Top o’ the 2am to ya! My second child has started shouting ‘mama’ in his sleep. Getting up was a choice this time; I’ve actually grown to enjoy these quiet mornings. 2am not sustainable but hey; I’m happy. I’ve seen 2am from the other side enough times.
This aripiprazone stuff seems like a slam dunk for everything that ails me. Yes yes I know; upgrading problems. But this is one big fucking upgrade. My brain is quiet. I am content. Or rather, I’m not crawling out of my skin with discontent and beating myself up for doing so.
That book which people told me to write might be falling out fully formed. Quitting alcohol, writing every morning, going deep. That was just practice for this and small fry. Honestly… so small by comparison. That was the headache and this is the sickness.
I finish working, get all the things. Process terminates, and I have enough things / relationships of my own making to hold me to this world. I get the drugs. And finally I feel like I can start living my life. Life starts at 42 for me. Yes yes I know but I’m 42 this year and it’s a nice number, you know why.
Weed; I’ve been medicated with legal analogs for years now. Effectively. I’ll make a post. Well.. I can take it or leave it now. I literally forget. I see the clock and think ‘shouldn’t I be getting antsy by now’. I lie down in bed and feel asleep naturally, like my wife does. Feels like zero lurching-awake, which has been my life to date.
I love doing these knives. I hate photographing and putting them online. I’ll be pretty lazy with it I think. I don’t really care whether they sell. Why am I doing them? The process needs to have a purpose. The purpose here is meditation. The knives are reflections of the world. Perfection is not the point.
I need to make them for me and then choose to sell the ones I am not attached to. If I make anything ‘to sell’ then the process stops being enjoyable and the product ends up shoddy.
I guess a freeform journal like this could be good and then other pages with more structure. The whole thing is coming together gradually. Let’s try that.
20250615 0215
So here I am laying my track and forgetting where I’ve been and someone comes in from the side with one of my prompts: anyway (change topic) then start new topic and once three lines of rail with stronger dopaminergic encoding (positive or negative) has been laid, I forget my own rail.
This is why adhd folks are so easy to manipulate. We hate it and we see it and yet time and again we are powerless to stop it. I am only just aware of this now; when I took aripiprazole it was like I saw god and all the manipulation in my relationships was translucent, with me like a spider in the middle.
Except I’m not a spider; I’m a fly. Or a train. And I am building the tracks and looking at my feet and it is so easy to change those tracks if you know the prompts. Near impossible if you don’t.
So - now to figure out my prompts. Make them intentional. Make sure I control them.
So = changing or resetting topic
Anyway = rewind
System model: a train, with only 3 pieces of track. Building as I go.
This is why I need to output; low memory. It’s also why I go so fast. The rails crumble as I pass over them and I need to get to the other side. I go too fast, so I need to figure out a way to slow the information down for others while being able to process it myself. Again - drugs is best? Gate it, rather than just trying to hold it in again. Can’t gate it. Not again. But it’s not an issue if I’m not with people; this website is a great way to output. Blabbing
Anyway
Low memory, laying rails, going 100kph. Is that even fast for a train? Anyway people can come in and fuck up my rails pretty easily with a ‘yeah’ or ‘uh huh’ or whatever. And a question from the side? Tangential? Please… let me finish my track first.
If you let me finish my track and step back then there will be something legible there for you, but otherwise it will be unfinished and whatever I was trying to communicate will not come through effectively. I will seem angry or uncooperative or flustered. I’m not. I’m just trying to find that last piece of track so you can see the picture.
20250615 0230
Death. What a topic. I’ve recently gone from feeling like I’m just waiting to die to like there’s some inherent reason to hang around so…
I’ve fixated on death since I was a child. Age 13 or so I had about 2 years where it was all I could think about. And I don’t mean the usual ‘oh we die it’s bad’ but I mean existential pain. A need to know why, what my purpose is, why I am here. A crushing need.
Obviously we are all human and we all feel this need for purpose, meaning. But I think with autism you feel it more, and with adhd the urgency is dialled up.
So undiagnosed and searching for a meaning to life. Desperately searching, while knowing intellectually there is no objective answer. Still, unable to create your own lasting meaning because of adhd. You see other people riding their bike 24/7 and marvel, as you bounce off yet another hobby.
