What Does a Hyperactive Mind Need?

Having a hyperactive mind can get exhausting if you are have trouble shifting into Rest-and-Repair mode, but engaging your full body and senses in more natural environments can have a profound impact on your wellbeing.

I have a hyperactive mind and the motor is always running. I don’t think of myself as having ADHD because I don’t have most of the inattentive traits, but I’ll admit I could very well be in denial because you can absolutely have mostly hyperactive traits without having a lot of inattentive traits—you just don’t hear about it as much. But rather than go down that rabbit hole, let me get to the point: running constantly at hyper speed is very hard on the system.

Imagine a fire engine that is always running around, whether or not there is a fire. It will literally run out of fuel and then not be able to get to any actual fires. That’s why the fire fighters stay put at the fire house and the fire fighters get to hang out until they are needed—they need to have all their resources ready to go when the occasion calls!

But for a lot of neurodivergent folks, switching gears is also really hard and we can easily get stuck in racing mode. After a while, living at hyper speed just feels like the only speed we can operate in. We know it would be better to slow down some of the time, and rest, and do all of those things we keep hearing are good for us, but we have no idea how to do it. Can you relate?

This is something I’ve been working on for over a decade now, and while I’ve made some progress, it’s still really hard. Having to listen to someone ramble about nothing for minutes on end is almost unbearable, and I have no patience whatsoever for trying to assemble something from Ikea if the instructions are poor. I can’t stand it! Anyone else out there start educational videos at a faster speed, waiting for the speaker to finally ‘get to the point’? Yes, I do that too…

I learned early on that sitting meditations don’t work great for me. I have adapted some meditations in motion that I really like, and they also come in handy when there is wildfire smoke or a snowstorm and I can’t go walking in the woods as I usually do. I’ve found that for things like tai-chi or qi-gong, it’s a really good idea for me to follow along with a video rather than do it on my own, because that way I will stay in the slower speed that was intended.

Some guided meditations can be helpful in a similar manner—if I meditate on my own, as soon as I slow down and get quiet, it seems to turn on the creativity button inside me and all these ideas start occurring to me. But I am more likely to stay focused if someone else’s voice is leading me through the meditation. Having something visual to focus on (like a candle flame) can also help.

Of course, there are times I love being able to tap into that creativity and generate so many new ideas! But I am always trying to figure out how to turn it off when I need to rest. Even when I have a migraine, I have a hard time shutting off /slowing down my thoughts, and I think there is a fair possibility that this is a factor in why I get so many migraines.

The practice I am getting the most from though is what I consider to be a form of rewilding—the restoring of natural processes by actively using more of my senses in a way that my body evolved to do. Humans did not evolve to sit in front of screens for hours on end, or to be sitting for long periods of time doing anything, in fact. We consider it pathological if someone ‘can’t sit still,’ but isn’t it the other way around? What animal in their natural habitat does that? Ok, maybe sloths. But you get my point.

I’ve always loved going for walks in the woods, but I spent years doing so without fully engaging in the environment. I would speed walk and usually spend the whole time thinking about whatever was going on in my life at that time and nothing else. Sometimes that led to problem solving, and sometimes it just led to increased cortisol in my system and circling thoughts that just spun around endlessly in my head.

But in recent years I have started to engage more and more with the forest life around me. This really kicked off when I became interested in wildcrafting (gathering plant medicine in the woods), although the more I learn about this the less I am actually taking anything from the wild—it’s much more sustainable to grow it yourself unless it is an invasive species.

But you do not have to actually harvest anything to get your senses fully engaged in the woods. Becoming familiar with what is growing around you (plant apps are great—I use PictureThis), knowing what is native vs invasive for example, is one way to start. For me, what really sparked my interest in learning these plants was knowing their medicinal uses and how traditional peoples worked with them.

Paying attention to nuanced differences between plants requires you to slow down. No matter where you live, there are bound to be dandelions, but there are all sorts of dandelion lookalikes that most people cannot differentiate. And why would you want to? Well, if you are going to eat it you want to make sure it isn’t poisonous, so that can be motivation for sure (we don’t have to worry about over harvesting dandelions, so pick away!).

Getting into the mode where you can spot it, examine it and tell the difference takes some practice, and I honestly would not have had the patience to do it if it meant lugging around old a big old book and hoping it was clear enough to tell me what was what. Again, plant apps have been a total game changer for me.

I walk in the same woods behind my house almost every day of the year, and going at a slower pace is what keeps it interesting—that is when you notice how much it changes through the seasons. Those mushrooms! How many varieties? How does it compare to last year? Knowing when to harvest nettle and horsetail—there are narrow windows for some of these, and even if I am not harvesting them, I enjoy getting to know their cycles. I am getting to know them.

Pine sap is another good one. You can walk past the same trees for years and years and never notice the sap. Then you read about its antiseptic properties and how it works the same way in trees—they produce the sap when they get wounded. That’s why you don’t ever want to take any unless there is so much that the excess is dripping onto the ground. The tree needs it to heal. We have a lot in common, trees and humans.

Suddenly you are walking through the woods just looking for evidence of sap, and noting how many trees have ‘wounds’ and how rarely it occurs that there is a surplus of it making a puddle on the ground. So instead of taking any, maybe you just go over and put your nose right up to it and take a big breath in. Pine is what is is called an exhilarant, meaning that it lightens and lifts the mood. You can enjoy the aromatherapy benefits without taking anything from the tree.

Why does this work for me? You could argue it is my special interest, and you would not be wrong. But I am convinced there is more to it than that. Slowing down in the natural world actually opens you up to more—you experience much, much more, and it is anything but boring. I think a lot of our problems actually come from being bored out of our minds and from having the wrong sensory environments. Being bored and uncomfortable is a bad combination.

We spend a lot of time discussing animal welfare and whether the chickens are free range or the cows were pasture raised.  But what about the human animal? Sitting in front of a screen all day is not a free range environment. Of course we are stressed! But really, I think the environment is a much bigger problem than how we are wired. My neurodivergence is not a problem when I engaging with my mind and body in a way that it evolved to do.

And to make an important distinction here—nature is not actually ‘peaceful.’ It is vibrant and rich and chaotic. We describe it as calming because it brings us back to using our bodies as they were intended to be used—developing and utilizing all of the senses fully (which is something our survival used to depend on). Using our bodies as nature intended reduces the stress that comes from living unnaturally, and the chronic stress is really the problem we are trying to address (not being uniquely wired).

For this reason, I am a strong believer in forest bathing (or whatever you want to call it). The woods aren’t for everyone—maybe water is more your thing. That’s fine—go take a walk on the beach or do some kayaking. Or grow some marigolds in a bucket on your back porch—whatever is accessible to you.

The idea is that getting back to using our bodies in a more natural way on a regular basis is one of the best things we can do to get our nervous systems out of a rigid, hyperactive treadmill nightmare. Opening our senses to the complex beauty of the natural world gives the mind and body some much needed freedom and space, and I believe it is time well spent.

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