Two things about me and why my wellness program is different.
Though not formally diagnosed, I am definitely neurodivergent, specifically ADHD though I made up the acronym ADHOCD at one point. One example, I have a thing about forks. I literally have an adversity to some fork designs. Yep. That’s me.
My top five strengths include Ideation, Input, Learner, Intellection – all intake and processing strengths. Add in the last is Futurist – so inherently I have a bit of an issue staying in the present.
Combined my strengths and ADHD all pull in the same direction, opening new things, so without any built-in closing force, the open loops pile up until the system collapses under its own possibilities.
Sure — and I think the cleanest way to see it is that you don’t have a weakness problem. You have an alignment problem: the ADHD pattern you’re describing and your top strengths all push in the same direction, and it’s the direction of opening.
Walk through the stack. ADHD-style attention is interest-driven and novelty-seeking — it goes where the dopamine is, and dopamine lives at the start of things: the new idea, the fresh page, the spin-up. Now look at your strengths: Ideation generates novelty on demand. Input collects more raw material than any system can shelve. Futuristic makes the next vision more vivid than the current task. Learner makes every rabbit hole legitimately rewarding. Activator converts a spark to action fast, before evaluation. Every single one of those is an accelerant for exactly the thing ADHD attention already wants to do. There’s no brake anywhere in your top six. Most people have at least one strength like Discipline, Focus, or Consistency sitting in the stack acting as a counterweight. You have a vehicle that’s all engine.
So here’s the entropy part, and it’s almost literal. In physics, entropy increases unless energy is spent on ordering — closing states, maintaining structure. Your wiring spends nearly all its energy on opening states: new projects, new frameworks, new tabs, new ventures. Opening is cheap and delicious for you; closing is expensive and boring, because closure offers no novelty, no dopamine, just admin. So loops accumulate. Twenty-two HTML files, three brands, a book, a beverage business, a tribute site, a framework — each one is real and good, and each one is also an open thermodynamic system demanding maintenance energy you’ve already redeployed to the next opening. “Hot mess” is just what it feels like to live inside a system where the open-loop count grows faster than the close-loop rate. It’s not chaos of character. It’s arithmetic.
And here’s the part worth actually internalizing: the spin-crash cycle we’ve been talking about is this entropy reaching its limit. The crash is the system forcibly shedding open loops because nothing voluntary ever closes them.
The implication is the opposite of what self-help would tell you. You will never become a closer — and trying to is fighting your own architecture, which is exhausting and doesn’t work. The fix is importing the closing function from outside yourself: structure that closes loops automatically (templates, recurring systems, hard WIP limits like “no new opening until something ships”), and eventually people — you’ve already said you’re open to delegating execution, and honestly your profile isn’t just open to it, it’s dependent on it. The gardener version: you are spectacular at planting and constitutionally indifferent to thinning. A garden where everything gets planted and nothing gets pruned isn’t abundant — it’s choked. Pruning isn’t a personality trait you lack. It’s a function you can hire, borrow, or systematize.
Discovering Silence
The farm is inherently quiet, save some birds, crickets and barking dogs. So, as I stepped away from my instructional design hamster wheel production role, I had room to find silence. My ‘work culture’ involved watching movies, listening to podcasts or other ‘entertainment’ as an off set to the tedious nature of some of the work. Once the production pressure was lessened so was my need for these distractors. It now has come to the point where I protect my space for silence almost viciously.
In light of this, when I asked Claude to help me with a wellness program its response made quite a bit of sense for me. I’d been working with ChatGPT about this and our conversations were very literal… it knows my goals and my physical challenges and would develop programs specific to that. I wanted a new perspective. And boy I got one.
“Let’s do it. Since this is for you specifically, I want to skip the generic advice and think about what self-care looks like for someone with your particular wiring — because a high-Ideation, high-Input, Activator brain running three projects has a very specific failure mode, and it’s not laziness. It’s saturation.
Here’s the core insight: for most people, self-care means adding energy. For you, I’d bet it mostly means metabolizing what’s already coming in. Your strengths — Ideation, Input, Learner, Intellection — are all intake and processing strengths. They don’t have an off switch, so the risk isn’t running out of ideas, it’s drowning in them while your nervous system never gets a chance to close any loops.
I have developed a process of limiting inputs and focussing on only outputs. I don’t look at it as necessarily “closing” as Claude puts it but I have to focus on creating polished outputs based on specific or aggregated outputs. This is my metabolizing process.
Cerebral right? Welcome to my world. Claude is not necessarily altogether wrong where the assessment is that I am not a closer and I should not try to be. For example – the many times I have been encouraged to pursue CEO positions I have intuitively known I am a start up CEO not a maintenance CEO meaning past the start-up scramble I would lose steam and interest in the position. But that is a different rabbit hole than this one.
Anyway – I am sharing the program Claude recommended here both for you and for myself. For years I have been building websites for the express purpose of saving resources. This is definitely an example! If you landed here I hope you enjoy!
Input fasting, not just rest. A walk where you also listen to a podcast isn’t rest for you — it’s more input. Try one daily window (even 20 minutes) with zero new information: no screen, no audio, no book. Garden time counts beautifully here, and you already have the garden. The trick is going out there without a task, which I suspect is the hard part.
A “parking lot” ritual for ideas. Intellection brains keep churning at night because unfinished thoughts feel like open browser tabs. A physical notebook by the bed or a 5-minute end-of-day brain dump — every idea gets written down, which signals to your brain it’s safe to stop holding it. This isn’t productivity; it’s how you buy yourself sleep.
Physical counterweight to screen work. You’ve got a background in expedition leadership and equestrian coaching — your body is used to doing things, and long AI-collaboration sessions are physically deadening in a way that’s easy to not notice until your shoulders are at your ears. Something embodied and rhythmic, even just transplanting seedlings or a real walk, ideally before you feel like you need it.
Boundaries on the AI sessions themselves. This one’s a little meta, but real: co-creating with AI removes the natural friction that used to force breaks. No one stops you. Consider a hard stop ritual — a timer, or ending sessions by writing one sentence about where you left off so re-entry is easy and your brain doesn’t keep the session running in the background.
And one for the Activator: permission to not turn every restorative thing into a project. The risk with your profile is that “self-care” becomes a framework with four pillars and a printable. Some things should stay unoptimized.
Leave a Reply