It’s so annoying. I am constantly catching myself replaying conversations from decades ago that have no relevance to my current life. Just getting myself all pissed off for no reason.
Aren’t most non-adhders also having constant conversations in their heads
Apoarently they can decide to, like, just not have it right now. Like some damn wizards.
How can this be? How can they accomplish anything without the constant analysis of every permutation and facet of whatever might be on your mind at the moment? I cannot imagine not having the constantly running thought processes…
I’m not sure about other’s amount of thought processes, but there are ways to lessen their impact. Mindfulness meditation helped me recognize and not engage with those thoughts, takes practice but it helps keep your mind on what you’re doing rather than other things. Admittedly I haven’t kept up with it but I did notice an improvement when was.
No way to actually stop the thoughts as far as I know and to be able to let the thought pass without spending time on it takes practice. Also you tend to fail at it a lot but even then you catch it more quickly to move on.
For me, personally - and I say that because everyone’s different - I don’t dislike that this happens unless it’s the usual “remembering that embarrassing thing you did when you were 10 years old” trope. It’s the incredulity that others don’t have to deal with this constantly running background track in their heads.
The fuck?
They have thinking layers, the conductor layer can tell everyone else to wait their turn when trying to coordinate a symphony. ADHD typically either has no conductor or the conductor has no arms. Or random sections have weapons grade sonar as instruments.
Edit: Neurotypicals have a conductor that still needs to be trained
mine isn’t conversation, it’s music. if there isn’t audible music my brain makes some, usually with a beat pretty in line with my pulse.
My music varies. Sometimes it’s music I’ve heard recently on loop, sometimes it’s music my brain came up with, but a lot of times it’s in the background. At times I don’t even notice the music is there until I realize I’ve been playing the King George songs from Hamilton on a loop for a couple of weeks. Either that or I’ll start focusing in on something external and start humming what’s in my head without realizing it. Right now, it’s Foxy Brown’s “Oh Lord” on muddled repeat. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Dont know if it’s an ADHD thing, but I have that. What’s weird is I eventually realized that the soundtrack is talking/reflecting back to me about what’s going on in my life.
Love when a random song pops in my head and I have no idea why until it get to the lyrics that are extremely relevant to whatever’s going on at the moment. It’s eerie as hell, though.
Exactly that experience! Gives.credence to the notion that we are a multiplicity
It’s estimated that about 50-75% of people don’t have an internal monologue at all.
No way it’s that high
Yeah idk how they even measure that sort of thing and I’m skeptical as well, that’s just the numbers floating around. I wonder too if it’s tied to literacy in any way.
Though I suppose there are different ways for brains to work than just verbally. Some people’s brains turn sounds into colors (perfect pitch), some brains don’t have visual memory (aphantasia), and others supposedly have photographic memory. So who knows how this all actually shakes out.
That explains the state of the society I guess
Not necessarily
It was a tongue in cheek joke.
because they just talk to themselves out loud, right?
Non-adhder here. Not constant conversations, no. And not unbidden. I do have conversations in my head, and sometimes they provide answers that weren’t readily available to my conscious mind. But I often have “silence” in my mind. When I’m tired enough, that’s “no noticeable activity” or “just the steps required to do whatever the immediate activity.” Other times it’s a song or a “movie” or plans for what I’m doing later.
I have no silence unless intoxicated or in flow state on something that dose not need words. Best I can manage normally is idle narration and planning. If one voice in my head is not enough to process a concept, simulate a conversation, or ruin my day, more NPCs get added to the thought.
hey at least you get a wider range of opinions instead of just one bitter sod who always takes the dark narrative and sees the worst
I can just imagine having a bad conversion with people that I hate instead of going outside.
So you can have more voices? How does that sound like? It’s like a debate or every voice talk one above the other?
Basically just imaging myself talking to someone I know well enough to guess therie side of the conversation. Sounds like best copy of their voice I can rember. Its usually along the lines of what would X say if I talked to them about Y then playing both my and X side of the conversion.
Oh yeah, i do that too i understand what you mean, sorry i imaginated something having multiple voices of you XD
God I wanna be like you, or at least have my brain be a little more like your brain.
