Time Perception and Stimulation for Adults With Dyslexia

And today I wanted to talk about the balance of time and stimulation. You know, I've got dyslexia and ADHD, and this is something I deal with, and I'm starting to see more and more in my life. And I know this concept will help others out there that think like me. So let's get into today's episode. Okay, so two of the things I see a lot with neurodivergent thinkers that have been diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, a bit of both, maybe a little something else on the side, is that many of us have two challenges. One is the balance of stimulation.

So what keeps their brains ticking and what keeps you safe, secure, and kind of like consistent, which is not always our best feature. And this kind of concept of stimulation is that the minute we get too bored, our brains start to hunt for dopamine, start to look for something outside of themselves, and this can appear in so many different ways. The other challenge as well with stimulation, though, is it's not just the boring stuff driving us to do potentially negative behaviors. It's that we can sometimes get overstimulated, so you actually get too much stimulation. I've had this when, like, I've had a really good day and maybe five really amazing things have happened that went really in my favor that I wasn't, you know, completely aware were going to happen, and my brain just kind of goes, Oh my God. It's kind of like it's euphoria, and I can sometimes get stuck in this loop of, like, it's just,it's actually sometimes there's debilitating, there's not having enough dopamine.

And so, you know, on one side of the equation, we're chasing this kind of more stimulation, but if we go too far, we're in trouble because now we're overstimulated and it's kind of just as bad. Like, I find it easier to add stimulation than I do to take it away. I've spent a lot of time trying to work on this take-it-away piece. You know, it's why the added sleep thing we built kind of got created, is trying to bring back some of that calm in those overstimulated situations, you know, because that was the bit I struggled with more. Now, the second piece of this is time. Now, I see this with dyslexics the most, but again, I truly think at some point ADHD, dyslexia, they're all kind of similar brain, Brain patterns that have slightly different, you know, I guess entry points.

You know, dyslexia is much more of the way, you know, reading, writing, spelling, that side of things appears the most. But again, our brains are kind of wired in a similar way. There's kind of a change in our heads, and the same with ADHD. It's just kind of different things, and there's a lot of comorbidity, should I say. It's probably the easiest way to explain it. I do other podcasts talking much more in depth about this in much better articulated language.

So, but for the sake of this, time is a challenge. You know, the ability to understand short term and long term. You know, sometimes I get stuck in the moment. You know, oh, we had some beers yesterday. I went out for a couple of drinks. You know, two hours, a few beers, I really get stuck in the present.

It's kind of why sometimes I still drink. You know, I go through patches of sober as anything, and then I have a few beers because, like, alcohol to me just keeps me in the moment. I'm so, and it's a beautiful impact until afterwards, and then I realize, oh my God, I've been too in the moment. I drank a bit too much, ate a bit too much. Now I've got to deal with that. Which again is kind of like a time warp.

You know, my head is sometimes so far in the clouds, or what's next, or what am I worrying about? What's the challenge? I've even seen some of this classified as OCD. You know, you start to see this. There are so many different variable diagnoses for some of this stuff. I still don't think the world has a clear vernacular or phrasing for a lot of it, but they all kind of, a lot of these things appear in different realms.

I've always said it's kind of like a cocktail. You're getting a little bit of each of these. But the two things I notice a lot in my life is this kind of time warp. You know, sometimes I'm right in the zone and I'm kind of in the middle where I can see the future and the present of how to get there. Some days I can get overwhelmed by seeing too much of the future and not having a clue how I get there and trying to overthink the how. You know, I did a couple of podcasts ages ago about how to kind of improve on this, which is kind of about setting those intentions and entrusting yourself to actually get you there.

I was listening to, I don't know if you've heard Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. It's his autobiography. Fantastic audiobook. Probably my favorite audiobook of this year, hands down. I'm a bit late to the party on it. It was released a few years back, but wow, what a great story.

