Hello my zebras and spoonies thanks for coming and hanging out with me today. I am glad that you’re here. So today I’m just going to be honest with you and I don’t really know where this is going. I came pretty close to not making any posts at all today because I’m having a lot of difficulty with my ADHD symptoms. I’m feeling very distracted. I’m feeling like focusing on anything is a small hurdle to climb over.
And then I decided that maybe today was probably one of the better days to talk about ADHD and the way that it can impact your life and we don’t usually talk about ADHD in context of spoons. We usually talk about spoons in context of physical illnesses. But I want to talk about spoons in context of mental health, in context of ADHD specifically.
So the thing about having ADHD is that there are days, no matter how good your treatment plan, there are days that you have more exacerbated symptoms, that it is more difficult to do anything. It’s more energy, more distracted thoughts, more everything. You’re just like, your brain is just like, all over the place. And there’s no turning that off. You can’t just be like, Man, I’m not gonna have an ADHD day those suck. You just have to deal with it. It just it is what it is.
When you have those days, it can take twice as many spoons to do the same task as it would on a day that wasn’t an ADHD day. On a normal level of functioning day, not that I ever have a day without ADHD symptoms. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that our mental health is just like our physical health and we have an ebb and a flow and we have days that we have less symptoms and we have days that we flare where we have more exacerbation of our symptoms where symptoms are more dramatic and just like our physical illnesses, and we can have things trigger this and some of which can be under our control and some of which might not be so this post is going to be chaotic and crazy and messy because that’s what my brain is today.
And I could spend a ridiculous amount of spoons to edit this heavily and make it actually something coherent and neat and tidy and put it in a little box for you that was beautiful and made sense. Or I can just give it to you in a chaotic messy heap. That is my brain right now where I just can’t act like normal. I’m like talking about everything and nothing and it just comes out and I just feel this urge and tangents and there’s no focus and I’ve already lost track of where I was going but that’s how it is today.
I think it was talking about spoons.
So I don’t think people understand that when you are doing things like making a post there’s a certain degree of effort that goes into making sure that that post is presented well, that it is staying on topic that the grammar is beautiful that the structure is nice that it’s orderly and it flows from one thing to another. In a lot of ways, it’s just like writing an essay. You want to make sure that it flows well and it’s structured well and it presents nicely and it’s not too repetitive which I know is an issue when I am having ADHD squirrel day. I swear that when my ADHD squirrels get to going I run on and string everything together and I turn into this bizarre, repetitive robot. It’s insane to me I’ll say the same thing like 12 times in a row like I didn’t just say it.
So that happens in my posts too when I’m having an ADHD day and in order for me to make a post that is as well polished and as well written and as neat and tidy, as they usually are (not that I am like this glorious writer but you know I’m decent). But on days like today, I’m chaos and I am distracted. And I don’t have the ability to really write the same way that I would normally be able to write and it requires a copious amount of editing to bring it to the usual level.
So I could spend a bunch of spoons and go through these posts and make sure that they’re what you usually see on my site. But I’m not going to today. I’m going to let you see what a bunch of squirrels running around in someone’s head actually looks like.
If you were trying to have a conversation with me right now, I’m probably going to be changing topics and I’m probably going to be talking while you’re talking. And I’m probably not going to be sitting still and I might just get up and walk away on you mid conversation. There just isn’t anything rational or focused or consistent. It’s just all energy and this level of energy is difficult to maintain on a biological level. My system is really high. My energy levels are high. Everything’s exciting and everything’s interesting and it’s cool. But, you know, it takes a lot of spoons to be here.
And I think that that’s part of why people with ADHD have such a dysregulated sleep factor. You know, we run really high, we run these high energy levels and then we go and go until we’re absolutely exhausted and then we hit that wall and then we are just done and we are crashing. And to try to turn this off in order to be able to sleep isn’t an option. I mean, that doesn’t happen. So I think that it’s important to understand that this idea of spoons applies to everything in the mental world, just as much as it applies to all of our physical disorders.
So if you have mental health issues know that you have mental spoons. Those spoons come from the same drawer of silverware that you get for your physical disorders. But our emotions, thinking, processing information, writing, reading any intellectual activity has a biological cost. our brain doesn’t do anything without using fuel and it is a fuel devouring machine. I mean, if you look at it per ounce of tissue, it uses more energy to do its work than any other portion of your body. It just devours energy. So our brain uses more calories to do work than any other part of our body. So it absolutely has a metabolic cost, a calorie cost and energy cost it requires us to use our resources, our physical resources in order to do these intangible things like having feelings and having thoughts and having conversations and having relationships.
And we don’t tend to think of those as having a energy and physical requirements so we don’t think of them in context of needing spoons. But they do and when you’re having what I call a squirrel day, but a mental health day, a day where whatever is going on in your life is causing you to have more difficulty in the world of emotion or intellectual capabilities. It’s going to cost you more spoons to do activities that require those skill sets. Just to like if you are physically tired, it’s going to require more spoons to do physical activities.
So your brain can be thought of in much the same way as just any other physical thing. It has a output but it has to have an input of energy to create that output. And that energy is a finite battery that we have that we use to complete every task that we do every day. So if you are one of the people who have a mental health diagnosis, know that it makes perfect sense that having an anxiety attack uses spoons, and it makes perfect sense that processing your emotions. When you have you know depression makes perfect sense. Like these things require energy and we can’t just do these things without a cost.
So remember that you have spoons that also apply to our mental health and I appreciate you staying with me this long even though my squirrels are dancing around and running around crazy and I don’t know that I have all of them, let alone into any lines. So thank you. I appreciate you being here. And that is about all I have to ramble about today. And it is definitely a ramble today. And until we get to talk again you guys make sure that you take care of yourselves and be sure that you are keeping track of your spoons, all of your spoons, especially the Golden One.
Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like what you read, click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!
Zebra Pig 