note: 'hyperfocus' strikes me as derogatory so I have just called it focus
In a nutshell: focus and regulate.
As the brain encounters stimuli from the world, D1 phasic dopamine bursts encode salience and meaning. For we dysregulated folks this encoding is deeper.
The way that these micro-thoughts are consolidated into a single cascade or ‘insight’ is through elevating tonic dopamine and increasing D2 dominance in the striatum.
The most reliable ways to achieve this are focus and repetitive motions. This is what the Buddha told his followers to do every evening: meditation and walking.
Focus can be meditation, art, non-phasic-spiking games, reading, writing, dance, music, more. Repetitive motions can be things like jiggling your leg and rocking but the best are moderate-intensity aerobic exercise like walking and z2 cycling because these increase tonic dopamine to a greater degree.
The individual who is healing from hurtful contacts with the world needs to be allowed to decouple from ‘reality’ for this period and enter their own world until the process has run its course. This may need to happen several times a day; the more microtremors you allow the less likely there will be a megaquake.
These are bleeding out thoughts in real-time and this is why you should allow your neurodivergent child to focus on their task of choice. If you do not, you are causing them intense mental anguish which will only build as they grow into adulthood.
If someone is not able to focus and regulate in this manner, the pressure will build and eventually release in the form of hypomania, mania or psychosis.
The sand-tunnels model sums it up nicely. We dig tunnels in the sand through phasic dopamine learning when we encounter anything rewarding or threatening. The tide of tonic dopamine comes in and washes these minima away as insight.
Focus and movement-based regulation both increase tonic dopamine and facilitate this process, as does sleep.
If we do not allow ourselves to undertake these regulatory actions then we become unable to ‘flush’ the insight from our mind and wind up digging deeper tunnels in the sand. Our reservoir of dopamine gets trapped in these minima and the tide becomes lower, so we become less able to flush the thought, and on it goes.
Obviously this is just for illustrative purposes. I will let the scientists do the jargonifying of things.
This process must be allowed to happen or our brains will become overloaded.
Once we reach the point of no return, the mind will initiate a forced defragmentation in the form of a manic episode or even psychosis. These see not only elevated tonic dopamine but also elevated phasic dopamine and can become dangerous if someone does not have the sustained attentional capacity to handle them.
This is another reason why meditation and focus are beneficial: they train the brain to keep the car on the rails even when the speed cranks above safe levels.
It is important to focus on positive things because this is also where you build your scaffold.
Your scaffold is the ‘other world’ of which the Buddha spoke; this is why metta meditation is encouraged in buddhist circles. You are what you eat and your nutriments will shape who you become and how your external world presents.
Your scaffold will come into play while you sleep and you will not remember it happening. Focus during the day consolidates the thought, sleep enables you to flush it from the system, and then in the morning you wake up with ‘insight’ into the problems that you were facing.
When the thought is particularly challenging to process you may wind up sleeptalking or sleepwalking or even sleep-weeing-on-the-stairs as happened when I was a child. This is all natural and good and you must not wake up the child who is experiencing this or you will interrupt the consolidation process, causing the minima in the mind to become more ingrained.
If people are allowed to focus and regulate then the incidence of dangerous manic and psychotic episodes will decrease because the pressure will never build to the level of a forced defrag.
This is also why adults should not be forced to work arbitrary hours or do meaningless reporting. I recruited a lot of the best AI scientists in the world and they almost all worked most effectively when they were allowed to choose their own hours and work style.
Einstein was dysregulated and his eureka moment was the result of one of these cascades laid out in the computation cycle on the [nibbana-protocol] website and [themap]. He had some incredibly deep minima playing in his mind, and when they reached critical mass he was able to consolidate them into a single answer rather than being labelled psychotic.
You must allow people to function as they naturally developed to function.
The bell-curve approach will work for most of the population but it must not be forced on we dysregulated few because it will break us and - likely as not - result in our suicides.
I have seen it time and again and it almost happened to me.
It is simple to fix.
All you have to do is stop trying to fix us.
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