And he talks about, he talks about shooting the arrows and letting the target line itself up. So, like kind of deciding what you want, and the target will find the arrow, which sounds a bit counterintuitive. He says it a lot better with his twang. I don't know if it's a Texas twang or his American twang, but it's a great book by Matthew McConaughey. I can't speak highly enough about it. But he, you know, it really, it's really the truth, right?

For many of us, we can get so stuck in how do we do stuff, we don't actually kind of hit the target. And so for me, you know, I see this as kind of that time distortion. You know, that's what this comes down to, is that we can see something in time in the future, in five years, and go, wow, that's amazing. And then our brains try and backfill that, but don't always know the exact path because so much of the path is uncontrollable, right? We'd all love to have more control, which we know is all a fallacy. You know, the amount of, like, if we try and tracked from right now to five years in the future, none of us would do a very good job at telling us how we got somewhere.

Maybe you're better than others at picking a goal and getting there, but realistically, the journey you go on to get there is never a straight line. It's never an exact plan. Now, there are some people who are better at planning, usually not neurodivergent thinkers, but many of us, we need to kind of set it and kind of trust ourselves that we're going to go down that alleyway. And so, you know, this balance of stimulation and time, I kind of want to make it like a kind of like, what's the graph where there's one line down and one line across, and there are four different quadrants around this kind of time paradox with stimulation. You know, it's kind of like, The time paradox of stimulation. You're going to have to imagine this.

I'm kind of actually coming up with this on the fly. This is what I love about the podcast. I can kind of just speak my thinking out and kind of get myself clear on this, is that, you know, if something is short term in the time frame and it is highly stimulation, you know, that's probably something like, you know, could be even kind of that alcohol kind of phase where you're kind of in the moment, you're in the right level of, you know, you're in probably the highly stimulated, you're going towards the highly stimulated point. And it's quite intense, right? It's kind of intense on your mind. And I guess what I'm trying to say here is our lives are balancing all of these key, these two key factors.

Like I'm starting to ask myself more and more at the moment, what's my stimulation level out of 10? And some people prefer 10, some prefer different metrics to kind of judge themselves. But where is my stimulation level? Like at the moment as I do this podcast, I'm probably a seven or an eight. I'm testing out ADHD meds again. I had a few beers yesterday, and so I know that I'm going to be going through a couple of days of lowering my inflammation based on having a few drinks and probably eating too much yesterday, plus the ADHD meds.

Like I know, give it two days, I'll be back down to a much better baseline of stimulation. But I know I'm going to be a bit heady today, so I'm going to be a bit in my head. I'm going to have a bit much going on. I'll still be productive, but I potentially feel like I could be burnt out this afternoon. And that's because I've decided to know myself. So that's kind of my stimulation zone.

And then I kind of look at what is my time factor zone at the moment. And so for me, I'm feeling when I'm doing a podcast, I'm very much in the moment. So I am in this podcast. I'm not in the future. I am in the now. It's probably a great way reason to do podcasts.

And you'll probably have different things in your life that puts you more in the moment than takes you out of it. Everyone's got different things that make them feel more comfortable. I'm kind of the same. If I'm doing a meeting at work with some people I like, I'm very much in the moment. You know, those things put me in life. Sometimes more of the challenging bits is when I'm actually trying to type or write something.

You know, I usually don't like those moments, so I start to think more about the future. I get a bit more scattered, and my time distortion kind of goes out. You know, when I'm trying to plan things in the future, my time distortion is out. You know, it's not good. It's kind of why I've had to, over so much of my life, kind of work out how to trust myself with the how of things rather than get stuck in it, because I know my time distortion is terrible. I'm not a natural time planner.

I have to use the resource of others. AI has helped, but that's really important. So, you know, it's two of these things I'm always asking myself is where is my kind of, I don't know if there's a phrase for it. I don't really say the words per se. Where is my time flux? That sounds like something out of Back to the Future.

