Lost in your own thoughts

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I am aware that I spend much of my time just completely lost in thought. I always have done and I have to fight it, for want of a better phrase, to make sure I get my work done etc.

Is that an ASD thing? an ADD thing (the neuropsychologist who diagnosed me with ASD said she thought I may well have ADD but would need to be assessed for that) or just a human thing?

I don't know, but I get the same. It's so easy to just block out the entire world and exist inside my head amongst my thoughts.

If it helps, I had an ADHD assessment and was told I have 'traits'. Currently in the middle of an ASD assessment.

Sometimes, i can start thinking about something and not realise just how much time will pass while i'm lost in thought. It's a wonder I ever get anything done!.... Oh wait... I don't

Could be hyperfocus. Mine isn't in the form of episodes of "absence" so intense that I'm completely oblivious to external stimuli, it's more a general state in which what I'm thinking about draws rather a lot of my attention. I usually have some awareness of the world around me even when I'm not looking at it, so it could hardly be called daydreaming. One or two accidents in my childhood that were caused by my hyperfocus probably made me wary of focussing too hard when I was in anything like a risky situation. And I guess having to hold a job down for decades would have put me under pressure to keep that radar switched on.

I once heard that when Darwin stood still in the woods and thought deeply about some problem in his work, he'd be so still that animals would settle on him as if he were a tree, and he wouldn't know they were there until he'd come back to normal awareness. I can't achieve that intensity of thought, but I'm somewhere along the way to it.

I also don't know but I also do the same. I don't have an ADHD Dx but suspect I have the inattentive flavour

yeah, i think i'm more ADD than ADHD

People will have whole conversations with me and I'll have no idea what was said because I'm mentally constructing or deconstructing something or having a simultaneous conversation with myself in my own head, so I'm answering mmm, yeah, ok at what I hope are the appropriate moments, but I'll probably get in trouble later for not doing what they thought was agreed upon.

I do that all the time. I "live inside my own head" 99% of the day.

I feel this is one of my worst flaws , I hate myself for it especially when my GF is talking to me , I have started to apologise and say I wasn't listening to a thing you said but that starts to wind her up after a while .

I do this too. I can now do it fairly effectively whilst doing menial tasks on auto pilot. It is one of the reasons I find the toss up between challenging engaging work and menial robotic repetitive work quite a hard one because I quite like being on autopilot in my own world as opposed to being forced to leave my own world even if it is to engage for "interesting" reasons...... if that makes any sense at all!

I used to do that a lot more than I do now. I don't know how it got better. Maybe I'm less anxious than I used to be, and can control my attention better. I used to try but I'd end up focussing on their tone of voice or their face or whatever. It definitely helps if the speaker doesn't talk too fast, and there are some styles of intonation that go in one of my ears and out of the other. And if it's a long story, I still often get hung up on the first bit I don't get, instead of moving on and continuing to focus on what's said next. For some reason it's hard to interrupt them to get the block cleared or to get them to slow down.

When I have chit type conversations with people, it is nearly impossible for me to not simultaneously be engaged in a meta-conversation with myself about the conversation I am currently having. This gets so distracting. Then there is the eye-contact. I am so worried about not making appropriate eye contact I tend to stare people down. Then finally, the worst bit, is if I have a drink in my hand my brain starts playing this image of me chucking the drink in the face of the other person. This has never ever happened. I would be totally mortified if it did. But I get so nervous about the whole thing, I am there with the meta-conversation, the eye contact thing and now this voice going "please don't throw the drink" it is absolutely crippling trying to make sense of what the other person is saying in light of all that.

I used to be similarly troubled by the idea of suddenly punching the person who was talking to me. I've never worked out why. Best guess, suppressed frustration and anger that they've got me in a situation where I have to give them my attention and can't just walk away. As if something inside wanted to really rebel and do an exaggerated version of what I'd do if I could shed this politically-correct politeness. Doing something taboo and very dangerous, instead of gingerly tiptoeing around eggshells, deliberately smashing them. But it's only theory. I wasn't aware of feeling that kind of thing very strongly. And I don't recall feeling scared that I might act out the impulses.

In my case it feels more like some odd coping strategy. It is like my brain puts me in a state of being hyper-aware of the possibility of failure and drawing attention to any oddness to ensure I stay on the "straight and narrow" and pass as "normal". If I wasn't worried and worrying about chucking the drink in someone's face perhaps I would let something slip and do something that would be perceived as awkward.

Saying that worrying about the drink is awfully distracting in itself...

But then I have believed myself to be neurotypical my whole life and it is is only now in my late 30s with an aspie-child that I wonder if the red thread of being different my whole life is also autism. Either way, whatever my "not normal" is or isn't, a lot of living involves layers of complicated coping strategies.