What Is Verbal Processing? Understanding the ADHD & Autistic Brain in Real Time

dec 10, 2025

If you’ve ever been told you “talk too much” or “ramble,” chances are you might actually be verbal processing. For many ADHD and autistic people, speaking out loud isn’t a quirk — it’s a survival tool.

Verbal processing is the act of thinking out loud in order to organize information, test connections, and bring clarity to chaotic thought patterns. What looks like endless chatter to others is actually a highly effective cognitive strategy.

 

 

What Is Verbal Processing?

Verbal processing means using spoken language to structure thoughts in real time. Instead of silently mapping out ideas, the brain externalizes them through speech.

For neurodivergent people, this often looks like:

  • Doodling, fidgeting, or pacing while talking
  • Jumping between ideas or making rapid associations
  • Asking endless “follow-up” questions
  • Talking through every option before deciding

Why Does It Look Like Rambling?

 

To an outsider, verbal processing may seem chaotic. The sentences might be long, filled with tangents, or appear unfiltered. In reality, the brain is working 100x faster than speech. Only the strongest connections make it out into words.

That’s why verbal processing isn’t “rambling.” It’s iteration in real time. Each spoken thought is a piece of raw data that gets shaped into clarity.

 

 

The Benefits of Verbal Processing

  1. Problem-Solving: By speaking it out, solutions emerge faster.
  1. Perspective: Saying it aloud helps reveal blind spots.
  1. Emotional Regulation: Words give form to what feels overwhelming.
  1. Connection: Sharing raw thoughts can create intimacy and trust.

 

 

Misinterpretations at Work & School

Teachers and coworkers often mistake verbal processors for:

  1. Not paying attention
  2. Doubting authority
  3. Being long-winded or unfocused

In reality, asking follow-up questions or “thinking out loud” is a sign of engagement. It means the brain is testing systems, checking logic, and processing deeply.

 

How to Support a Verbal Processor

  • Listen without judgment – don’t shut them down mid-flow.
  • Allow brainstorming space – not everything needs to be polished immediately.
  • Recognize safety – if someone verbal processes around you, it means they trust you.

 

takeaway

Verbal processing isn’t a flaw. It’s one of the most authentic, efficient ways a neurodivergent brain works.

So next time someone tells you you’re “rambling,” remember: you’re not rambling — you’re building clarity in real time.

Thinking in Overdrive: Fast Thoughts, Hyperfocus & the Neurodivergent Brain

nov 20, 2025

I think roughly seven times faster than I speak. Words spill out, branching like an oil spill at 100 km/h. Connections form instantly, possibilities and blind spots mapped in a complex web. My mind works in layers—each processing a different type of information, overlapping, expanding, and sometimes colliding.

My Layers of Thought

  1. Current Task Layer: Cooking, typing, speaking, eating.

     

  2. Analytical Layer: Web of all information, making sense of patterns.

     

  3. Environmental Layer: Processing everything around me.

     

  4. Sensory Layer: Images, sounds, feelings—visualized in 5k.

     

  5. Emotional Layer: Deciphering emotions—mine or yours.

     

  6. Self-Reflection Layer: Inner monologue with critic, cheerleader, and relativator.

  7. Earworm Layer: Songs stuck on repeat for days.

When hyperfocus hits, all layers condense into one: laser-sharp attention on a single subject. The world disappears, and I become pure conceptual energy. I learn, absorb, and create at Mach-like speeds. I forget food, water, and even the bathroom. Interrupt me, and my irritation is immediate. But when a project is complete, I land back on Earth with the satisfaction of ultimate productivity.

The Upside of Speed

This rapid mental processing allows for extraordinary creativity and problem-solving. I can see associations others miss and absorb vast amounts of information quickly. Visual and auditory thinking help me design, plan, and invent in ways that feel almost like superpowers.

The Downside: Burnout

Life as an adult often strips away the ability to indulge these layers. Obligations replace curiosity. Over time, the inability to hyperfocus on things that matter to me contributed to my autistic burnout. Energy depletes, joy fades, and survival mode kicks in.

Recovery & Balance

The capacity for fast thinking and hyperfocus is a strength—but like a high-performance engine, it burns fuel quickly. Rest, recovery, and permission to engage in flow states are essential. For neurodivergent individuals, honoring hyperfocus isn’t optional—it’s a basic need. It sustains creativity, curiosity, and even mental health.

