my brain won't slow down sometimes

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My mind races fast sometimes and I am extremely productive when my mind races, but my brain has trouble slowing down and resting. Sometimes it interferes with my sleep. Other times I have no energy or motivation to do anything. When my energy and motivation are low, I get excessively tired and don't want to do anything. There is no in between for mind. I am either productive to the extreme or not productive at all. I sleep better when my brain doesn't want to do anything. Do any of you experience this? How do you calm your mind so you can relax and sleep?

I have noticed a similar ability in myself especially when I am pondering a serious problem. It appears to have several components. The first is that my processing speed goes off the charts in the still of the night. Generally this trait begins about 4 hours into my 8-hour sleep cycle. It seems easier to describe this process in computer terms.

First my dreams become like a computer data buffer that needs to be placed in long-term storage otherwise the buffer overflows and is overwritten and the data is permanently lost. Therefore I tend to wake up in the middle of the night.
Second when I wake up, I retain a state of rest during my sleep that my mind is so utterly still that thoughts flow easily. It is like my mind has become a super liquid cooled computer and my processing speed are truly off the charts. The chips in a computer are susceptible to damage by overheating. Most computers are cooled with air. If you drive a computer to faster speeds, they will heat up the chips leading to their destruction. So the computer designers adopted other methods to cool the chips using liquid cooling. This allowed the computers to operate at greater speeds (overclocking), creating supercomputers.

One of the problems with process, is often when I finally wake up in the morning, I have totally forgotten everything. During the night, it is like I have solved great problems but when I wake up I cannot for the life of me, even remember what the problems were. It can be very frustrating, because what was lost, others have described as “pure genius”. Trying to remember the last thing before I woke doesn’t help, because after I found the solution I moved onto another topic and then another one. In the morning I spend hours and hours trying to remember but to no avail.

So over the years, I have learned techniques to train and harness this ability. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, I jot notes of everything I can remember and then I go back to sleep. Sometimes even when I am awake, the information data stream does not stop but continues even while I am writing notes. But then after a while, I return to bed and a few minutes later, my mind explodes into more thoughts. And around 30 minutes to an hour later, the buffers have again filled up and I automatically wake up and jot down some more notes. This can go on for hours; sometimes I go through this cycle 3 or 5 times per night times then my mind becomes rested and I stop my restlessness and finally I return back to sleep until dawn. When I wake up, I collect all my written notes and scribbles and read through them. I then stand in awe for a while. Next, I take my notes and transcribe them into the word processing file. It is like my mind can fabricate the missing puzzle pieces of a vast puzzle.

After several years of doing this, my mind knows when to wake me from a deep sleep. In a computer, when a data buffer is full, the data is dumped into storage. This is how I would describe that process. It is sure better than what happens during a buffer overflow.

There is an old phrase called “sleep on it”. So if I have a problem or concern, I just sleep on it and the next morning, I generally have an answer to address the problem or concern. The above is the process that occurs when I “sleep on it”.

I never try to control this process. I just go with the flow.

That's a good description of your brain. My brain does that all hours of the day for days at a time. That's the only time I really, truly get a lot done. Sometimes these moments result in me aggressively cleaning my room, getting a lot of stuff done at work, or me being way more chatty than normal.

I can’t know what you are dealing with or diagnose you over the internet, but to be honest, when I read your post, Cyclothymia or Bipolar II disorder immediately jumped to mind. Please correct me if I am being nosy or wrong here. Here are some links to articles/tests you can take if you want to find out more about the disorders though:

https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/ ... c-disorder

https://psychcentral.com/quizzes/bipolar-test/

Cyclothymia? Wth is that?.....Elaine, I hope you're ok.

Cyclothymia is thought to be a milder manifestation of bipolar disorder, which is a disorder often commorbid with autism. Many people with the disorder don't experience it to a seriously disabling extent in their lives, and instead use the periods of hypomania as a way to get work done and be productive and creative. If a person has cyclothymia or bipolar disorder, they will have experienced the mood fluctuations between hypomania and depression for at least one week per episode (or 4 days for hypomania). It would be highly unlikely that ladyelaine has the serious manifestation of the disorder (Bipolar I) because it would have been easily recognized by now, as manic episodes have to include psychosis or hospitalization in order to qualify as true mania.

Cyclothymia is seen in 0.4-1% of the population, and isn't always recognized as the presentation is not as severe as it is in bipolar disorder. However, there are treatment options available, especially if you have had depression/anxiety that hasn't responded to typical treatments, such as SSRI's. Talk therapy and mood stabilizers can be useful if the disorder is interfering with work or personal relationships. So having cyclothymia doesn't mean that a person cannot live a fulfilling, successful, or happy life, it just is a term used for a mood disorder in which mood fluctuates from high to low.

There has to be a county mental health dept.

This website....

http://psycheducation.org/

.....has lots of interesting thoughts and information about the grey area between bipolar and unipolar depression.

I have a degree of mood cycling though not serious enough to be considered bipolar. I am currently in one of my spells of elevated mood where I am very productive in areas that I normally struggle with a lot. I often wake up at about two o' clock in the morning and find that I have a huge amount of energy and my brain is racing with all sorts of thoughts and ideas. I don't have much need for sleep during these spells whereas at other times I need nine to ten hours and don't function at all well without it.

I have been diagnosed with an unspecified mood disorder and have been taking a mood stabiliser plus anti depressant for a few years now. My moods are more stable than they used to be though there is still clearly an element of mood cycling present. I kept a mood diary for several years which clearly showed the pattern of cycling.

I found the above website very helpful in giving me some ideas about what might be going on but there is very little information anywhere about that grey intermediate area between bipolar and depression and even less of course about how it might interact with autism symptoms.