On And Off And Overthinking.

Post Reply New Topic

I often find myself to be a very "On or off" type of person where I either go all in or I switch off. Also I usually make things many times worse by overthinking things which were never a problem before I tried to correct percieved issues which were not there. (I hope all this makes sense?)

Black and white thinking is characteristic of autism, but most NTs are more black and white , than me

"Cool" this and "sucks" that

"Human behavior is unpredictable", not counselor Jeanne Courtney told me



Human behavior is not as predictable as it appears


Spectrum


Sexual orientation spectrum

Gender identity spectrum

Homophobia spectrum

Yes that sounds like me. My motto seems to be that if a job's worth doing it's worth spending the rest of my life thinking it all out and getting it 100% perfect at the expense of everything else in the universe. Of course I'd be dead if I let it get the better of me completely. But it still takes its toll especially when the pressure to get on with the rest of my life is only long-term pressure rather than immediate pressure. I scare myself silly by letting deadlines get scarily close while I'm "wasting" my time thinking about whatever has happened to capture my imagination.

I've made some inroads in being a bit more of a "cognitive miser," I look for facts that will hopefully suggest I can ignore a huge chunk of knowledge about a subject, but I still find it hard to buy a can of beans without planning it like it was a bank robbery. I get the feeling that when I do drop a line of thought or decide that it doesn't matter whether I do A or B and that I therefore don't need to weigh up all the pros and cons, it's the result of a learned conscious intervention, it's not intuitive or innate. And it kind of hurts to pull myself away from a chain of thought, and I tend to feel at the time that it's a very inefficient thing to do, that it's like sawing a bottle of beer in half vertically and expecting each of those halves will be of the same value as half the whole bottle.

The whole thing seems like a nonsense because no matter how hard I try to figure out all about a topic, there's bound to be something I overlook, so I don't know why I feel so strongly that I mustn't leave the matter until I've completely thought it through. But there are such things as sensible, efficient natural breaks. I think a lot of the problem is that Aspies often find it hard to resume a line of thinking after an interruption, unless they first get the time to tie up enough loose ends to stop the whole thing somehow unravelling in the meantime.

Ooh. I get this...

But I'm ok if I have converted the thought into picture form, but I only do this if I am designing something or if I am listening to a book or reading a book etc. Sometimes, I can read pages and not remember what I have read unless I have converted it into pictures in my mind. It is only lately that I have worked out what is happening in this way.



Ummm. Maybe I am on the spectrum...

It has been quite a surprize to me the last few months to find this out. I am at the sage where I feel I will be surprized if I am diagnosed and find I am not autistic. It is a strange thought. I mean... Well. Two or three years ago, before I started to know anything about the subject, I would say if asked if I was autistic "No way!"
Then from two or three years until just before finding this site, I would have said "I don't know".
Now I think "I must be as so much adds up!" But could I be imagining it?