Hyperfocus is more than obsession; it’s a fundamental mode of being. Respect it, protect it, and structure life so it can thrive.

Your brain’s speed is not a flaw—it’s a gift, and giving it room to operate fully is essential to living fully.

Public Transport & my Neurodivergence: A One-Way Ticket to Overload

nov 20, 2025

Public Transport: More Than a Ride

For most people, public transport is simple: you buy a ticket, hop on, and get from A to B. But for me, and many other neurodivergent people, it’s the absolute definition of hell. The smells, the noise, the crowds pressing into your personal space, the weather, the delays, the unpredictability — it’s not a ride, it’s an obstacle course. And one that leaves me completely drained.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve walked away from a bus or train ride shaking, overstimulated, and bleeding from biting my lips and fingers just to cope.

The Whiplash of Switching States

Taking public transport feels like mental whiplash. I’m switching between modes constantly: hyper-alert for delays, scanning for empty seats, bracing for smells and noise, watching out for aggressive passengers, trying not to get lost in the sensory overload. It’s not just getting somewhere — it’s surviving the ride, and just keeping a smile to mask it all away from my surroundings.

The Stories That Stick

I have stories burned into my memory:

  • Age 14: Packed into a bus, crushed between bomber jackets, boiling hot inside while freezing outside. Suddenly, a girl fainted and collapsed on the floor. As others rushed to help, I crouched down, trying to calm my racing heart and breath. By the time I arrived at school, my fingers were bleeding, and I was already done for the day.

  • Age 16: Laughing with a friend on the bus. Suddenly, a stranger turned to me, furious: “You’re laughing at me because of my colored lenses!” Before I could react, she slapped me in the face. (I wasn’t talking about her, I didn’t even notice her before. I told the driver, who shrugged and said, “Not my problem.” My dad literally chased down the bus to confront the girls. That moment of protection meant everything to me.

  • Age 22: Commuting from Almere to Amsterdam with my foldable bike. I locked it to a pole in the train, not realizing it wasn’t allowed. The conductor stormed in, screaming, threatening to throw me off. Even after I unlocked it, he kept raging until passengers stepped in to defend me. I was shaking for hours.

And these are just a handful of stories. I have at least dozens more.

The People Factor

It doesn’t help that much of the staff are underpaid, overworked, and regularly abused by passengers. I’ve seen them spat on, yelled at, and physically threatened. They’re stressed, and sometimes, they break. And when they break, I’ve been their safe target more than once. I’ve been screamed at by staff for absolutely nothing, at least six times.

But there have also been moments of kindness. Like the bus driver who saw me panicking at 13 when I couldn’t find my card and just waved me in. Or the Amsterdam tram conductor who rhymed every stop announcement, making the whole tram laugh. Small things that felt huge in the middle of chaos.

The Neurodivergent Cost

For me, public transport isn’t just inconvenient. It’s exhausting. It’s overstimulating. It’s anxiety-inducing. Every trip eats up energy I don’t have to spare. By the time I arrive, I’m not just physically there, I’m mentally wiped.

And here’s the kicker: it’s expensive. In the Netherlands, you pay ridiculous prices for the privilege of being stuck in a crowded, sweaty, noisy sensory hellscape. At least in other countries, the misery is cheaper.

For many autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent people, this isn’t just whining. It’s reality. It’s why so many of us avoid it when we can, or why we need extra recovery time when we can’t.

It’s not just a ride. It’s survival.

Processing the World Through Art: How Neurodivergent Minds Find Order in Chaos

nov 19, 2025

Processing the World Through Art: How Neurodivergent Minds Find Order in Chaos

Living with Autism and ADHD means living with a brain that doesn’t filter the world the way most do. Every sound, every flicker of light, every shifting facial expression—nothing slips past unnoticed. Add to that an endless web of associations firing at lightning speed, and daily life becomes an experience of relentless intensity.

From the outside, it may look like I am “just sitting there,” but inside, my brain is working at the speed of a supercomputer. It processes everything, all the time, in layers.

Thinking in layers

My thoughts are not linear. They exist in stacked dimensions:

  • Task Layer: What I’m actively doing—speaking, typing, cooking.
  • Analytical Layer: Making sense of patterns, weaving information into a web.