But where is my, you know, it's not even time zone. That doesn't make sense because that's hilarious. But, you know, I start wondering about where am I on the time spectrum. That's a good word. We're going to go with time spectrum. And where am I on the stimulation spectrum?

Because these two things matter. Like if I'm under-stimulated, I'm in a really good place to start thinking and planning for the future. The lower my stimulation is, where, you know, I've got maybe enough to be motivated, but not enough to be overstimulated, great time to be planning the future. If I'm overstimulated, it's actually sometimes the best time to be just doing the next thing in my day. What is that thing I need to do just to get done? Because I will feel, I will feel a small amount of dopamine from taking something off, but I know I'm going to have to do smaller steps to get there.

I need to not overwhelm myself because the more overwhelmed I get, the more stimulated I get. I also have to be very careful if I'm overstimulated to work out, you know, what I'm eating and drinking. I try and drink a lot more water, less caffeine. Caffeine increases stimulation, as I'm sure you are aware. And I'm very conscious with ADHD meds as well that I need to be drinking more water. I had a lot of decaf coffee, which has a little bit of caffeine, but I try and make sense about it.

So, you know, this is what I'm playing with at the moment, this kind of axis, that was the word I was looking for earlier, between time and my time distortion lag. Because again, I wish it was easy just to kind of plot wherever I wanted to be at any time, but it's more deciding, realizing where I am, and stimulation. Because I think if you can get these right, like I know when I'm in a good moment of stimulation, and I know what leads me there. And the more I'm aware of where I sit on this axis, the more I can start to remind myself, if I'm off of it now, what can I do to make tomorrow's axis better? You know, what can I change to lower my stimulation? If I'm a seven right now and I want to be about a five.

What have I done that's overstimulated me? And for me, as I think I mentioned, it's about probably having a bit too much inflammation in my body, probably gave myself a bit too hard a time over the weekend, enjoyed myself a bit too much, didn't keep to my routines. Weekends are always the hardest, so I kind of learnt that. And I need to make sure that I, you know, for the next day or two, I really stick to that to kind of get back to my baseline. And then when it comes to time as well, I kind of, what I kind of have to be clear there, what kind of gets me back into my time, the right kind of time spectrum is thinking, do I have a clear plan of where I'm going in the next one to five years? Do I know what direction I should be going in long term?

I may not have specifics, but do I have a kind of, do I have a point, a pointer? Because if I don't, that's when I really get out of the time spectrum. It kind of puts you into the multiverse and you can go anywhere. And when I was young, that was a bit easier to operate with. The older you get, the more responsibilities you have, the harder I find that personally. So it's really good to say to myself, where am I going in five years?

What do I want? You know, for me, you know, we're working to pay our house off. We're working to become more financially free, just as a security point for me, my wife and my family. I'm wanting to, you know, increase the business itself so it operates a bit more without me, some of those kind of goals. Now, I don't know how exactly I'm always going to do those, but they're out there. I know where we're rowing.

I make sure my wife's on the same track, and that really helps with that time distortion. I then go down to a year and say, okay, what am I going to do in this zone to get me to where I want to be? And I've got a couple of health goals this year, a weight goal I want to get to. I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I just trust that I will get there. And an HRV, you know, that's your heart rate variability. Again, I have no idea how I'm going to get there.

It's going to be an interesting run into the end of the year. And then also a financial goal, what I kind of want to earn this year and get to. And so by having those kind of goals there, I don't, I kind of stop myself creating brand new goals to a point. Like, I still have ideas, don't get me wrong. I have 150 different fun side quests I play with, but I'm also conscious they're side quests to keep my stimulation up. They're not just, they're not there to reach those longer-term time goals.

So again, it kind of gets me a bit more grounded in where I'm going. Like, there's always, there's always a pointer on the map taking me, taking me in a direction. Now, and again, the way I get there is always weird and wonderful and amazing. Like, I'll give you a great,let me give you one final story before I leave you today. I'll give you an idea. So about a year and a half ago, I was sitting there at the pub.

