which I’ve done that in the past that has burned me out. Some of my earliest posts were massive and highly convoluted, like I was presenting a thesis, and for what gain? Yes, I was processing my way through some theory I was unravelling but my output was too much to expect anyone else to engage with or make sense of and the driven way I would approach the task would leave me flattened for days.

Another trip point can still be the time of day that I allow myself to pursue these deep dive urges: because, often, I get my first intuition to pursue a particular thread at 4 am. in the morning and, without discernment, let myself get to work researching this topic there and then, under the covers and writing in draft form on my phone. Some of my most satisfying posts have started out like this but at what cost to my health when I’m awake in the night with my brain sparking off ideas instead of resting? When fatigue and burnout follow in this behaviour’s wake, I sometimes don’t even remember to factor in that this may have been a root cause and that tending to my need for reliable sleep patterns would serve me much better, in the longer run, than chasing down an idea I’ve had, which may give me some intellectual satisfaction for five minutes yet is likely only going to get replaced by another rabbit to chase down a moment later…when does it ever end? I need time to recharge my batteries, more than ever as I age and with precarious health, yet I constantly run them dry because of this trait. Its so often not until a particular deep dive has run its course that I stop and take account of the collateral and, by then, I’m often in such deficit that the damage takes so much more effort to put right; perhaps never catching up on itself if, by then, I am already off into the next pursuit.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying a bit of a pause or at least a respite compared to the sheer intensity of the old life where I was constantly surfing on some wave or other that I was determined to ride out. I’ve been far less caught up in the more abstract or intellectual deep dives whilst I’ve been engaged in the relocation process and settling into a new house these past few months, or at least I’ve dipped in but been able to surface out again much quicker (though quite a lot of that process has also involved pursuing conceptual ideas and conducting lengthy research and comparison…) so I realise that I am far more at risk of falling back into the behaviour now that the house project is reaching a conclusion. I guess that’s why I am wanting to give this topic some attention, to make sure I am fully aware of the dangers because, prior to the move, my life was one long deep dive after another, with all the inherent consequences, including frequent mental burnout and also the fact I was leading quite the sedentary life, which is really not good for my hypermobility because it deconditions the body and makes disautonomia and joint issues much worse. At least this house move has forced me to keep on my feet a whole lot more!

Dealing with constant, often bizarre, health issues doesn’t help the situation. When the issue at hand is to do with health, I can noodle around with an idea for hours, justifying it because I really need those answers that, like a dog after a rabbit, I go off in hot pursuit of like my life depends on it; however, the very nature of the material can be highly triggering, exposing me to material that stokes up the feeling of just so many things potentially going wrong in the human body because there is plenty of information out there to suggest that this is the case. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be where I am today with at least somewhat understanding my chronic health situation or even knowing about my neurodiversity if it wasn’t for all the deep dives I’ve done, following the trail of breadcrumbs, but there’s a point, in every case of chewing on a particular bone, when it becomes healthier to let the obsessive quest go flaccid for a little while, at least long enough so I can take a respite from overthinking the kind of symptoms that can become overwhelming when hyperfocused upon.

The resultant feeling of precariousness that can arise from hyperfocus on health is no good for my enhanced sensitivity (especially as I’m not even qualified to look at some of this information) and this is where the chronic health kind of rabbit holes can be no good for me, the opposite to what I intend them for, and quite counter productive as they make me feel so overwhelmed and out of my depth, plus hearing other peoples terrible stories really doesn’t help. So what is my pay off here, what am I really getting out of it? As this morning’s podcast reiterated to me, there is always a pay off or secondary gain to a behaviour, especially one we are stuck in, even when we can’t see it!