  • Environmental Layer: Processing every sound, smell, and visual cue around me.

  • Sensory Layer: Vivid 5K images, sounds, and feelings.

  • Emotional Layer: Tracking my emotions, and yours.

  • Self-Reflection Layer: An inner dialogue between critic, cheerleader, and philosopher.

  • Earworm Layer: A song looping for days.

Most people operate with one or two of these layers at once. I live with all of them active—constantly. It is beautiful, but it is also exhausting.

When hyperfocus hits

Then there are moments of hyperfocus, when all the layers condense into one. Suddenly the chaos becomes order. My attention sharpens into a laser beam, and I disappear into learning, absorbing, creating. Hours vanish. I forget food, water, even the bathroom. Interrupt me and you’ll feel my irritation. But when I resurface, it feels like touching ground after flying at supersonic speed.

This is the paradox: my brain can either be everywhere at once or nowhere but here.

The cost of overstimulation

This layered, high-speed processing comes with a cost: energy depletion. Even joyful events—birthdays, concerts, family outings—can leave me with what feels like a hangover. Not because the event was bad, but because my brain has burned through every reserve.

When the energy bank is empty, even simple actions like getting up for a glass of water feel impossible. This is not laziness. It’s neurological bankruptcy. And when I push through, I borrow energy from tomorrow, leading to days of collapse.

Why art is survival

In the midst of all this, art is not optional. It is how I process, organize, and release the overwhelming flood of stimuli.

When I paint, photograph, or work in mixed media, I am taking the chaotic web of sensory data and giving it form. Through art I find:

  • Structure: Patterns and logic in the noise.
  • Reason: A way to make sense of relentless thought.
  • Perspective: Distance from what overwhelms me.
  • Relief: A place to rest my brain.
  • Expression: A window into my inner world for others to glimpse.

Without art, the layers remain tangled. With art, I untangle them—thread by thread, color by color, image by image.

The science of creativity and regulation

Neuroscience confirms what I’ve lived: autistic and ADHD brains often process stimuli with less filtering, which means more detail but also more exhaustion. Art therapy has been shown to regulate emotions, process trauma, and help the brain “file” experiences in ways words cannot.

For neurodivergent people, creativity isn’t just self-expression. It’s nervous system regulation. It’s medicine.

Conclusion

My art is not a hobby. It is a survival strategy. A necessity. It transforms overstimulation into beauty, chaos into order, exhaustion into expression.

I don’t create to be productive. I create to live.

Autistic Burnout: Ignoring Special Interest and rest needs will Slowly Destroy You

okt 8, 2025

How My Autistic Burnout Unfolded

 

My autistic burnout didn’t strike like lightning. It built itself layer upon layer across my entire life, like the infamous boiled frog metaphor: the water grows warmer and warmer until you don’t even realize you’re being cooked alive.

For me, “normal life” meant constantly pushing myself to the very edge, mentally and physically, then labeling the exhaustion as laziness. If I had trouble completing routine tasks, the conclusion was always the same: I’m weak. I need to push harder.

What most people don’t realize is that for an AuDHD brain, everything that isn’t driven by intrinsic motivation costs one hundred times more energy. ADHD comes with a broken reward system for routine or boring tasks. There’s no natural dopamine hit for doing laundry, replying to emails, or cooking dinner. Every action has to be done manually, step by step, as if wading through syrup. “Just do it” doesn’t exist. Each task is a negotiation between brain and body: Move your arm. Now your hand. Now pick this up.

And yet, the inner critic whispered: But everyone else does it. How hard can it be? You’re just lazy. Try harder.

So I did. I forced myself through life.

Childhood and Adolescence

As a child, I struggled deeply with fitting in. I was the “weird kid,” always slightly off from what was expected. But by my teenage years, I cracked the social code. I became adaptable, even popular, wearing the mask so well that nobody suspected how hard it was.

But behind the mask, I began experiencing panic attacks at sixteen. I ignored the signs. I thought it was just part of life. I kept pushing, kept adapting, kept pretending.

When you live this way—masking, forcing, never resting—something eventually breaks.

