Understanding Autism: My Hyperactive Internal Dialogue
When you have a constant stream of thoughts, some of them will not be helpful.
My brain never shuts up, and I mean never. If I am even a little bit awake, I am hit by all manner of thoughts all the time. It is great for generating ideas, but it is also exhausting and makes rest very challenging, and feeds the insatiable appetite of my anxiety.
Like me, you probably know one or more people who seem never to stop talking. As an old friend of mine used to say, they must breathe through their ears! Apart from it becoming very tiresome very quickly to spend time with these people, I have also noticed that nobody actually has enough interesting, valid, and pertinent things to say to speak constantly. Our brains need time to think things through, develop ideas, and draw conclusions. But when you are talking, it is very difficult to think at the same time. (As an aside, this is also why singing or humming when you are stressed can help because it distracts your brain from the things that you are worried about!) People who talk all the time inevitably end up talking nonsense.
Unfortunately, this seems to also apply to my loose-lipped inner dialogue. I do have lots of interesting, if random, thoughts, and I regularly go down mental rabbit holes so deep that I quickly forget how I got into them in the first place, which is unfortunate, as the original thing I was thinking about may have been important! But my brain also feeds me a lot of absolute rubbish. It can jump from just about anything at all to complete catastrophe in moments. Anything that goes wrong, or could go wrong, becomes an existential threat in my head.
I would love to set out now how I manage this and channel it to get the positives (of which there are many) while suppressing the negatives, but I can’t. I am getting better at managing it, but it is very much a work in progress. I do find it helps to keep reminding myself that thoughts are not the same as reality, and that sometimes it helps to fact-check my head if it is forecasting something particularly gloomy. The worst-case scenario that it has told me is certain may quickly turn out to be demonstrably impossible with a few internet searches, and even the worst possible outcome that is remotely possible probably has a solution.
Our brains, you see, are very good at filling in gaps. This is helpful when it covers the blind spot where our optic nerve connects to our eyeball and when it converts a series of still images on a screen into a moving picture, but less good when it draws apocalyptic conclusions based on a couple of rumours!
The one strategy I find that works is to try and keep my brain busy. For me, this tends to mean reading or doing puzzles. Giving my mind a focus stops it running off into a myriad of dark places where it loves to lead me. I even tend to have the radio on when trying to sleep to try and give my mind something to focus on a little as I drift off rather than giving it free rein to inevitably forecast my imminent demise!
I love that I have many thoughts. I love all the ideas, the creativity, seeing connections that others miss. I just wish I could channel it better to stay positive instead of being a worry generator as soon as I let it roam, but I suspect they are two sides of the same coin. More books and puzzles it is then!