Asking other people - or the socials - what the dream goal is. Locking it in mind and starting to pursue because surely this one has some kind of lasting meaning and will bring purpose to your life.
Well it’s because you’re autistic, James. Your life already has all the meaning it ever will.
Someone had to tell you the purpose of your life when you were young, and they forgot to. Or they were too honest, too respectful, and told you ‘we don’t know’ or ‘there is none’. Autism in those days was a different ball game; you were undiagnosed because you didn’t fit the diagnostic criteria; now you do.
Anyway all the angst about this. All of it. You know; the unnecessary stuff. I’m still gonna die and so is everyone I love. But now? I don’t care quite so painfully much. I still care.
I think this ties back into rsd too. The autism really doesn’t like the lack of meaning, and the rsd really doesn’t want to let go.
20250615 0250
inappropriate emotions
These are a bitch. I fucking hate them. Hate them so much. Hated myself so much over the years because of them. Always knew they weren’t my fault on some level but was powerless to turn them down.
This is the volume switch I wanted for my entire life. Turning down the brain. Lowering the intensity. But it’s not the brain; it’s the juices.
So I think of us as having 2 emotional landscapes: the neuronal and the hormonal. Weirdly enough the neuronal is both faster and slower; it’s electric so fast but not as powerful; when you see a bear you need chemicals pumping around your body to fire your muscles up and get your heart pounding and whatnot. The brain just doesn’t have the oomph.
So let’s say that the brain is the controller and the juices the guns. The brain is the ship and the juices the cannons.
Let’s say you see a snake. Argh! Stomach lurch! That’s your juices. Oh! But wait. It’s a stick. That’s your brain.
So your brain registered it in a lower region with low-resolution, triggered a sympathetic nervous system response, and then cancelled the response when the higher-resolution processing had been done. I think rsd is a truncated version of this but anyway.
Actually running with rsd the dopamine droputs are causing you to go full praire-dog every second. Emotionally think ‘where am I’ and then re-encode.
So maybe your emotions are just out of whack. Or maybe they are not ‘inappropriate’ but rather ‘appropriate in the micro’. Maybe you saw a snake in that split second; a micro expression that you didn’t like. Maybe that’s what you’ve registered.
With medication (aripiprazole in particular) my dopamine signalling seems more regular and the inappropropriate emotions have… dare I say… disappeared?
One troubling thing with these emotions is that they are totally unpredictable. You can’t tell what kind of inappropriate response it might be. Anyway loose thread…
20250615 0300
daydreaming
I really hate this word because there’s something a lot more important at play here. ‘Daydreaming’ and the female version of ‘airheadedness’ is just… oh fuck off. Seriously.
The thing about adhd daydreaming is that the second you try to lean into a daydream, your mind goes elsewhere. It’s not pleasurable. It’s not the same.
So yeah. tpn and dmn. Everyone knows that shite by now. The dmn is active while the tpn does its job; one of the key differences in an adhd brain. This is obviously one cause of daydreaming.
But it’s bigger than that. The mind wandering doesn’t feel like ‘easy wandering’ and more like a frantic searching. An escape. The mind is trying to protect itself from negative feelings by ensuring that there is not a spare instant during which dopamine could drop out. Remember that fluctuations in dopamine prompt all behaviour. Thought is a behaviour.
So I think the daydreaming is also a self-defence mechanism. It is to ensure that your mind never sits still, just like your body can never sit still. Avoiding Trainspotting mode.
My daydreaming took the form of constant planning. I thought I was addicted to productivity and grew to hate it, but turns out I’m just a mega monkey who needs 20 bananas instead of 2 thanks to some songkran shit in my juicy bits.
So every moment of every day was spent planning the next moment of every day. What went before is not held in my short working memory so I need to ensure that every task is completed before moving on. Slap bang wallop, テキパキ, slap it away and onto to the next.
And this is all while trying to process complex life events. They don’t work that well in the background so having to hop between slap-banging and trauma-processing can get quite tiring. It also never allows you to get into the trauma-processing groove, which is why I think these knives are so good for me.
In my 42nd year I discover a need for self-stimulatory behaviour. I discover the reason: I need to occupy my brain with a simple repetitive task so that it can process the hard stuff in the background. This is the time when I can daydream properly.