Motherhood: The Steepening Slope

Becoming a mother made everything heavier. The hill I’d been climbing suddenly turned into a vertical wall. Sleepless nights, breastfeeding, the endless cries of “mama” every day, all while trying to maintain a career, a household, and a relationship.

Add in the invisible labor: doctor’s appointments, school meetings, birthdays, playdates, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and remembering every tiny detail of family life.

It’s a choreography of a thousand moving parts—and I refused to drop a single ball. Delegating cost even more energy than doing it myself. So I carried it all.

And then came the breaking point.

The Final Straw: A Crashed Hard Drive

One day, our hard drive failed. Years of personal photos vanished. Birthdays, vacations, ordinary moments of joy—erased. To make matters worse, an entire wedding shoot for a client was on that same drive. We managed to recover most of the client’s photos from memory cards, but our own images were gone.

It might sound trivial, but for me, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As I write this, I still feel the sting. Those memories were irreplaceable, and losing them ripped something open inside me.

I shattered.

Eight Months of Collapse

Every morning, I woke with violent heart palpitations, as if an electric current jolted me awake. My body shook with adrenaline. I curled into a ball under the blanket until my heartbeat calmed.

I survived only by functioning on the bare minimum. I took my kids to school on sheer willpower, then came home and collapsed on the couch under a blanket, paralyzed by exhaustion. Eight months passed like this.

Cooking, cleaning, even making myself a drink were impossible. Some days I lay frozen, unable to gather the energy to feed myself. My life shrank to survival mode: keep the kids alive. That was it.

The doctor called it “probably depression” or “just burnout” and told me to rest. But what does rest mean when you’ve already abandoned everything except bare survival? Even resting was too much. My recovery stalled. Two steps forward, one step back.

The Diagnosis Journey

I entered the diagnostic process, which dragged on for nearly three years. First they suspected ADHD. Then autism. Then “maybe just one, maybe both, maybe neither.”

Finally, the conclusion arrived: ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety. Along with one truth I already knew in my bones: I was in the depths of autistic burnout.

The Forgotten Lifeline: Special Interests

Looking back, I can see it clearly: a huge piece of my collapse came from starving my special interest.

Before kids, my life was built around creation. Career, art, content, sports, and rest balanced each other. I had space to breathe.

But with children, that space vanished. All my time and energy poured into family logistics. Creativity, art, and content creation became luxuries I no longer allowed myself. The cruel irony is that the very things that recharge me were the first things I abandoned. How could I sit down to draw, write, or create when there were still groceries to buy, dinners to cook, forms to fill out?

My perfectionism wouldn’t allow it. So I kept going, drained dry, until nothing was left.

And this is the cruel cycle: without art, I lost my lifeline. Without rest, my brain had no time to form ideas. Without ideas, there was no creation. Without creation, there was no self-expression. And without self-expression, I lost myself.

Something in me withered. The piece of me that makes me me: gone.

Recovery: Art as Medicine

The turning point came with my diagnosis. With words to describe my brain, we could finally restructure our household, hire help, and carve out breathing room.

And when I returned to art, I returned to myself. Creativity is not indulgence—it is survival. My AuDHD brain thrives on hyperfocus, structure, and the deep dive into special interests. It’s both my strength and my vulnerability. But only when I feed it the fuel it needs: creation.

Now I treat my art the way others treat medication. It is non-negotiable. It is medicine.

What Happens When You Finally Make Space

The difference is night and day. When I carve out space to create, the ideas pour in. My brain sparks like a nuclear core. Hyperfocus takes over—I lose track of time, forget to eat or sleep, and surrender to pure creation.

And those moments? They’re not indulgence. They’re survival.

This is the cruelty of burnout for neurodivergent parents, especially mothers: the first things sacrificed are the very activities that keep us alive. Self-care, creativity, joy—they’re the first to go. And the cost is devastating.

The Message: Claim Your Space

If you are neurodivergent and see yourself in my story, hear this:

Your special interest is not optional. It’s not “just a hobby.” It is your oxygen, your compass, your lifeline.

Claim the space. Demand the time. Fight for the hours that seem impossible to carve out. Because without it, you risk losing yourself too.

I lost myself when I abandoned art. Through art, I found myself again.

And that is the quiet truth of recovery: sometimes survival looks like picking up a pen, a brush, a camera, or a keyboard—and letting your whole self breathe again.