Dear Cali Chica:

Not only is your apartment perfectly neat this morning (assuming you did make the bed and put things away this morning)- so is your post. Look at those nice paragraphs, what seems to me as perfect grammar, no typos, look at the punctuation- very “clean and tidy”.

“I have had trouble focusing on small things such as putting clothes away etc- my whole life… being able to do something very large quite easily, say write and submit an essay…  The more frenzied my brain is- the more frenzied my organization is.. allowing clothes to go unfolded in my drawers, and being frenzied about putting stuff away”-

– when the brain is agitated aka frenzied, overly excited, it doesn’t like to focus on detailed physical tasks such as folding clothes  before putting them away, or cleaning a kitchen counter when it requires moving items away first, then cleaning, then drying, then cleaning the items and placing them back.  The brain is too excited to stay in one step of a task before moving to the next. Each step of a physical task takes too long for the frenzied brain, it doesn’t have the patience to stay present for each one of the steps. It rushes through.

When you have a thought, it takes a tenth of a second to experience the thought before the brain moves to the next thought or image. On the other hand, it takes ten seconds to fold a shirt (I am guessing here, about # of seconds), the frenzied brain doesn’t have those ten seconds for the task.

The reason the essay  is easy is because it involves thoughts and typing that is congruent with the frenzied brain- it doesn’t take ten seconds between the typing of each letter, it takes a split of a second per letter.

This is why slow yoga and tai chi- especially tai chi (when the teacher is right)- is amazing, for the frenzied brain. Tai Chi is about slow, exact movements. Even the cleaning you did yesterday is an excellent exercise for the frenzied brain- one movement at a time and the brain remaining with each movement before going to the next.

The nature of the exercise to heal or re-establish that frenzied baseline is to intentionally force the brain to remain present with One Physical Movement/ Task at a Time before moving to the next.

And yes, I am having a good morning, drinking strong coffee. There is a little blue in the sky in front of me as I sit facing the deck.

anita