What is Addicted to Insight About?

 “Addicted to Insight”  is about understanding how a personality trait called “systemizing”  or “hyper-systemizing” affects so much of our lives. Our understanding of this trait is evolving and being studied in depth by neuroscientists and psychologists who focus on asperger’s and autism.

Being “addicted to learning” (or having such a strong drive to understand and learn that you actually get “high” from learning) has been found to have a BIOLOGICAL basis in your brain, nervous system, and in your endocrine systems.

Are you Addicted to Insight?

Some people are actually HARD WIRED to be pursue insight and the systemization of knowledge and understanding that it can affect their lives in many ways.  It can make you

• absent-minded about daily life.
• interested in things that most people find boring
• bored by small talk and things most people find interesting
• challenge other people’s version of the facts if they are not accurate
• ask more questions than other people are comfortable with
• easily distracted by interesting new ideas
• an idealist who really cares about things being “just so” which can make you seem like a control freak / perfectionist to others.

If any of these sound like you, welcome to the tribe!

This trait explains many of my own personality characteristics jsut as much as ADD does.  My hope is to gather up research and case studies to raise even greater awareness of how this trait affects our daily life and relationships even if you aren’t actually “diagnosed”. Many of us have this trait.  We might be called “idealist” “challengers” “seekers” “serious” “perpetual students” “philosophers” “non-conformists” or depending on other variables in your life and personality makeup, these traits may have gotten get you labeled as:  a geek, someone who “thinks too much”, is a “know it all”, stubborn, rigid, critical, too sensitive, perfectionist, procrastinator, chronically messy or disorganized, chronically late or neurotically punctual, impatient, a wordsmith, someone who doesn’t finish what you start and more.

I am so excited about helping people affected by this understand how this works and why people with these traits have been so maligned by pop psychology and often feel chronically misunderstood, by therapists,  teachers, spouses and even by others with the same traits.

But most of all, to help my tribe be less self-critical and more accepting and agile when things don’t go the way we expected or when we simply have to attend to daily life, but find it so challenging!.   There are ways to make it easier to live in when your personality traits are not as common as others. If you’d like to join this conversation with me, I’d love to hear your thoughts, reactions and experiences with the stuff I write about here.

Who knows?  Maybe someday it will become a book to help us and the people who love us better understand why we are this way and why we can’t just change ourselves.  Something will never be that easy for us like they are for most people…but we can accommodate our quirkiness, be ourselves and find freedom from the intensity of our minds.  : )

 Read My Addicted to Insight Blog Posts Here