[Samzone]

Hello. I'm usually not one to seek reassurance so much since I know its only a patch solution to this problem but something has been nagging me too much lately.
I know brain-fog is a normal symptom but does anyone else also feel like they have become unable to "see the bigger picture" on things? I got the usual symptoms of brain-fog but I oddly enough feel clear-headed a lot of time but still can't seem to think all that clearly, if that makes sense. I feel stupid and like my brain is only working at 70% capacity despite having energy and a sense of clear headedness.

I've also got a few fears I wish to share in case somebody can relate:

I've got this fear that I won't be able to think logically in some circumstances due to brain-fog and will go psychotic. Its so bad I sometimes explain basic things to myself, things that I know but it still does not "feel" right after I explain it to myself for some reason.

I have this irrational fear of anything I don't fully understand. I've always been a curious person, even from childhood. Every time I stumble upon something I don't understand I would always instinctively seek knowledge about it. I carried this habit throughout my whole life and it feels like this has now become a morbid obsession in this state. I overanalyze everything and feel a need to figure everything out. Everytime a question comes to my mind about anything, I must find an answer. What might have made that guy choose to wear that shirt today? Why is the teakettle this color? What might have inspired this drawing on the cup I am drinking from? What is classified as a creative work? What is creativity?

If I do not address the questions and find a hypothesis or direct answer for every question, I feel this sense of chaos inside. A sense of disorder and madness and my anxiety heightens. Even when I do find a satisfying answer/hypothesis, the urge is not satisfied and it begs more questions. The worst part is that I keep challenging my own answers. So if I have this hypothesis of how creativity works for an example, I will start poking holes in the theory and try to apply it every time I look at something I deem "creative" according to my theory.

It might sound absolutely crazy. It does to me too and it scares me. I know I don't have to figure these things out. I know my answers and hypothesies may be wrong. But its the OCD loop I find myself in that keeps me in dpdr. I could get into these OCD thought loops sometimes even when I was not in dpdr or anxious, but I can usually stop it or focus on other things and it goes away.

Anyone who have similar experiences please feel free to pitch in

I would also like to mention if anyone need an accountability partner or something, I am open to that sort of thing. I had an accountability partner back when I was in this state 3 years ago and it helped a lot getting out of it. Its nice to have direct communication with somebody who shares your pain.

 

[Trith]

Warning, this is a long post, I want to respond to you, but I am also taking the chance to say what I think about my own problems that seem related, based on recent experience:

I have never identified with brain fog, because I thought spacing out had always been part of my personality and I don't remember it getting any worse when my DPDR started. But more recently I had some problem with some meds and it got worse in the last years, and I wanted to get tested for ADHD so that I might try some meds for that or some special therapy, I am now wating for the results. So in a nutshell, I have always had memory problems. During my memory tests, it seemed I have a very good memory, which is strange. I could remember a fake shopping list with 16 items in quite a short time. But the next day, I had to go for shopping for just one single item, I forgot to go shopping at all and remembered just because a colleague was going to, so I went there and bought the wrong thing and had to go back in the evening. So it seems I am doing much better at exercises than at real life. I did very poorly at the exercise for planning and organization, which might explain this too. But I know that ADHD can also cause hyperfocusing on some activities that are interesting and lack of focus on all the others, so not lack of focus on everything. And doing a test in a doctor's office, with no distraction, knowing it is just for a few minutes is very different from real life circumstances. My daily problems are for real, I have coworkers who make fun of those memory problems, I try to write things down but I forget them even before I can take my phone to type them. So I thought I should monitor my daily memory problems, so that I could tell them everything that happened to me during a regular day, so that they see that despite my good results I do have some problem that still needs to be identified. I'm saying all this to say that monitoring my memory problems was very interesting. I could write some things after the fact, with no problem. But as I went for shopping that evening, I realized that every thirty seconds I had to actively try to remember what I was shopping for, and I thought I should write these mental processes and started monitoring them. So then I was trying to remember what I was shopping for, and at the same time trying to remember each of these mental processes and it just got really bad, every time I tried to remember something I forgot another, and then went back to it and then blanked, and could not remember any of the things for 10 seconds, then started to write some stuff and had to stop because I could hear someone speaking and it was distracting.
So, all of this to say that I think I definitely have some concentration and memory problems, but I found that monitoring them, although temporarily very useful, made it even worse. Sometimes it feels like I automatically think I should be able to do everything I already do with my mind, plus monitoring it all at no additional cost. But I don't have a second mind to monitor what the first one is doing, I am doing it all with a single mind. It's like that drawing where you see someone's head and behind their eyes there is a guy sitting on a chair looking through the eyes. It feels like DPDR is making me be someone else inside my head so that I can monitor everything and be in control, as if I should be able to step out of my mind to watch it. Part of me wishes that this mind I am trying to control would stay exactly the same as I am observing it, so that I can understand it and control it. But "I" and the monitoring it wants to do are processes generated by the same mind and it costs more energy. This is even more work, and while I am focusing on all of that it's also normal I can't focus on my shopping list. My first topic of attention is my own mind and those problems, it's not my shopping list.
So I am really not saying that this is all there is to the problem, and it doesn't mean that just by trying to not monitor, every problem is going to be solved. Just that to some degree, in my case it seems to be part of the problem, and also that it is something normal that the brain functions worse as a result. I mean, monitoring and monitoring the monitoring takes energy, and it makes sense this makes me dumber than someone who is only focusing on their one-item shopping list and have no awareness of their mental processes. So for this part it's not that I am becoming crazy, my brain is just normal for that aspect.
These are my two cents. I don't know if you identify with this. Personally I feel that overthinking is a big part of my problem, and I cannot just stop overthinking just through wishful thinking, I think there is more than this to this problem. Some people say that acceptance of DPDR should solve DPDR, and while it could be true for some (or a lot of) people, I don't think it works for me, because I have not focused on DPDR for many years and it didn't help me. But I did keep overthinking about many other things, many other problems, self-help problems, societal problems, relationship problems, being lost in fantasies, talking to myself,... So if monitoring DPDR is their only problem, then to stop doing this might help them, but for me I think that the problem is a more general one.