overexcitability

When chronic fatigue meets an ADHD brain

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Just like it’s much harder for a hypermobile person to recover from an extended period of inactivity and lack of appropriate load-bearing (since I learned this the hard way, I have now heard it coorroberated by many reliable sources of hypermobility-meets-chronic fatigue information) I suspect it’s much harder for a neurodivergent person to recover from extended lack of cognitive load bearing. In fact, across both areas, my whole view of pacing has had to be changed since I was busy writing about it last year, with my source information taken from more neurotypical outlets at that time. So what’s important here is to "use it" in order not to "lose it"…yes…but to adapt the way we “use” and “move” to what we can genuinely cope with at this time, be it recumbent exercise or micro dosed cognitive excursions that we enjoy but don't sustain for too long at a time.

Reframing PEM and considering how it may be linked to delayed emotional and sensory processing in autism

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

How could having more sensory information to process than the next person and delayed emotional processing have to do with post exertional malaise or delayed onset pain and what could any connection between them tell us about PEM so that we can reframe it in a more positive light?

Life in the gap: coercing an AuDHD brain to work within the energy parameters of ME/CFS

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Learning how to slow down, how to pace or stop everything including your overactive mind may be the biggest achievement of your life with ME/CFS when you are also AuDHD because it is THE hardest thing for you...yet slow down or stop you must. The point is, those spaces and pauses between exertion and overthinking, that very void you always dreaded, may hold the very healing elixir, the antedote, you've probably chased after all these years but getting into this state is always doubly tough for you and takes such persistence and focus...perhaps more effort than all the things you ever filled-up all your days with before.

Pacing 101

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

When was the last time I just sat there and did absolutely nothing for long-ish phases of time? When did I, with hands on knees, just sit and watch the birds out of the window and let my mind become blank for more than just five minutes at a time? In fact, when do I ever allow myself to be still, without my mind flooding with a dozen new and ever-more more jet propelled urges to do half a dozen other things the moment I allow myself to get going again…and then, once I get going, becoming so hyperfocused I forget to get back to my pacing? Every time I allow myself a short period of activity, I risk becoming embroiled again. It’s hard…probably one of the hardest things (if not the hardest) I’ve ever attempted but the few times I managed to really master pacing, last week I began to feel noticeable benefits that I find hard to explain in words but I felt them clearly enough. There were distinct shifts in me that I hadn’t experienced for a long time, some of them for years, which manifested slowly and subtly like ghosts of a new experience stood on the periphery, contrasting starkly with all the stuck-feelings of chronicness. The best I can explain is that my nervous system felt less compressed or jangly, my body felt less hypertonic and my endorphins felt increased, in short bursts, that almost felt like excitement or waves of appreciation and something bordering on joyfulness. I can vaguely recall feeling like that much more often, even perhaps frequently, back in the good old days, back before ME/CFS took hold in such a way that it has become a whole other way of life but I think it had been a very long time since I had been there, even for a moment, until I started properly pacing last week and now I hold out for experiencing even more of this. It turns out pacing is not this passive thing, the "absence of activity" that I feared so much but this incredibly proactive thing that lets other good things happen.

Hyper: when your body doesn’t behave in predictable ways

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Curly tubes, slow motility, mystery pain, treatment outcomes that don't "take" for very long, delayed and paradoxical responses and an ongoing tricky relationship with gravity...exploring some of the quirks of living with a hypermobile body.

Assessing the true price of the deep dive

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

If you are extremely prone to taking deep dives, the time comes for asking: What is the true price of doing this in terms of its impact on self-care; is it all worth it? What do I gain from this latest obsession? Is my self-care repeatedly suffering, coming second-best to my latest fixation? Have I succeeded in traumatising myself in the name of a few inches of increased knowledge? What did I lose, in terms of blissful ignorance or humanising innocence, when I opened up that latest can of worms? Should I continue or just drop it now, like a hot potato, to reclaim my peace of mind? Can I break this trend of pushing myself too hard, too relentlessly, without first assessing the value of what I am doing 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 actually learn to steer this neurodivergent vehicle of mine instead of running it off the rails?

When things go right but your mind is still looking out for things going wrong

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Over the course of a lifetime, we can become so very weak at this skillset of taking pause, taking a moment, taking the time to enjoy the view from the top of the mountain before “doing” anything else such as pulling the metaphorical camera from the pocket. Just allowing ourselves to be there in the moment of culmination, to breathe it in, take in the 360° view and allow the cells of our body to drink from the water that will remind us later that things don’t always have to be “going wrong” or dying or destructing. We need to amplify such moments in our awareness…not skip over them. They help us to rebalance all the other moments when things feel like they are always shifting and taking us by surprise and they help us to redress all the hypervigilance and anxiety that seems to want to take us over as we age.

Adult ADHD challenge: When you know you need to stop everything for while…but its a real struggle to do so

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

As someone with ADHD I can never completely stop or relax. I end up laughing at myself for my lack of ability to sustain even the most inviting moments of peace and inactivity for very long but I am also mortified. Almost as soon as I have clocked the perfection of such a moment, like taking a minds-eye photograph of it, I am already prepared to dismantle it and move on to the next thing. Its as though I am designed to blow-up such moments of completion, some part of me utterly compelled to drop the pebble in the smooth pond, like I just cant help myself!

The importance of finding your place

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

So many of us put up with living in less than ideal places and circumstances, especially if we feel we are stuck with them, but what if they are the missing piece of the whole health jigsaw. If we also happen to be neurodivergent, feeling "out of place" can be become such an innocuous-seeming sensation across the course of a lifetime because we become so acclimatised to feeling like a misfit in a lot of situations; our version of "normal". This makes it all too easy to ignore times when we are really in the wrong place or situation, when we should be doing something about it, especially when our health is being badly impacted. Clues might be subtle but we, of all people, are past masters at piecing together all the signs and patterns that tell us there is a better kind of life waiting for us somewhere, one that better fits the way we are wired.