The Brilliantly Chaotic Brain
I have been described as many things over the years.
Scattered. Distracted. A bit random. “Can you just get to the point?” remains a personal favourite, usually delivered by someone whose patience ran out somewhere around the third tangent.
And, in fairness, I can kinda see their point.
If you ask me a simple question, you’d better have a cup of tea prepped and be ready to pull up a chair. Because there is every chance I’ll start in Hampshire, take a brief detour through a childhood memory from 1987, somehow involve a conversation I had with a client last week, and then arrive triumphantly at the answer twenty minutes later as though anything less than that level of detail would be a crime. And I make no apology for that, as to me it makes perfect sense.
It might look chaotic from the outside, but my brain isn’t randomly pin-balling off the bumpers, for the sheer sake of it. It’s connecting things. Following threads. Spotting patterns. Making links. The route may be unconventional, but I usually arrive exactly where I intended to go. It just doesn’t always travel by the roads other people were expecting.
This is the thing I wish more people understood about neurodivergent thinking. What can get labelled as scattered, unfocused or chaotic isn’t a dysfunction. It’s a completely different but magnificent operating system doing its thing. One that happens to be running several tabs, three side quests, a background process and an entirely separate investigation at the same time. Which sounds ridiculous until that same brain solves a problem everyone else has been staring at for three weeks.
The scenic route is still a route
Most people are taught that thinking should (don’t we hate that word?) be linear. Step one. Step two. Step three. Nice and neat. Predictable. Reassuring. The sort of thinking that owns a sensible filing cabinet and knows exactly where its passport is.
Unfortunately, many ND brains did not receive that particular software patch.
Our thoughts tend to arrive more like a spider’s web than a straight line. One idea triggers another. A conversation about marketing reminds us of a documentary we watched three years ago, which somehow links to a client problem, which unexpectedly sparks a completely different business idea. From the outside, it can look like we’ve wandered off topic entirely. Internally, however, there is usually a very logical chain of connections taking place at alarming speed.
The challenge is that we forget to explain the twenty-seven invisible steps in the middle. Or maybe we don’t feel the need to.
So whilst everyone else is wondering how we got from A to M, we’re already halfway to T. Then we become mildly frustrated because nobody else seems to be keeping up. Which is deeply unfair, given that we’ve shared approximately 3% of our working out.
The irony is that many of the same people who find this style of thinking confusing are also the people who later marvel at the solution it produces.
Creativity is messy!
Who ever thought that ‘creative’ should be organised? Surely by its very definition it needs to be full of tangents, and ‘emergency stop’ moments?
As Stu says,”creativity is the sat nav of the brain. Truly creative thinking never welds itself to the ego or the concept of “right”. It takes various things “on advice” but it is free to fly to wherever it needs to and then backwards engineering the through line.”
Brilliant ideas are brilliant because they more often than not are non-conformist. They aren’t sitting in their sensible armchair, smoothing out their beige suit trousers, whilst pondering whether to opt for a plain digestive, or a custard cream.
No. They’re the sort of ideas that screech into your brain at 3am, and have you frantically reaching for a notebook before they eject themselves from your brain forever. The ‘thought magicians’ of the idea world, that make you both flinch and laugh at the same time.
Personally, my best ideas have arrived in the oddest of moments. In the shower, whilst driving, halfway through another task, and occasionally whilst trying very hard to think about something else entirely. My phone ‘notes’ app is a smorgasbord of wild brain dumps, including linkedin post ideas, future hobby goals and random numbers that seemed vital at the time, but now read like coded messages from a previous version of myself. I found one the other day that simply read 4690. Is that the code to my eternal happiness? Who knows…
And yet, hidden amongst the chaos, there is always something inspiring.
The problem is that we’ve spent years being told that good thinking should look tidy. So when our process looks sprawling and slightly feral, we assume we’re doing it wrong. But creativity has never really cared about being neat. It wanders. It explores. It takes the scenic route. And more often than not, that’s where the interesting stuff lives.
The bit where your brain is galloping ahead
One of the things I’ve noticed about many neurodivergent people is how quickly their brains can move. Especially if they are sponsored by ADHD. And I say this with no judgement, being the proud owner of one of these magnificent brain beasts myself!
This all sounds wonderful until you’re trying to sleep. Or relax. Or watch a film without simultaneously redesigning your website, solving a client problem, planning next year’s content calendar and wondering whether penguins have knees.
But that same speed can be incredibly useful.