20250615 0320
fighter
I think my whole life might have just been training myself to never give up. And then when my fight was over, I found out that it wasn’t a choice to begin with.
So much self restraint and discipline. Meditation and training. Journalling and soul searching and … always viewed as selfish and pig headed and… well fuck me I’m done with that. Give me drugs.
So school was rough. After we moved to Sheffield, that is. I ran away when I was 11; scaled the walls and sat in my garden until my parents came home. I was reading lord of the rings before the move and they’d pulled me back to red book number 4 instead, bastards.
The big school was rough. The rules of conduct my dad taught: Never go down. Protect the weak. Don’t start fights but always finish them. Never hit someone on the floor. These were my bible. I never felt bullied. But I had 3 fist fights per week, often against groups, and frequently to protect other people I saw in trouble.
I was the autistic avenger.
And I fucking love reframing it like that because the whole ‘bullied’ narrative never fit. I fucking won those fights mate. They needed to come at me with 5 people because they were afraid of me. Terrified. And that’s kinda cool. Smartest kid in a school of 2000, sure. But maybe the toughest too?
Anyway I got out of that country as soon as I could. I hate violence. I’m good at rules and optimisation so I am good at (fist-level) violence but I absolutely hate it. You can’t change the rules of the game but you can change the game you play.
So I changed my game. Moved to Japan. Found my home.
Japan is awesome for autistic people. Everyone walks on the same side of the pavement and stands on the same side of the escalator. Interactions in shops are scripted. It’s clean and orderly. So I work my way over to Japan, first with a year in highschool / homestay, then uni, and then work in Tokyo.
Living solo, my employer collapses in 2 weeks, and I land a job in recruitment. It’s basically sink or swim and I swim, by putting on another mask. The first day, ‘name gathering’… sat there, fear of the phone… do it or back to the uk. I swallow all my morals and pride and lie to people to get their info. I hate every second. Within 4 weeks I’ve figured out a more effective way which doesn’t involve duplicity, but those initial weeks, even though I didn’t cause any harm, well that’s the type of mask I can never wear again. Stomach in knots thinking about it.
So that company collapses and I choose to join a guy building something from scratch. I’ve always loved challenges and building things; money never interested me. Just give me something hard. Something all-encompassing. Give me Super Meat Boy and Celeste and I will 100% them just because I need to focus so damn hard to keep those dropouts at bay.
Anyway off we go, me spiralling into alcoholism, toxic relationship, culminates in me in jail after an altercation following the death of my 10 year old niece. I was scammed basically, while drunk, but used it as a way to turn my life around. Always with the reprogramming, making these negatives into positives.
Bye to the bitch and I decide to go for a run. Can’t even hack 2km. I dissect. 3 years later I finish my first ironman. I’ve built this guy’s company. I’m bored. I’ve done 100 days off alcohol. I don’t know. Like… what now? I’ve done it. I’m at the end of a chapter and need to close it so I can move to the next. But that mental training from the ironman; that stays with me.
So off I go with my wife (non-toxic!) cycling around Asia. I build my own company while on the road. Try to do something new, end up half succeeding. In hindsight this was to accommodate my all-or-nothing work style. Anyhow. I am forging a new niche in AI recruitment, in 2014. They’re dreamers trying to change the world back then. It feels worthwhile. I have purpose.
While cycling Asia I do a 10 day silent meditation retreat, and I take an hours-per-day meditation practice forward for a few months but then cut back because it’s making me too detached.
Anyway. SE Asia, Thailand, Italy. Want to start a family but no support network so try moving to the uk to be near my family. This goes terribly. Hostile environment policy means my wife isn’t welcome, and we have an ectopic pregnancy miscarriage with our first child which some lawyers use to scam us out of a few thousand pounds. Fuck that country. We leave.
So - back to Japan and to Hokkaido. No money. Bang - pregnant. Fuck! Need to work. So I blast the prodigy and crack beers. I spent a winter drinking appx 750ml of whisky every day while I crank up the head-volume and bang away on linkedin. I hate every second. It has to be done. I will die. But;
Do what you have to do before doing what you want to do.
Fuck it’s tiring just thinking about this. I proceed to work my ass off for…2 years? This is child number one. I work before he’s born and after. I start ironman again because drink was and is not sustainable, and I get serious about trying to stop the booze.
