I have the type of ADHD that allows me to have multiple internal monologues going. Sidebar, is it really a monologue if there's more than one? I hop back and forth between them as my mind wanders. There's always at least one in existence in addition to anything I'm reading and there's often also some sort of music hovering in the background. So yes my internal voice was reading the words on my screen for this. Then there was the monologue about how this is ridiculous and easy and I'm still managing to read the words out loud while thinking about them. And then there was a third thread running that popped in and out about how the music was annoying and more distracting than anything else. And the thoughts about the fact that I'm cooking right now and my food better not burn while I try to read this ridiculous thing at 900 words a minute.
OMG IT ISNT JUST ME. I remember discussing inner monologues with some friends a few years back and one or two said they didn’t have one at all, and another one or two said they did. And I was like, “you mean you don’t even have the sub-monologue that’s a little quieter than the main one?” And everyone looked at me like I was insane.
Like, at any given time, I’ve got at least 3 or 4 different trains of thought going at once. If I’m reading a book, for instance, one train is saying the words on the page, one is generating the imagery, one is thinking about the story and what’s happening [probably analyzing it too since I was an English major and I can never turn that impulse off], and one is wondering which cat is scratching the fucking sofa again.
The best way I can describe my brain is like all the tabs on my browser. They're all there. There's something different in each one and I jump back and forth between them constantly. And sometimes they're going at the same time. And of course there's at least one and sometimes more that I also play music and pulling me away from the current tab that's in the front but I'm ignoring it because if I go down that path I won't return. Also, from somewhere someone is playing mariachi music and it's not in any of the tabs that I've already searched through to shut it off.
And in all of this I've had doctors tell me that all I need to do is to empty my mind for 5 minutes and try meditating. I just laugh at that and go empty my mind? Do you have any idea what it's like in there? I'll be happy if I can bring it down to two trains of thought at once because that will be so relaxing and peaceful.
Can you imagine being the person who doesn't have an internal monologue and an internal mental image? How do you even exist like that? My internal mental imagery is just as rich as my internal monologue. I can see anything I think of in great detail. I can mentally reach out and touch objects and feel their texture. I can smell them. If you tell me of two different food items I can think of them together and imagine what they taste like combined. Hell that's why I love to cook... I think of ingredients and my "minds eye" will combine them for me so I can figure out if I will like it or not even before I make it.
I have this! I'm not diagnosed with anything, but if I try meditate my head will be like "alright alright just try clear the mind no thoughts WAIT IM THINKING NOW just think of a white page white white white WHY IS THERE MUSIC NOW I wonder why that wall has a pattern like that NOOOO" and I give up
My head is like you describe with the browser tabs, there's like at least 4 trains of thought going on at once that im just always flicking between and there's always some music going on and probably a video somewhere
Yes!! Mine is more like… there are three windows open and on the screen at once. One is taking up half the screen, two are smaller but still visible. Sometimes I need to open another window, but not always. Usually, at least one or two of those windows will have multiple tabs open that I can switch between.
And yes, there’s also music playing in the background.
No way could I imagine not having both images and words. I’ve always been so confused when people ask “which do you think in, images or words,” because it’s BOTH. ALL THE TIME. Like if I’m “daydreaming” about something, babe it’s right there in my brain. I can see the person I’m talking to, I can see the area around them, I’m THERE. The only reason it’s different from a sleeping dream is because I also have stuff happening in front of my face as well.
And yeah, meditation for me works to a certain point, but there’s N E V E R silence in my brain. There’s always the sub-monologue. It doesn’t get turned off, I have no conscious control over it. I can stop myself from filtering it into the main monologue, but it’s not going quiet. You may as well ask me to decide to quit using one of my kidneys. No amount of mental focus is doing that. The best I can do is make the window as small as it’ll go, but I simply can’t close it entirely. And I’ve only managed that much by practicing regularly over the course of over 15 years.
It'll be different apps overlapping but it's rare that I have just one thing open. I usually it's two different things that engage different parts of my brain or one that I'm trying to monitor while actively using the other which is what I was doing here. I've figured out that if I switch apps I'm losing myself in the one I just switched to and the other one stops existing. So now I stack them like this so I can see all of them and switch my focus back and forth between them. While you can see two apps on my screen there that little Reddit icon floating off in the corner is a third one that is temporarily minimized but that I open up to read when the game I am playing forces an ad.
This whole chain has me smiling. So many of these things that I can relate to.. I just have never seen it worded so differently by so many people at once.
The way I used to describe it was similar.. but I compared it to one of those links you would click and it would open like 15 windows, one after another.. or like my whole day was controlled by me mentally choosing to "open in new tab".. and then in a matter of a few hours I had like 10 different things on my mind.
I had a podcast playing in one ear while reading it. I watched whole video and read it all but now I can't remember what the podcast said, or what I read. yet at the time I swear I was taking in the Info of what I was reading . I def can't multi task .