As a non-adhd dude, i talk in my head, i have monologues in my head and i “simulate” conversations in my head too, i do the same thing while i write and when i walk in silence i just start a big monologue or i look around commenting things in my head.
I think i can stop that but i always start to talk again in my head so idk, i should see if i get silence at a certain point
Are they? I would really like to know.
Anecdotally in my own life, no.
Some people around me seemed to start to understand better when I told them this asshole in my head starts talking the moment I open my eyes and he doesn’t shut the fuck up! I get no peace! It’s really how it feels.
Any good strategies how to make the negativity of that flow stop? I literally can’t stop it, spend the last 15 minutes envisioning how my relatives may get poisoned by a Blue Ring Octopus. The time before that I think some made-up political discussion ending up in the family exploding (very popular).
I really would prefer less negative stuff. And please don’t just say therapy, I live in Germany, we don’t have any therapists available before 2030 for 2nd class healthcare receivers.
Mediation. The practice focuses, in part, on training you to avoid persistent thoughts and staying present.
The last thing I want is staying present tbh, my life sucks ass (which is one reason why I’d like to focus more in aspects that may improve it).
I know our life sucks. That is exactly why meditation is so helpful, and important. You can easily do a gratitude meditation - breathe in thinking about something you’re thankful for, breathe out letting that gratitude flow down from your head through your body. This will instantly help your body and brain feel better. Other meditations help us separate what we want (everything to be better) from what we actually need (air, water, food, a place to sit), and see that we cause our own suffering through attachments to our expectations, which finally gives you a real way to stop hurting yourself constantly, by letting go of the weapons you use. You already hold the key. There is honestly, no judgement in meditation. Just keep gently guiding yourself back to your breath and/or whatever you are trying to focus on, and let yourself just be you for a while. It’s surprisingly helpful.
Not to be flippant, but if you want to alter the way you think, then therapy is probably the answer.
The good news is that in my experience, the valuable part of therapy is totally free and you could start today.
I’ve had success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The model for CBT says that our automatic thoughts initiate our feelings, and while our feelings are valid, our thoughts can be bullshit.
Our brain is like an overgrown field, and each thought is like a person passing through it. Each time a thought passes through the field, it wears down a groove which will become a trail or a road. Our thoughts want to take the path of least resistance, so they follow the well-worn paths. However, we can create new paths with better thoughts that lead to more positive feelings, and eventually the negative paths have more resistance than the positive ones.
The key technique is recognizing Cognitive Biases, which are common ways that our brains lie to us, and then restructuring our thoughts through journaling exercises. Common biases include assuming other people think poorly of us, making predictions of the future with limited information, or thinking that because we feel bad we must be bad.
Now on the flip side, therapeutic techniques are not a one-size-fits-all solution. What’s worked for me might not work for everyone. And that’s okay because there’s plenty of tools in the toolbox left over.
I got a lot of mileage out of CBT. It’s logical, there’s a process to follow, and it improved the quality of my life to a point. It didn’t happen overnight, and I still have bad times more often than I’d like, but there was improvement
Whether you have access to a therapist or not, the greatest impact from therapy comes from doing the homework. It’s lame, but there it is. But if you really don’t vibe with a technique, the good news is there’s a zillion other techniques you could try a web search away.
From what I picked up, CBT is basically telling a bad thought to stop and moving to a different topic. Like literally tell the idea or your thought precess in your head to fuck off and process something useful until your default thoughts are not constant nuclear war in your head.
Its a million times harder than it sounds at first, but progress snowballs. Eventually you retrain the briains default reaction to chill out instead of contatntally assuming your doom. You figure out how to extinguish a thought chain thats going to end with your brain telling you to neck rope before it goes that deep.
Huh, I figured this out myself a decade ago. It’s getting to be about time to go through it again.
My best answer is to get diagnosed and treated for an anxiety disorder because these are not things that have ever popped into my head
you’re
Certainly helps to develop one’s ideology if you’re constantly synthesizing!
Fuzzy logic, cute.
