I was born on the 6th September 1988. At birth, my lung collapsed and I was immediately rushed to ICU. Luckily, I bounced back, but started to flap around with a touch of ADHD and autism. Not much has changed since. Except I struggled my entire life academically until I was 27-years old, then had a breakthrough and discovered, or should I say ‘experienced’ flow for the first time ever. Then, almost overnight, everything started to change.
Now, I’m a psychological, philosophical, psychiatric, neuroscientific, neurodivergent introvert researcher who is on the spectrum with high-functioning autism who used to have ADHD and lived wildly distracted and never present for 27-years of life who now has a fascination with how the human mind works, biologically, mechanically, desiring to learn everything about the brain, brain waves and brain states in order to alter the current neurochemistry of your brain.
At 27-years old my brain was somehow rewired, reconfigured and reprogrammed, for flow, which started this process, and begun turning my life from upside down to downside up, enabling me with increased creativity and productivity making my ADHD a superpower, an ultimate strength being super focused and extremely engaged with high intensity interval activities performing physical, and mental, marathons deliberately all for the sake of endurance as doing so is its own reward. I’ve since become highly intrinsically motivated.
It’s unclear wither my neurodevelopmental disorders were a result of my brain being deprived of oxygen at birth. Or if it was inherited from my mother’s schizophrenia she was diagnosed with years before my birth. It therefore seems I may have been predisposed to schizophrenia. However, luckily, my autism would never allow it. Not to mention flow proneness, which acts as a protective shield against it. And not to mention if one is always happy and productive in society, it’s very hard to actually have the time to ever feel down. Especially when life has so much to offer.
That’s why I’m awake and reading books from 5am most mornings. It’s been a crazy life so far. Always with far too many goals and forever trying to solve tomorrow’s problems today, there is never any time to be anything but productive. And with too many things and always feeling happy while doing them, it’s always baffled me how anyone even gets time to feel bored.
In the past I had dreams of being a world famous DJ and producer performing to millions all going crazy for me. But considering I prefer to spend my free time alone and with books, pens and pets before people, I instead opted for a king charles cavalier. Mostly because dogs don’t talk. Whereas some people never fuck up. I prefer to sing alone to my dog in solitude. My wife refers to me as a cartoon and compares my life to Mr. Bean. Because everywhere I go, shit seems to follow. However, trained in stoicism, I’m always prepared for any shit that follows. All that means is that there is always another exciting challenge waiting around every corner. Each day is another new problem to be solved. That’s also why I therefore carry 2TB of cloud storage with me, a laptop, an iPad, several hard drives, a voice recorder, 2 rulers, 5 pens, 4 highlighters and always 4-5 books and several journals inside their original boxed packaging with 125,000 digitally backed up files with me everywhere I go. Being extremely organized is something I value and enjoy almost more than anything else.
I own a library stacked and filled with books ranging from history to business, psychology to philosophy, neuroscience to social science, consciousness to drugs, addiction to brain disorders, hypnosis, psychiatry to psychedelic medicine (for healing and depression), physics to physical education, human mind investigation to human nature, positive psychology: flow and happiness, manipulation to power, dark psychology to emotional intelligence, personal development to finance, meditation to morality, art to artistry, computing, marketing, organisational skills, productivity, music, creativity and technology. I am also fascinated with the creative process and flow producing activities, hence why I’ve managed to get into as many things that I’m into. But more importantly, how I even got into them. As the flow experience is at the core of all these activities. And this is important, because achieving flow significantly alters your thinking level and experience in consciousness, altering who you are as a person but only in extremely positive ways. For achieving growth and complexity within the self is always enjoyable and for its own sake as the mental benefits experienced from it are tremendous.
Which are, as follows:
– Enhanced creativity.
– Increased productivity.
– More physical and mental energy.
– The ability to focus on difficult things for far longer than normal.
– The ability to find better solutions to current level thinking problems.
– The ability to problem find better problems to think about harder solutions to try and solve.
– Deeply immersive states of focus that lead to extreme pleasure, fascination and pure enjoyment.
– Higher mental challenge/skill level capabilities.
– Experiencing pleasure through deliberately engaging with difficult tasks.
– Suffer from less stress as each negative experience turns into a eustress experience.
– Better sense of wellbeing, meaning and purpose to life.
– More intrinsically motivated
– Desire to set harder goals and the work ethic to always achieve them.
– And always unusually happy with life. Even when shit happens! As monotropic flow tends to follow.
I’ve recently had to start carrying a briefcase with me everywhere I go. Not because I’m a doctor. I’m not. But because carrying 15kg over my shoulder every day for years now is beginning to weigh me down. So briefcase carried walks on each arm every 1-2 minutes seems more practical when on the go. But it’s still really hard for me to try and remember all this and say that to people when they ask who are you or what do you do? So, I just lie. And tell people I’m a bus driver.
Therefore if you find anything strange here, you are excused. For that is the goal. And you are aware of the reason for your confusion. I have since overcome my mental obstacles in life and learned how to harness them into being my greatest strength. This website is about a lot of things, as my mind tends to work differently from other people’s. We comprise 1% of the world’s population. Throw in being left-handed and it makes even more sense why I think in pictures. However, given what you know about me now, I not only hope you’ll understand why I find it difficult to ever make eye contact with you, but that you’ll also understand my motivation and reason for why I’m interested in neurodivergence, neurodevelopment disorders, and learning how to prevent neurodegenerative diseases. Life on the bottom has not always been easy. But that’s the point. That’s a good thing.
This is about how to live, overcome, and quite possibly even reverse neurodevelopmental disorders and how to prevent neurodegenerative diseases. It’s quite ambitious. To learn and teach how to grow into old age with a continuing sense of meaning and wonder to the mystery of your life, and continue having a never ending love and excitement for learning to keep us feeling alive, to stay connected with that childlike imaginative quality so that it never diminishes. I hope you will find the contents here as unusual and interesting as this life so far has been. But also, I hope you also learn how to harness that power of turning your biggest weakness into your greatest skill. What works for one, however, doesn’t always work for all, unfortunately. But I’m going to share everything that’s worked for me. And my hope is that in laying out that path it may therefore also help you.
Mental health is a current crisis. It’s the perennial problem of our advanced technological era we need to address. If not only for ourselves, for future generations to follow. And I would like to be a contributor to that driving force in trying to make life not just a little more manageable in order to cope, but how to attain (and sustain) a higher quality existence to thrive in the next century. Also, given my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I arrived on the scene with ADHD and autism, this is personal to me, to understand more and find strategies and better ways of thinking about people who can’t but help think differently. Because even though I got off to a rough start, struggling academically speaking for the first 27-years of life, that all eventually changed, somehow. That ‘somehow’ is the mission I’m on to explore in more detail, and why this exists. My hope is during the course of my continued self-education 10,000 hour process here, you might make breakthrough discoveries and insights yourself.
That is after all the whole point to becoming a researcher.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor. However I am interested in many subjects, including medical literature. The subjects you will find on this website will range from personal development to business, creativity to performance psychology, dark psychology to philosophy, psychiatry to neuroscience, neurodevelopmental disorders to productivity, and procrastination, and much more. I’m a serious student with an interest in a wide assortment of fields. I wish to gain knowledge on as much as possible to be able to pass it on. I’m interested in understanding more about things many people misunderstand. And I think we all share a role in that, not knowing where who exactly falls on a spectrum, means we all have a responsibility to learn how to enrich life, to prevent mental health problems from arising in the first place. You only have to search. You will find what you are looking for.
This blog is to help me continue my process.
