Overwhelm

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Do you ever feel like Alice?



Too many thoughts, I don't want to loose any!
But there are too many and I feel overwhelmed!

I'm more of a Wendy myself, but I can relate to Alice as well!

Sometimes. Mostly it happens when there's too much sensory input, somebody might talk too fast and not clearly enough, and sometimes my life might get worse if I don't take it in, but I can't. I notice this loop, with my brain saying "can't take it in, must take it in, can't take it in......" Luckily it subsides after a minute or two, I don't know how.

Before I knew anything about ASD I noticed I got into a state I called the "ton of bricks" situation, where too many problems were on my plate. I also noticed that it got better as soon as one or two of the bricks either fell off me of their own accord, or I managed to shake them off somehow. Then I was able to overcome the weight of the remaining bricks and stand up again.

IsabellaLinton, yes, but what happened next?
no splash

ToughDiamond, I like your "ton of bricks" image.

This is another one:

It can be scary to have tons of thoughts, I think there's often a fear of letting any of them go, but if there are too many to catch there's no choice. It doesn't seem to bother me as much as it used to, so maybe experience taught me not to worry so much about it. I used to say to people in conversation, when they lost their thread, "don't worry, if it's important enough it'll probably come back." A lot of my thoughts seem extremely important to me when they first happen, but if I do manage to preserve them, later on even though they often still seem fairly perceptive, they tend to have lost that urgent sense of being absolutely vital. Letting things go is still something of a problem with me though. I've probably improved over the years but it's still there.

If my short-term memory is looping, I write it down. This saves most of the creative ideas, and minimizes anxiety during errands.

I've often wondered about using a sound recorder to capture things when they're happening too quickly to write them down, but it can be a laborious thing - transcribing it to a written format alone can take some time and careful effort, then there's the challenge of getting a clear recording without spending too much time setting it all up.

I free-fall forever.

I had a friend who built an eight-key array into his bicycle handlebars. He had to press combinations to get the whole alphabet, but it solved his problem of having to transcribe from voice notes. These days, voice recognition software might be adequate.

^
There was a chap who had movie cameras and all kinds of event detectors recording masses of data concerning his entire life, 24/7. Apparently he had software to make sense of it all and could call up information about anything he'd experienced or done, all charted out or filtered, at the click of a button or two. He struck me as a tad eccentric, but he made a good case for his activities during an interview about them. Assuming his gear worked as well as he said it did, imagine being able to instantly recall any desired event like that. I marvel he hasn't taken over the world yet, but then I don't know that his project truly measured up to his claims. If I attempted it I'd expect to die of old age long before getting it working anything like well enough to make it worth the effort.

Sometimes i use a mind map to quickly capture thoughts.
I noticed the day I started this thread that I hadn't taken my meds. They can help - but it is like putting on sunblock - sometimes you don't notice until you forget.
I took them later that day.

I mostly have to deal with the fact that I have more ideas than I implement.

^^ "When all is said and done, more is said than done."
It is good to select the better ideas before acting on one.

Is that the Tony Buzan kind of mind map? I've always liked his stuff and I get some of the theory about mind maps, but I've never yet been able to get the method right.

Tony Buzan mind maps are like the uber mind maps. Mine are more like spider maps.
With a Tony Buzan mind map you are basically making a memory palace on paper - each idea should be "elaboratively encoded" with some kind of picture of people and things so outlandish they are unforgettable - then you draw a picture to represent that idea. The paths between the ideas are a journey you take in your mind's eye. Between the elaborative encoding and the pathways you are engaging parts of your brain you don't usually engage. In theory you can memorize anything this way and quickly without repetition (like the flash cards way).
My mind maps start with something simple like "Saturday" or my boss's name then I put all my projects or sometimes life areas or roles like "me time", "dad", "husband". Sometimes I put the names of important people in my life with me in the middle then the ideas connected to those people (or tasks).
I think in pictures and my mind responds to picture questions with picture answers, sometimes in quite a flood of images - it may be scenes from my life or from fiction or movies, or memories from the day before.

When I started this thread I was thinking of something I need to look up in my e-mail, then that reminded me of something I needed to find on the internet, and coming from someplace near my right ear into the front of my vision came my oldest son and something I wanted to share with him about his job search - I would e-mail it to him if I could find it on the internet, but in my e-mail out of the corner of my left eye I saw a e-mail from the boy scouts and I had promised to help with something for my youngest son's troop, so I did a quick search on that in a new tab - but that reminded me - but first - but before I forget - Oh I really need to e-mail this link to myself at work - but my wife wanted me to - Oh look at the time I need a shower - but before I forget.

"You're nothing but a bunch of cards!" cryed Alice - and at that moment they all jumped into the air and began flying in her face.

^
Yes that's a good description of what happens to me at times. Sometimes I think it would be useful if I just had a text document always open on my computer so I could click its icon on the taskbar and quickly jot down a key word or two whenever something occurred to me that I "really ought to be doing soon." The essence of what I think I need is a very quick, easy-access thing so that I can continue to pursue the task I was pursuing just before the second (, third, fourth, etc.) task(s) occurred to me, without being distracted from the first task for long enough to make me lose my thread. Which is just the kind of device a person with a lousy short-term (or more properly, "working") memory might find very useful.

What is an uber mind map? I suspect that when I've tried to create Buzan mind maps, although I think in pictures (at least I think I do), my habitual style of working is in words, and long strings of them at that. I even have difficulty using key words and writing notes that omit words such as "the." Somehow my brain insists on trying to write a long essay with perfect grammar and syntax, carefully checked for anything that might not be quite correct, all the t's crossed and the i's dotted. So it's often hard for me to keep the detours short and glib enough to allow me to easily return to the original matter. I guess this is because of my ASD brain wiring that tends to leap headlong into the details of whatever its attention is turned to, and perfectionism makes me stay there trying to get all those details right.

But that's what happens in the worst case. In the average case, I sense what's going on and I make some effort to counter what my brain would otherwise do, and I have a few little coping strategies to mitigate things. When I'm on the Web, for example, my use of browser tabs helps - every new idea I've opened is likely to be a tab or two, so when I come to closing the browser, naturally I look at each tab, and am reminded what I was doing before something else came up.