With the spiritual deep dive that lasted for years, as I shared about the other day, I guess the pay off for me was that I wanted to find coherence to counter the feeling of chaos and arbitrariness that has so disarmed me all of my life. If only I could start to feel that there was an ultimate system to make sense of all the surprises and apparent unfairness in the world, I might be able to sleep better at night. If I could ignore all the uncomfortable feelings I get from looking at the surface of things, because I could glean that there was method in all of the madness, maybe life wouldn’t feel so scary and abhorrent. Deep existential discomfiture has been stuck there in the centre of my highly oversensitive and overactive brain for as many years as I can remember, troubling my immature thoughts way before my age peers had put down their preoccupations with childish things, yet there was I lying in a bedroom adorned with Paddington Bear posters stewing on the apparent senselessness and cruelty of the world. I literally don’t recall a time when I didn’t feel like that and it has plagued me since, especially this unfairness thing (a heightened sense of unfairness being a common autistic preoccupation, I now know) and it was never just about any unfairness affecting me at the time but the unfairness that affected other people, animals, the planet we all live on and so on. It’s a lot to have to live with and has sent me down more rabbit holes than I can name, trying to make sense of things, seeking out a sense of order that everybody else must have missed but which I was determined to uncover, though seldom finding any rhyme or reason to anything at all, at least nothing that really compensated for the feelings of overwhelm I constantly live with. Stoking these thoughts up with my intellectual and spiritual pursuits has seldom thrown up any pacifiers and has, more often than not, exhausted and burned me out.

I’m so wary of going there again; I know I have to do what I said in my previous post and stay more grounded than I used to be in the old house, where I would lose days, weeks and months to some latest fixation or other. I need to check in to ask myself what is that payoff and also what is the price; is it all worth it? What do I gain from this latest obsession? Is my self-care suffering? Have I only succeeded in traumatising myself for a few inches of increased knowledge? What did I lose, in terms of blissful ignorance or humanising innocence, when I opened up that can of worms? Should I continue or just drop it now, like a hot potato,and reclaim my peace of mind? Can I break this trend of pushing myself too hard, too relentlessly, without first assessing the value of it or whether my nervous system would rather be doing something else or even has the reserves to cope? Can I allow that it’s not always a waste of time to be less driven or intense? Can I guide my inbuilt intensity into more benign practices that generate joy and not so much discontent, fear and trauma? Can I learn to steer this vehicle of mine instead of running it off the rails?

I’ve talked about secondary gains in a health context for years: it’s so important to ponder “what is my payoff” from a situation such a health issues that won’t seem to resolve in spite of all my efforts and the fact that I apparently want to heal and yet something keeps me gripped on to the unwanted situation. For instance, questions might be, is the situation of not getting any better protecting me from my deep-seated fear of having to go back to a job I hate (or indeed any job!) or am I worried that, if I make progress in my health, people will expect more of me, will demand that I be more sociable, take on responsibilities I can’t handle or don’t want, force me to become more independent etc? Asking these questions can enable you to get to the source of the real sticking point such as I need to change job, learn how to say no, start to trust that I can do a few things on my own again or stop masking my neurodivergent traits.

It’s the same line of questioning when it comes to the matter of deep diving: what am I getting out of this particular deep dive, is it distracting me from more pressing things (my ADHD makes me the master of distraction and avoidance of what I would rather put off), does it justify the fact that my health forces me to be more sedentary than I want to be a lot of the time, masking it as intellectual pursuit, validating an existence that has always felt like it has no other point or purpose, is it hiding the sheer terror that I live with every day not having all the answers to my health, does it distract me from an existential terror I can’t look fully in the eyes…the list goes on.  The payoff we get is sometimes so hard to spot because it’s not necessarily something we would imagine that we are seeking at the surface of things but it can still be there under the surface, calling all the shots. It can also tell us something massive about ourselves when we get to the very root of it.

Increased self awareness is the ticket out of this. That doesn’t mean always saying no to the rabbit hole but being more discerning about when, how deep and for how long you go down there…and sometimes deciding it’s not worth it at all, not even when curiosity is most piqued, because it’s just not worth the pay off. If the cost is too much, it’s time to reassess the situation and take the decision not to, whereas I know for myself that I used to say yes to pretty much every vaguest thought that I found alluring, kidding myself this was a sign that it was meant to be followed, as though it was some divinely guided impulse…but no, there’s a balancing point and that comes from using the muscle in me, that other half of my brain, that I’m now working on developing so that I can step up for my mental and physical health, parenting myself if you like, but if that’s what it takes to get on a far better footing with my health then I’m prepared to give this a try.

Here’s that podcast episode I recommended.