The ability to connect ideas rapidly means we often spot opportunities early. We notice risks before they become obvious. We see patterns emerging before everyone else has even realised there’s a pattern to look for.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a strong feeling that something wasn’t quite right, only to discover a few weeks later that my brain had already spotted something my conscious mind hadn’t fully processed yet.
What often gets dismissed as overthinking is sometimes pattern recognition running ahead of the pack. Not always, of course. Sometimes it’s just anxiety wearing a fake moustache and pretending to be intuition. But not always.
Too many ideas isn’t the problem
I have never really understood why “having too many ideas” gets treated like a character flaw. Admittedly, it can make life slightly chaotic. But I’d still rather have too many ideas than none at all.
The problem seems to be more that these ideas all arrive with the confidence of drunk Ron at your local boozer, 5 pints of Stella in and telling you how he’d sort out the economy.
These over enthusiastic ideas are why some of us end up with six unfinished projects, three domain names, a half-written book, a business idea involving crochet, and a cupboard full of craft supplies we were definitely going to use.
Eventually, I realised the problem wasn’t having too many ideas. It was trying to store all of them in my head at the same time. But if you are able to create a home for these magnificent specimens. Somewhere safe where they could exist without demanding immediate action, like a notebook (do not take inspo from my notebook app!) Then the chaos just becomes a list of cool things you can come back to.
Because not every idea needs doing today.Some ideas just need somewhere to wait.
A shout out to the pattern-spotting genius
One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking came when I stopped viewing this style of thinking as something I needed to fix. Because in business, it’s often incredibly valuable.
Many ND business owners are exceptional pattern spotters. We notice tiny shifts in behaviour. Small inconsistencies. Things that don’t quite add up. We connect information from completely different places and somehow arrive at useful conclusions before we’ve fully worked out how we got there.
The funny thing is that these strengths rarely feel impressive from the inside. They just feel normal. Like surely everyone else is seeing the same thing.
They’re not.
What feels obvious to you is often the result of hundreds of tiny observations being quietly filed away in the background. Your brain has been collecting clues long before you’ve consciously realised it was solving a problem.
Then everyone acts surprised when you’re right…..Again.
When the chaos starts driving the bus
Now, before we all disappear into a dopamine-fuelled celebration of creative brilliance, there is a small caveat.
Chaos is wonderful right up until it isn’t.
Because whilst creative thinking creates possibilities, it can also create overwhelm. Every idea feels exciting. Every opportunity feels interesting. Every project feels like it could be the thing.
And before you know it, you’ve agreed to launch something new, redesign your website, start a newsletter, learn crochet, volunteer for a committee and somehow become responsible for organising the Christmas party.
The truth is that brilliance still needs boundaries.Not because there’s anything wrong with having lots of ideas, but because attention remains a finite resource. At some point, every opportunity cannot be the priority. Every exciting possibility cannot happen simultaneously. Trust me. I’ve checked.
Structure isn’t a fun killer
I think structure gets terrible press in neurodivergent circles.The moment someone mentions planning, systems or organisation, half the room starts looking for the nearest exit (usually the ADHD half). But good structure isn’t there to suppress creativity. It’s there to protect it.
The right amount of structure creates a container. It gives your ideas somewhere to land. It stops your best thinking disappearing into the void because something newer and shinier turned up five minutes later.
It doesn’t have to be rigid or complicated. But some boundaries around things such as how many projects you can have on the go can be a real gamechanger. Because structure isn’t meant as a cage. It’s the thing that stops all your brilliant ideas escaping before they’ve had a chance to become something useful.
One more time for those at the back. You’re not broken!
The older I get, the more I believe that half the things we were criticised for as children were actually strengths that nobody knew what to do with.
Too many questions.
Too many ideas.
Talking too much.
Daydreaming. (actually it’s blue sky thinking!)
Being “easily distracted”.
And yet they’re some of the same traits that show up again and again in entrepreneurs, creatives, innovators and problem-solvers. The people who challenge assumptions and constraints. Spot opportunities, test what’s needed and what’s excess baggage. Connect dots that everyone else missed.
I think the issue was never that our brains worked differently, but that we spent years comparing them to systems that were designed for a completely different style of thinking.
The challenge isn’t becoming less chaotic. It’s learning how to build a life that gives that chaos somewhere useful to go. Because the people changing things have rarely been the people thinking exactly like everybody else.
Perhaps the problem was never the chaos.
Perhaps the problem was being taught to see it as one.
AMEN!