*By a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in neurocomplexity as well as addiction. *
It’s 1:47 a.m. and you have eleven tabs open (after closing so many).
One is a paper on interoception. One is a thread about rejection sensitivity. One is a podcast paused at minute 41. One is a note in your phone called “Why I am the way I am (draft 7).”
You feel wonderful. Focused. Clear. The world has narrowed to a single beautiful problem, and for the first time all day, your brain is quiet.
You tell yourself you’re learning, because technically you are.
That’s what makes this so difficult to recognize, because sometimes the thing that regulates you is also the thing you happen to be exceptionally good at.
You can research for six hours and call it curiosity. You can analyze yourself until 2 a.m. and call it self-awareness. You can chase one more explanation and call it healing.
Sometimes those things are exactly what they look like, and sometimes they’re primarily doing something else: **changing your internal state. **That distinction matters if you’ve ever had a substance do the same thing for you.
Never Only About the Substance
If you’ve ever stopped drinking, using, or smoking, you probably know this already: the substance was doing a job.
For a lot of neurodivergent and high-capacity people, that job was attempting to tend to your nervous system. Alcohol turned down the sensory volume. Stimulants gave an ADHD brain a runway. Cannabis slowed the racing. Something, anything, closed the gap between how your nervous system felt and how you needed it to feel. (The research backs up part of this: ADHD in particular is associated with higher rates of substance use problems. The link isn’t destiny, but it isn’t random either.)
Then you stopped because the side effects and consequences of long term use were outweighing the benefits. That was hard, and it matters.
But your need for a state change didn’t leave with the substance. It went looking for a new door. And if your mind is your strongest organ, the door it finds will look like intelligence.
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying a six-hour research spiral is pharmacologically the same as a drink. It isn’t. I’m saying the function can be the same: changing your internal state. That’s the part worth looking at.
What Information Actually Gives You
Figuring things out isn’t always a random habit. It’s a smart strategy, because information can supply exactly what a neurodivergent nervous system is often short on:
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