I help build a pretty-big-news company then burn out. Again. Maybe 3x in that cycle? Covid hits and we are ground zero Hokkaido right when my second child is born 6 weeks early. We need to visit the NICU while the hospital is locked down and covid cases are ’15 and rising’. I burn out again. 3 months potato mode.
Then I pull myself up and say ‘right James - this is it - the final push’ and target Japan’s equivalent of early-days-Google. I sign up for an ironman and decide to target sub-11. I quit alcohol permanently. All at the same time. And I tell the people on the booze forum not to become overnight superman? Ffs James. Advice tailored for self.
Anyway I dissect everything. Not consciously; I just dissect it to fundamental pieces like lego so that they will always click together in the right way. The candidate sourcing to the interviews to the offers. The getting dressed to the ride to the recovery. The taping to the cutting to the gluing. It’s all automated. Every second of every day optimised for productivity to A to B to C to the end and…
What?
What then? That’s the point. I managed to get there. In 2022. I should have retired. I tried to, actually, but couldn’t. I thought it was because the company was mine and I had employees but in hindsight it was probably just because I have audhd and didn’t have medication.
So instead of stopping I carry on. By now I’ve upgraded my addictions so many times that my addiction is addiction itself. Nah that’s silly. It was discipline. I was addicted to discipline. Perfect shave every morning. Not a wrinkle in sight. A round peg well and truly hammered square.
So until now I’d had clear targets for my work. ‘Go to the gym 3x a week’ sucks but ‘squat 2x your bodyweight’ is great. For my work it was ‘buy a house’ or ‘retire early’. Now I had run out of real tangible personal goals; that’s the thing. I still had to chase something because of audhd but I had everything I needed in life. The internal conflict… steel wool just thinking about it.
I decide to target the ironman world championships. I also know that I will not be able to ‘just stop’ recruitment because I am well and truly addicted, so I - again - replace that addiction. I spend a year and waste 5 million yen trying to build a bike shop. I overtrain on the ironman and get very sick a few days before my race.
This all serves the purpose. I close the chapter. I get out of recruitment. I cancel the bike shop. Then the next day I go for a bike ride and find that guy hanging in the park. Fucker. At least my kids weren’t there. Do it at home please.
Anyway I’m into the art now. The bike shop got my body out of recruitment and the art was to get my mind out of finances. I lean into this more and more, and in hindsight it became - you guessed it - another addiction. MonkeyJ needs his 300 bananas. I also get into yoga which makes me feel incredible, but I reject it forcefully after just a few months, probably because my brain was like ‘not again mate’. Another mask. Another person’s dream.
But yeah… if I look back at my life it has been one of discipline and effort. Depending on when you met me, you would either think I was a military boy or a full-blown alcoholic. Either completely collected or falling apart. None of the effortless grace that Joe Bloggs exhibits as he cracks his 4th beer; all held together with effort and duct tape.
And people saying you’re living the dream. First world problems, I know.
But; brain chemistry. It’s a real problem, even if the physical system it affects is your brain.
20250615 0415
So I have this thing where I kind of channel my autism. I started doing this with the art shortly before my mask imploded, and think it helped me to get more in tune with who I was, under the storm of shit. This is before I knew I had either adhd or asd.
It’s kind of… letting your eyes drift out of focus, letting the tension melt from your face, letting your wrists go slack, and drooling your way around until something feels right.
Cannabis is great for this because it can lower your short term memory even more so you’re down to 1 rail instead of 3. This helps me to get into the zone; I’m never happier than when I’m in the zone.
In fact I’m not sure I’ve had much choice to date, and am curious to see how my life changes now the brain has a little more control over the endocrine system. Is there such a thing as ‘easy happiness’?
Anyway I find that when I can get into this kind of hazy half-alert phase I can act on instinct; things flow. Not always, but often.
Then there’s dopamine. Now this is weird. You won’t believe me.
I think I can feel dopamine, and I think it feels like fishhooks under the cheekbones. An inexorable pull to do. In those smiling muscles, right at the top. The gurning muscles. Doesn’t matter what; just do.
Well this has been calmed down infinitely by aripiprazole. The tension in my face just melted. It’s creeping in a little now, but it melted completely at first, to the point where it scared people; I lost all my facial expressions for a week.
