{"id":8758,"date":"2014-10-18T12:43:32","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T12:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=8758"},"modified":"2014-10-18T12:43:32","modified_gmt":"2014-10-18T12:43:32","slug":"0161-overstimulated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0161-overstimulated\/","title":{"rendered":"0161 &#8211; Overstimulated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a scene in one of the earlier episodes of The West Wing where the White House Chief Of Staff, Leo McGarry, describes his alcoholism to a junior staffer. (Season 1, Episode 13). It&#8217;s a pretty powerful scene. He describes he can&#8217;t ever just have one drink; he has to have 10 drinks. It doesn&#8217;t make sense to her, but that&#8217;s because she&#8217;s not an alcoholic. They&#8217;re just wired differently. It&#8217;s well worth a watch:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The West Wing  Season 1 Episode 13 (Leo explains drug &amp; alcohol addiction)\" width=\"770\" height=\"578\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ll6GxYVJcuo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>ADHD:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For most of my life I pshaw-ed at the idea that people are wired differently. I mean, there are extreme cases where people clearly need medical attention- but a lot of people who cheerfully claim to have OCD or ADHD or &#8220;I&#8217;m so depressed!&#8221; are probably just making it up, surely? If you look at my report cards, they say that I was a bright kid that couldn&#8217;t be held in line- too noisy, too many inappropriate remarks, no discipline, no work ethic, so on and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>I thought I was just lazy, and it never occurred to me (or anybody in my immediate circle, family and teachers included) that I might be different from others in a deeper sense. My boss was the first person to suggest to me that I might have ADHD. Several others on Hacker News did the same, simply from reading something I had written. I met up with an expert who deals with adult ADHD, and she told me that it was clear to her: I had\/have a full-blown case of the zesty.<\/p>\n<p>On hindsight&#8230; the diagnosis makes perfect sense. I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s something I was born with, something I sort of grew into, or both. My parents allowed me a lot of freedom when I was a kid. I read a lot of books. I played video games, which I found very stimulating. I&#8217;d read entire school textbooks before the school year started, which made me quite the know-it-all (I&#8217;m sorry. I never actually had much of a &#8216;social education&#8217;).<\/p>\n<p>So many tell-tale signs, on hindsight.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Hyperfocus&#8221;:\u00a0<\/strong>Once I really get into something I can spend hours on it and lose all sense of time. By this I mean to say I outlast everyone else I know, when playing video games late into the night. I bet you that I could easily stay online and find things to do for a full 24 hours. But this predated the Internet for me. I used to read books until I fell asleep, and continue when I woke up. During these moments, I would not notice if anybody was calling my name. When I&#8217;m out with friends, I&#8217;d lose track of time and inevitably break the soft curfew my parents set for me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Food:<\/strong> I used to eat really unhealthily. I&#8217;d eat my food with tonnes of ketchup, which I imagine is full of salt. I&#8217;d drink a 500ml bottle of Pepsi or Coke a day in school, then have a McDonald&#8217;s meal afterwards. This went on for years, and I got skinny-fat with a big belly. It stopped once I was in secondary school- I&#8217;d start eating spaghetti or mee goreng. And sandwiches. And lots of cup noodles.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Candy:<\/strong> I was also a candy monster. I used to eat nerds, mentos, gobstoppers, hichew, fruit tips, fruitella, lakerol, all that sugary shit. And I&#8217;d finish it all in one sitting. (Never experienced any of the laxative effects that they warned about.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cigarettes:<\/strong> And then I picked up smoking. Cigarettes are the best thing for anybody who craves stimulation, if you don&#8217;t mind the stench, cancer and death. I don&#8217;t mean that sarcastically. If you&#8217;re feeling chronically understimulated, a little stench and death can seem like a worthy tradeoff to light your brain up a little. It gives you a lot of control.<\/p>\n<p>A cigarette is really a work of art, gamification wise. You can carry a pack of them in your pocket. Lighting one always feels good, now you have a little fire in your hands. You can control your puffs- how much you inhale, how you exhale. Make no mistake about it, smoking is a skill, and over a few years you get good at it. It&#8217;s a nice skill to master, being able to manipulate your state like that. It can relax you or pump you up. It becomes a little game that keeps you alive as it kills you. What do you do? I smoke, that&#8217;s what I do. It&#8217;s like feeding fish or some other responsibility- there&#8217;s a little circuit of neurons in my head that demand to be lit up by the nicotine, and I obey. It&#8217;s a simpler master than most of life, and it&#8217;s predictably rewarding. Only bitch thing is the ruining your health bit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Social Media:<\/strong> Then came social media, which is more of the same. I was a heavy MySpace user because I was promoting my band (ah, the good old days). I very naturally became a Facebook power user. I got off on the Likes. Each Like was like a puff of a cigarette, a hit. It was an addiction, just like nicotine. Social validation is a hell of a drug. But you gotta remind yourself it&#8217;s all an illusion. It&#8217;s just cookie clicker. A number goes up and it tricks a part of your brain into feeling good, and you chase that.<br \/>\nActually all of life is like that, just that the pursuit of some things are sustainable and others are not, some are socially acceptable (and these aren&#8217;t necessarily what optimizes your utility\/pleasure) and others are not.<\/p>\n<p>I got pretty good at the Facebook thing. I would spend a lot more time on it than most people I know. I would be late for appointments with people because I was caught up in a Facebook argument at the computer (this was before I had a smartphone, so I wasn&#8217;t able to write-on-the-go).<\/p>\n<p><em>I stopped writing this post right around here, because I ran out of time or steam or something. But what I was trying to say is: I have an atypical brain, with regards to addiction and addictive substances. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m necessarily in the 99th percentile of did quit smoking- but I&#8217;m definitely not-average. And that&#8217;s an interesting thing for me to think about, and have to deal with.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a scene in one of the earlier episodes of The West Wing where the White House Chief Of Staff, Leo McGarry, describes his alcoholism to a junior staffer. (Season 1, Episode 13). It&#8217;s a pretty powerful scene. He describes he can&#8217;t ever just have one drink; he has to&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,27,16],"class_list":["post-8758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-adhd","tag-cigarettes","tag-social-media"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>0161 - Overstimulated - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0161-overstimulated\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"0161 - Overstimulated - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There&#8217;s a scene in one of the earlier episodes of The West Wing where the White House Chief Of Staff, Leo McGarry, describes his alcoholism to a junior staffer. 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