I heard a quote recently that a person with ADD needs to use 100% of their brain at all times, so if a task doesn’t require 100% then having something else going on that can occupy the remaining percentage like music or a TV program on helps. The more brain focus the task requires the fewer extraneous distractions there can be.

I definitely find this true for myself. Focusing in heavy traffic requires silence, while normal driving requires music or listening to something streaming on my phone.

I’ve realized that if I don’t have background noise on my brain will fill the silence. And sometimes the thoughts are obsessive or intrusive. If I’m half listening to a TV program it is helping me not go down one of a dozen ruminating rabbit holes.

The worst time for this is at night when I want my brain to shut off. For some people screen time before bed keeps them up. For me playing games or reading articles on my phone shifts my thinking away from whatever thing my brain has decided to ruminate on at the moment. I usually stay on my phone or tablet until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, because if I am not 100% ready to fall asleep my brain will start up again.

Turning on sleep sounds or stories has the same effect in keeping my brain occupied until I am able to drift off to sleep. If I wake up at night I often have to do the same thing to get myself back to sleep.

I also use white noise. I am hypersensitive to sound, or lack of sound so having the fan on is calming. I usually don’t even have it pointed at me. I just need the noise.

My obsessive thinking causes me to overthink about everything. I will over analyze interactions with others especially if I think I said something stupid, which happens too often because I spoke before I thought it through. 

I realized a few years ago that I needed to work on my Emotional Intelligence. Basically I lacked the awareness of when it was a good time to speak and not to speak. Just because I thought of something didn’t mean it was a good time within the conversation to mention it. Maybe others were talking or maybe the conversation had moved on from what my comment pertained to.

This actually happened recently, when a conversation I wasn’t a part of was happening at the table next to me among a group of people I knew. They were musing about the occurrence of redheadedness in families. Since we have a lot of redheads in our family I knew the answer, but I couldn’t get their attention to interject my thought. When I finally did, it ended up feeling awkward and rude and they just looked at me funny and went back to their conversation.

Once when I was a teenager my sister and friends joked about me talking to the table. I had thoughts and I was just speaking them out even though no one else was listening!

Of course they laughed and I probably did too, but those kind of things led me to feel socially awkward and reluctant to speak as I was sure to say something out of place.

I think that’s true for a lot of people with ADD. We realize we don’t fit in the norm and so we try to adapt. Maybe we mask, pretend we’re more like the others and mimic their behavior or maybe we shrink back and hide the parts of ourselves that feel awkward. 

Something else I’ve noticed about myself is that I don’t like change. I find my favorites and I stick with them. It’s like the flip side of obsession is novelty which my ADD brain craves, but there is safety in sameness. I like my environment not to change and also to change in predictable ways.

Change, as the British say, “throws a spanner in the works.” I recently described the anxiety I feel prior to travelling to the anticipation of stepping onto an escalator or a moving sidewalk. Step wrong and you can send yourself tumbling. Change is like stepping on the escalator. Once you make the transition you’ll be fine, but you have to be careful on that first step.

Even if I’m looking forward to a change or I know it’s a good thing I still get anxious about change. I cope with this by knowing that I’ll settle in with time and it’s ok to feel uncertain when new things come into my life.

Another way I can get obsessed is with playing games. For example, my niece introduced me to Mine Craft and I played it pretty solidly for a whole year before my obsession ran its course. Now that I know this about myself, I am aware that if I find a new game to play and it feels like I’m being obsessive about it that the obsession will fade with time.

It is interesting that one of the hallmarks of ADD is distractibility and yet another facet is this obsessive thinking and the way we can hyperfocus on things. If I am mid-project I can get so caught up in what I’m doing that I’m not paying attention to things like being hungry, having to use the bathroom, or simply being too tired to keep going and think straight.

I’m much better at stopping myself now that I’m older, but there have been times when I pushed my limits and stayed at something way too long just because I was so hyper focused on it.

This tendency actually makes me quite good in a crisis. As long as I have something to focus on like a task list I can stay relatively calm. When my dad and husband’s boat overturned while they were fishing and they ended up having to be rescued from the middle of Lake Erie we were frantic with worry because we didn’t know what had happened to them. But everyone said the same thing to me afterward, that I was so calm.

I didn’t necessarily feel calm, but I had this odd ability to compartmentalize my feelings and push them away. There was no need to think the worst while we had no confirmation that the worst had happened. I would not allow myself to go there.

Being aware that obsessive thinking is part of my ADD helps me accept it as part of who I am. I have learned what I can do to distract myself from thinking obsessively about something if it isn’t productive, but I can also harness that energy and become hyper focused in order to get projects completed.