And sure; I’m basically permanently a little bit high now. But I think I was in withdrawal for half my life so have earned a little relief.
Tired after the early morning and thoughts are a bit discombobulated.
20250615 1000
divine
So more and more I think that autism is order and adhd chaos. Good and bad. Yin and yang.
All cultures have this duality in some form or other. Whether they cooperate or compete depends on whether you’re in the east or west, but every religion has some kind of good and bad at its root.
I believe that the eternal struggle in all of us is what created our religions. Audhd is just an extreme end of the bell curve, is all. I’d have been a monk if there was no science.
Pattern recognition, seeing god, fate, reading the tea leaves… it’s all ‘autism’ to some degree. It is easy to imagine a holy man seeing a pattern in the weather and predicting a storm, due to some gut feeling or voice speaking to him, telling him it’s coming. All because of unconscious pattern matching.
The kingdom of heaven is within, as are all the hells. These are the brain states we have to chart.
But the thing doing the charting is the autism. Let’s call it the nervous system, since everyone has one of those. The analogy of land. Buddha used the same; an island unto yourself and observe the clouds come and go.
The more I think about it the harder it is to imagine any other possibility actually. We all have this internal struggle, and we all have some level of rng in our emotions. They’re juices, not voltages. Shit leaks, yo.
There’s a very real possibility that the autistic people saw these patterns and ended up becoming the saints, the divine. The level of evangelism… it all fits. The fact I’m making this fucking website ha.
20250615 1355
talk
Yeah so I struggle with small talk. A lot. I’m shit at it. No matter how many times you tell me to just nod and smile, I can’t. My brain will engage with that silly comment and I will forget the matter at hand.
So there are two things going on here:
1 - I have absolutely - and I can’t stress this enough - absolutely no interest
2 - It is completely overwritnig what I had in my memory for the real conversation
So conversation I love. I excel at conversation. The real juicy stuff. Close to the bone. The stuff that hurts and has meaning and makes you laugh? The hard conversations? Well I live for those. When I have the batteries of course.
I understand why the small talk happens - it’s to lubricate the wheels and assure your partner that you’re not going to punch them in the face because of your inappropriate emotions.
But for me… it comes in and takes 60% of my working memory, knocking out the next thought I had lined up. The little ‘oh yeah that’s annoying’ comment which I know was to try to facilitate the conversation has actually made me forget what I was…
Anyway; the flip side is that I dive into tough topics too fast for people. I’m like ‘yeah you’ve got childhood trauma so do this’ when they were asking if I want cream in my coffee.
But yeah - talk and conversation are two very different things. And the easy one for me seems to be the hard one for most.
20250615 1410
cartography
The Buddha mapped out the mind in the language of his day but we can do better with the tools we have now.
I think that a good starting point would be to take the neuronal system as the land and the endocrine system as the weather. They both influence each other, but disproportionately. Autism is solid, adhd is fluid. And remember we all have these.
In this analogy I had some Jupiter-like weather going on and now it’s just a bit blustery.
You could map brain states out according to the individual using this dual system. 32 dopamine points for me is different to 32 for you, and that’s because our land is different.
The weather shapes the land over time. But mostly the land shapes the weather, if your brain is functioning normally.
So you could have a topographical map which symbolises the physical structures of the brain, volitional action, memory, thought, etc. Then a meteorological system for predicting when a storm is incoming, etc.
I also think that ‘slightly fucked up’ endocrine systems are essential for the species. Otherwise we’d all be Zuckerbot bananas ripe for a blight. Occasional errors in the genome and a bit of RNG in the emotions will keep things moving forward.
20250615 1345
interests
Special interest my ass. I’m making knives from mortal weapons. Previously I was a world class athlete, a businessbody, the heaviest drinker you’d ever meet… you get the idea. Go hard or go home.
So right now I can barely wait for the arrival of a new whetstone. I just realised I’ve never actually analysed these interests so…
How to get good at something:
Dissect the fucker into lego blocks
Make sure that you dissect everything and know it intimately, tangibly. Do not follow guides; follow your hands. Look up the fundamental principles and muddle through after that. Find your own path and write your own instructions. Ensure that instructions are sequential and there is no temporal component, and make sure individual steps can be checked off as ‘task completed’ even if the project is ongoing. Leave the items necessary for task initiation where you can’t avoid seeing them, and where they are easy to grab.
