thinking & feeling too much

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.

Oxalates in review: one year into a lower oxalate diet

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

A year into a lower oxalate diet, what successes can I report? As it turns out, quite a few when I compare my far-less sensitive life now with the year before I made these changes, not to mention the biggest shift in symptoms and general health stability for years. Read on for a run down of all the improvements that I'm now appreciating in the rear view mirror.

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.

History of a health burnout; what the past can teach me now

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Such as we are experts in anything, those of us with long term health issues also possess a rich hoard of hard-won experience and insight into what made us chronic in the first place. So, what can we take from all the years of navigating our way through the experience of chronic illness as a means to averting a delayed recovery from covid or other trigger virus, especially when we notice any similarities with what we have been through before? Can we now take the overview in order to notice and better understand the patterns, weak spots and trip-wires of chronicness before they become ingrained this time?

Cultivating the fierce self-compassion you need to keep your essence intact

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

Unnecessary exposures to sadness, negativity and grief suck vital life force out of people; take this from a hypersensitive person who knows all too well the cost to health. Learning how to fiercely curate the amount of exposure to negativity that we can cope with as an exercise in self-compassion.

Boldly curating the unique life balance that enables your neurodiversity to thrive

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

At times, chronic illness has appeared like a more "socially acceptable" screen for so-called ADHD deficits that I am embarrassed to own up to....because I know, deep down, that they are not all that I have to offer, its just that the domestic routine of life fails to bring out my better qualities and it takes more variety and positive stimulation from life for me to light up and shine my unique light. When I don’t feed my need for positive hyperactivity, it presents as internal hyperactivity, mainly “overthinking” and then, given time, it ultimately presents as more and more physical symptoms....

A quest to know myself better through synesthesia

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I’m beginning to sense that in synesthesia lies the key of so many aspects of my long running chronic pain. If I could only gain a better viewpoint of what actually happens to me when I sense things, I suspect I might be able to catch a glimpse (like some sideways-on reflection of myself reflected back at me in a shop window) of some of the causative aspects of pain where no other provocation for pain seems to exist. This feels like a worthwhile line of enquiry for anyone who is neurodivergent and weary of how unusual levels of pain never seems to abate, especially as I think it is possible to have one of the less talked-about versions of synesthesia and not even realise it since it is your version of normal.

Synesthesia or salience: autism and environmental sensitivity

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

In the case of those of us most sensitive to environmental factors, is "weather (or whatever it is) salience" a more apt term to describe a higher degree of awareness that leaves other people wondering what on earth we are talking about and does synaesthesia sometimes get recruited by our neurodiverse brains as a means of extending the basic sensory tools so that we get to gather far more "data" from our environment in an attempt to better "systemise" our experience of the otherwise random-seeming world we live in?