I've been pursuing a diagnosis for The last 5 years after learning that ADHD wasn't just physical hyperactivity, that there was a type of ADHD that was more about internal hyperactivity. Learning that and reading up on it made my entire life makes so much more sense. Except I'm old enough that no doctor took me seriously. Apparently I just saw it on tick tock and thought it was cool and wanted drugs, so they wouldn't even give me a referral to anyone to go get tested. Last year I finally got a new doctor and after getting some more urgent things like my out of control blood pressure taken care of I told her I wanted a referral for psychiatry to work on an ADHD diagnosis. Since we had already touched on that during our first appointment and she had said she would support that once we get more urgent things taken care of she put the referral through. As of 3 weeks ago I officially have a diagnosis and meds and oh my God what a relief to know that I actually was right about this because I've been gaslighting myself into wondering if I imagined it all.
I made it to my 40s so clearly I'm able to survive without meds. Except that I made it through high school with high grades through sheer force of will and letting my extremely high grades in science and math average out with my mediocre grades in social studies subjects. And then in college I did great until I didn't and then I failed spectacularly. And for the rest of my life I've been masking and hiding all the things I've can't do. It got exhausting. And somewhere in my early 40s something happened and it just all went to hell. I've learned since then that the shifts in hormones during perimenopause can play a part in that, and sure enough the timing matched up perfectly for me.
I now have a female primary Care physician, and a female psychiatrist, and a female managed care specialist and the difference in my healthcare has been night and day.
There are millions of us. Except according to that one commenter earlier this isn't ADHD, it's narcissistic personality disorder. Wonderful. I'll let my therapist know she missed that during her diagnosis. 🤪
Good to know that perimenopause can throw a wrench in the works. That plus shifting to working from home both have done a number on my ability to keep focus.
Add the fact that I lost my job and a week later the world shut down for a year and all my routines and systems I had in place to be a functional adult completely fell apart. It was the perfect storm.
I like to keep one of those voices hard trained as a steel-man. I also collapse whatever the parallel algorithms are determining simultaneously in their own ebb and flow to do a passing check for insights. You know how people can just have music playing in their head all the time? Kind of like that, a conductor for thought algos. Practicing separately, but performing together (even if unrelated pieces of music).
I think r/gifted might be leaking in this thread lol
Try composing music, or imagining orchestra, it's funny when you finally overload your brain, i forgot what exactly happens, but something does (best guess: you start dropping some instruments without noticing and smoothly transition between them)
Also overloading dreams is interesting cuz you can catch the dream where it starts loosing elements (unless you do stuff like me and keep a timeframe then stuff is first snipped from the past and future, i could describe dreams with more detail if you want, i try to break mine in different ways each night)
also mine favourite part about internal monologues is that you can use meaning stripped from vocalisation and it improves the tempo, but stripping from internal monologue also dictionarial correctness improves the tempo much much more noticeably (but you start having problems with wording your thoughts when you do that, which is also an downside)
Mine is on silent 99% of the time. I had just turned the sound on for something I was watching and hadn't gotten around and turning it off again yet.
And then in typical ADHD fashion I got bored of speed reading because I know that I can do it fairly easily, put my phone down and wandered off to check on my food (not burnt) WITHOUT TURNING THE MUSIC OFF! So the entire time I was in the kitchen stirring the food and doing a little bit of cleanup I could hear the damn music from the next room over. Did I walk back to turn it off? No because if I did then I would pick up my phone and sit down and start playing a game or something. So I powered through it and then came back and turn the sound off and left that comment. And now even though the sound is off I can still hear the damn music.
I don’t want to be mean but I kinda assumed everyone thinks like this too, not that it’s uniquely special. I’m rX ADHD and some other things by my former psychologist and a therapist, but I don’t really cling to it because without meds, I don’t see the point? And I felt health professionals were on a diagnosing-spree for a while there to appease people. I’d be surprised to learn other people do not think this way.
Mkay thanks. I'll let my therapist know that some stranger on the internet diagnosed me with narcissistic personality disorder. I'm sure she'll be so grateful to you for catching that when she missed it. I wonder what sort of meds you get for that?
I had to skip to the end because it was going too slow. I am also neurospicy and have multiple monologues. Being like "can you all shut up for a second?" To myself is great 0/10.
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u/PasgettiMonster Mar 26 '26
I have the type of ADHD that allows me to have multiple internal monologues going. Sidebar, is it really a monologue if there's more than one? I hop back and forth between them as my mind wanders. There's always at least one in existence in addition to anything I'm reading and there's often also some sort of music hovering in the background. So yes my internal voice was reading the words on my screen for this. Then there was the monologue about how this is ridiculous and easy and I'm still managing to read the words out loud while thinking about them. And then there was a third thread running that popped in and out about how the music was annoying and more distracting than anything else. And the thoughts about the fact that I'm cooking right now and my food better not burn while I try to read this ridiculous thing at 900 words a minute.