I don't know, I still drink a few beers from time to time. It was January, it was sunny. We were sitting with our neighbors, and we were trying to come up with some cool dreams for our kind of year goals. And one of them I came up with is I always wanted a bookcase door. You know those ones in Batman where you pull a book and the door opens. And I had no idea how to create that.

If you've ever met me, you should have seen me on the weekend. I managed to turn the fridge,I got a fridge in my office,I managed to change the door from one side to the other so it opened a different way. I felt like I was the most accomplished person in the world. I'm so bad with my hands when it comes to anything like that. I'm not a tradie. I'm much more in my head.

God, I'm terrible. My wife doesn't let me touch much at my break. But I did this, and I was so proud. So when I try and think, how am I going to get a bookcase door? It's definitely not me building it, is what I'm telling you. There is no way in many things that I'm building that thing.

And so what I ended up doing was I put it out to the universe, and I kind of decided, oh, I'm going to create a website to do this. I'm going to actually create, like, because that's my speciality. So I put up a website for this business idea and started getting leads. Like, I think I got like 50 leads for other people who wanted this. And so I started by chatting to my neighbor, who had a cabinetry business, and we talked about building it. We spent a year playing with it.

It wasn't a big priority, but we kept the dream alive because I knew that's what I wanted. Long story short, he disappeared from the,he couldn't do it just due to time and commitments. And another guy appeared who was a Romanian cabinet maker, and he loved the idea. He got his teeth sunk into it. Him and his mate built it, installed the first demo on my house, and then we did a couple of rounds of tweaks and fixes, and I now have that bookcase door. So every time I go into my office, I pull a book and I can get into my office.

It is as cool as it sounds. I will put photos up if people want them. But it's wicked. Like, I created something from scratch that I dreamed of. If you'd have told me the path I was going to get there, I never would have guessed it. But by putting that out in the future, that really helped my time distortion field.

I also kind of gave myself a feeling of when I wanted it. I wanted it in the relatively near future, but I didn't put any pressure on, and I trusted the how would just appear and the thing would get done. And, like, I can't actually stress at how powerful that is when you start to get your head in the game with your neurodiversity, is that your brain is like a,it is kind of like the, as Matthew McConaughey says, kind of like that arrow being shot and the target kind of finds you. It sounds weird, but, you know, you shoot the arrow and you just wait for it to hit the target. And I'm not saying sit there and go, I want a billion dollars for the sake of a billion dollars. That's a whole other podcast I've done in the past about setting goals you actually want.

But, like, when you actually put something into the universe you truly want or into the world, your brain will shoot that arrow and you might just hit it. And the better you get, you know, you can,the better you get at balancing your stimulation and your time spectrums. Goal setting can really help. I might try and do a more detailed podcast. I might do a video on this one because I kind of want to do that access for you. If you'd like that, pop me an email at hello@truthaboutdyslexia.

com. I'm also going to be flicking something out about my new book that's coming out. This book is an easy read for anybody with dyslexia or ADHD, but what I actually think it's probably better for is giving to partners or friends. Buy a couple of copies and hand them to people who you want to understand you better, and they will understand you a lot better. I think its goal is actually going to be to help relationships rather even than the person it's being given to. So yeah, that's coming out soon.

I think it's on Amazon. The audiobook will be out at some points. I think it's called Truth About Dyslexia if you search that out, you'll probably find it, a blue cover. But I will put a link in once we're fully ready to start pushing it. So have an epic rest of your day, guys. Thank you for being a listener.

Thank you for the people that share the podcast. I appreciate all of you. Thanks for listening to The Truth About Dyslexia. This podcast is sponsored by Added Nutrition and our new product, Added Sleep. It's designed for brains wired differently. If you want to sleep better, maybe give it a try.

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