So knives. Early days. Where are we in the process…
Anger to start as usual and buying loads of bits of sword, then high quality synthetic stones, and just rubbing that shit until something came out. More synthetic stones, too many, but twice making the same knife type and I’m bored so I try a natural stone with a funky shape from a 75 year old dude online.
The smell is amazing. The sound. The slurry on the fingertips. The feel. This is a rabbithole. I can spend decades here. Japanese sword polishers - 研師 - are respected keepers of the culture. It’s a meditation. It’s a healing. It’s history and culture and imagination.
It’s also technology. Infinite variations of stone. Different compositions sure, with fun imperfections. But also different size and shape of particle. Triangle or square? Some cut while some burnish. Making a slurry. Slurry thickness for cutting. On the fingers for misting.
Then there’s the steel itself; two different kinds. There’s at least 6 different words for steel in Japanese. The central one is the cutting edge and tougher, so you can select stones after polishing which will scuff only the soft steel, emphasising the hamon.
So this is amazing for me. I’m behind right now, where I would have been ahead if I’d been taught. That will change. Learning this way happens exponentially, and once you reach critical mass you just fly. It will happen with time. Break it down and build it up. And the satisfaction from doing so. Hnnng… I can feel it already.
So right now I’m working with 10 natural stones and 5 finger stones including a petrified tree. Working on 800 year old steel which has been sharpened down to the spine and has evidence of combat. This is so fucking cool. Special interest? Go sit on your football mate. Special interest…. I mean. Must try harder, really.
So yeah we will see if this lasts. It’s either 5 years and near-mastery or 5 months and never again. I don’t decide!
But this time I’m being extra careful to define a purpose before getting too into it. Because apparently (as of 3 weeks ago) I’m autistic. If I don’t decide a purpose then one will be decided by my wacky dopamine system and it’s likely to just be some riff on ‘more’.
So the purpose: meditation. I’ll just make them until I feel they’re done and then… well… see how I feel.
Finger stones are super nice. Picked them up today. I’ve always wanted to do something like this. It was literally impossible until medication.
20250615 2005
So I stand up and look back and it’s mostly done, I think. As usual. I need to plug some holes but the bones are there. Next up is a cut phase to clean up the mess, and then maybe another push.
I think I am unpacking the rules of my life to date because of how much aripiprazole has freed up my brain for real processing. The initial euphoria / high triggered things to move forward faster, and emphasised some of my autistic traits, but the processing due to less overload is a real clinical effect.
Anyway now I need to see how things lie. Adhd is coming together; autism will still be there tomorrow. What else do I need?
- Practical tips for communicating
these will be far easier than high-James thought ha!
- Other adhd traits and shite. I’m gonna have to google them because I’m forgetting (and that’s not a pun)
I think I needed to unpack and understand so that I can move forward, and I think I will likely write a blog going on. I have a lot of opinions and many of them are valid, but my wife only has two ears and one brain, and I’m not the only child in the house.
And there’s always that side of me that does want to go into the cloud. I think it’s our only chance to survive as a species, and AI needs to be embraced and steered instead of feared and repelled. That wave is too big; it’s a losing battle. Always has been. Because dopamine, you see. Dominoes.
This might already have happened of course; we’d never know if the simulation resolution was high enough. If a tree falls and nobody hears then was it ever rendered? Probably not, really. Why would it be?
Anyway. Yesterday made it very clear that I’m still recovering. It’ll take months. I used to scramble in the swim of ironman, and just hanging around the start line of a trail run was overwhelming.
It’s amazing that I functioned for so long, and I feel bad, for everything I put myself through. That first step to see a psychiatrist. Fucking hell it took ages. So many years, decades, thinking I was depressed or bipolar or just a bit shit and it was a neurodevelopmental disorder that could be mostly drugged away…
Anyhow. Identify and then plug holes:
Soothing X
Sensory issues X
Emotional intensity X
Tiredness X
And then have a fucking break. Sprint and rest. Train and recover. Build and cut. It’s the only way I can operate.
20250615 0410
tired
Oh fuck me I was always exhausted. I don’t think I actually had a proper night of sleep until I took these medicines. I just kept burning the candle from all directions until I exhausted myself to the point of passing out, rinsed and repeated.
Late ironman days I would need a 60 minute nap every day just to function. This was my medicine, remember, and I had a tolerance. So I would wake up at 4 with night sweats, high cortisol, bouncing off the walls. Do something like meditation to try to restrain myself, then do my workout or whatever.
The steel wool would spin faster as it does when I’m tired, but the adhd side would crave more stimulation. And it would spiral. Both on the micro intra-day level where I will be doing dumber stuff and getting more tired and angry, but also on the macro scale where I decide to spend my off season mapping out the entire mountain range, back country, solo. Sorry but anyone telling me that this is a better idea than a bit of weed needs to review their priorities.
These whetstones. Lovely. The natural world.
Anyway I never knew rest. I never knew sleep. I just knew activity and exhaustion.
I tried everything. And everything I tried over the years, medicine included, worked for a while then stopped.
Because my sleep issues all stem from dopamine and norepinephrine. It’s that simple. Those cold plunges in the mornings? They were bad for me. They spiked both of these and trained my body to do be in an even higher gear.
To be clear: dopamine hacking made things worse, in hindsight. I was good at it. I knew all the foods and behaviours and supplements. I was good at it, and it was bad for me. The sleep hacking was fine, but mostly ineffective.
So guanfacine lowers my NE and I sleep like a baby. My god the relief. But again - 2-3 months in it begins to fade.
Now aripiprazole I think is the big one. It fucked up my sleep for a week or so as perceived dopamine ramped up, but now everything is at a stable clinical level I am sleeping the best in my life. Sleep latency is low, I stay asleep, and I wake rested, if a little earlier than previously. This is week one of good sleep though so we shall see.
I can’t stress enough how much these drugs have lowered my exhaustion. And they have done so by lowering the spikes in motivational neurotransmitters, not by exaggerating them. Lowering these hormones has increased my motivation and wellbeing. Lowering them. Restraining them. Not restraining myself, but restraining these two neurotransmitters with single-milligram-level doses of old drugs has changed my entire life. More =/= better.
But yeah. No fucking tips. I tried them all. They didn’t work for long. Because it was all about the songkran in my juicy bits.
20250616 0430
sense
I never even realised I had sensory issues. Or rather, I never realised that everyone else didn’t. Is your red the same as my red? Quantifiably not.
So I think this all ties into the highly sensitive person thing, and emotional intensity. As you get tired, your dopamine system seeks more stimulation, the stimulation becomes more overwhelming, your executive function breaks down, you get the picture.
So I never realised everyone else couldn’t hear the constant low-pitched hum of transformers and large engines. We are talking a 50Hz hum coming through the concrete from 50 metres away, or an engine several kilometers away. The type of sound that cuts straight through everything else but is dB-c so not picked up by most sound meters.
The type of sound you lose 5 years of sleep to while people tell you its all in your head and you start to question your sanity. That type of sound.
Well there was meditation, which was fucking useless. Thanks buddha. Or there was drugs. Meditation would maybe have worked if I’d pushed it into defence mechanism territory, but fuck that. Take my 620 yen.
So I have a single track mind and issues with the data pipeline. I can not tell you how just how profoundly starting aripiporazole freed up a logjam of thoughts. That’s what this blog is! The initial flood was chaotic but still, the flow remains.
When I started guanfacine the sensory issues became obvious. It dialled down my NE and removed my defences. The new understanding of adhd and stimulation seeking also showed me that a lot of what I was doing in ‘expanding my comfort zone’ was probably just making myself feel stressed for a thrill. Ha. Sobering thought.
So yeah - kids screaming, bright lights, engine noises… all bother me intensely but I’d never realised. The last 20 years of my life I’ve repeated the mantra ‘fear and excitement are physiologically identical’ and taken anything that scares me then repainted it as excitement. I have devoured my fears.
But this was all feeding into an overbearing and overwhelming exhaustion and eventual breakdown, over the course of 2024, which I think will take the whole of 2025 to recover from. This is ok. I now know how to structure a real recovery instead of just dusting myself off and getting back on the bike.
It was exhaustion from a lifetime of sensory stimulation seeking and masking to myself. Wrap it up, nice and neat, and put a bow on top.
20250616 0515