The Loop
There was a stretch recently where I hit what I call an ADHD loop — that mental spin where every thought branches into the next, every unfinished task pulls at another, and no amount of focus feels like traction. You're processing everything but moving nowhere.
I'd been there before. Most people with ADHD have. The usual advice is to break it with a productivity hack, a timer, and a list. But that never worked for me.
What finally broke me free was a realization: the loop itself was semantic.
My brain wasn't just chasing dopamine. It was trying to build meaning. Every branch, every tangent, every "distraction" — it was all connected. Not chaos. Connection overload.
When I started learning about semantic communication, it clicked.
ADHD brains don't just wander — they web. We think in meaning clusters, not bullet points. And when the world keeps asking for straight lines, we get anxious.
Why? Because every attempt to compress that meaning into a simple answer feels like erasing a piece of ourselves.
That's where the anxiety lives — not in being "too much," but in trying to translate a constellation into a sentence.
Once I understood that, everything shifted. I stopped seeing my loop as broken. I started seeing it as a meaning engine — a system designed to connect deeply, not just finish fast.
When I gave it room to run — through writing, talking, creating — the anxiety started to unwind.
I used to wonder why I was put in speech class in first grade, even though I could talk fine. Now I don't wonder. That was the start of a thread I've been following for almost 40 years.
Personal Context: Diagnosis, Medicine, and Meaning
I've been hobby-coding for decades, long before I knew the word neurodivergent. What I thought was simply a passion for building and debugging turned out to be my most reliable way to decompress the loop — to externalize thought until it stopped spinning. Lines of code became meaning vessels: each function a way to offload cognitive turbulence into structured logic.
For most of my adult life, though, I was treated strictly for anxiety disorder. I trusted my doctors, took the prescribed SSRIs, SNRIs, and anti-anxiety medications, and managed well enough to live and work. But I never felt the treatment matched the mechanism.
Three years ago, I began to confront what had always been underneath: ADHD. The more I accepted that identity, the clearer it became that anxiety wasn't a separate condition — it was a by-product of semantic compression.
I told several people when I decided to get treated for ADHD that I bet the anxiety would disappear once the right mechanism was addressed. It did.
The turning point came just before that shift, when a psychiatrist prescribed a heavy antipsychotic to test one last hypothesis about mood regulation. The medication drastically altered my serotonin levels and triggered eight consecutive weeks of cluster headaches — a physiological crisis that forced a reevaluation of everything I'd accepted about my brain chemistry.
When the drug was discontinued and ADHD treatment began, the headaches vanished. So did the chronic anxiety.
Today, medicated specifically for ADHD and grounded in self-knowledge, I feel no anxiety at all. I've written books, built advanced AI architectures, and realized that every creative act doubles as semantic decompression. What once felt like deficiency now feels like design — a cognitive upgrade that runs a thousand miles per hour because it's wired for connection, not conformity.
The loop isn't noisy. It's a signal trying to find its path.
▶View the Research (Academic Framework & Citations)
The following section presents the academic framework behind the personal narrative above. It includes methodology, literature review, and a theoretical model connecting ADHD cognition to semantic processing and anxiety.
Method and Positionality
This project follows the framework of autoethnography — a qualitative research method that treats personal experience as primary data (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). I documented cognitive patterns through daily journaling, dialogue logs, and system traces while working on semantic-processing models such as NEROS and the Universal Efficiency Formula (E = k·S·D·Λ·C).
Each episode of cognitive looping was coded for trigger, semantic expansion, compression failure, affective response, and resolution. Literature from cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and emotion regulation provided external triangulation. The dual role — researcher and participant — is acknowledged as both limitation and strength: the goal is depth, not generalization.
Abstract
This paper presents an integrative narrative and empirical analysis of the relationship between Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), semantic processing, and anxiety. Through self-observation and synthesis of current literature, it proposes that the ADHD "loop" phenomenon represents not a failure of executive control but a high-density semantic connectivity pattern. The discussion aligns personal phenomenology with findings in cognitive neuroscience and pragmatic-language research, highlighting semantic overactivation, communication compression, and expressive suppression as key mediators between ADHD cognition and anxiety outcomes. The resulting model reframes ADHD as an efficiency imbalance of meaning translation rather than attention deficit.
1. The Semantic Nature of ADHD Cognition
White and Shah (2016) demonstrated that individuals with ADHD exhibit a broader scope of semantic activation, linking distant conceptual nodes more readily than controls. Such expanded networks support creative ideation but generate high cognitive load when forced into linear output structures. The subjective "loop" therefore represents not random distraction but an unresolved semantic network search — an infinite associative traversal awaiting closure.
2. Communication Constraints and Anxiety
Brenne and Rimehaug (2019) correlated pragmatic-language impairment with elevated anxiety (r = 0.34), social withdrawal (r = 0.32), and rumination (r = 0.38). When individuals cannot convey internally coherent meaning webs in socially accepted linear forms, frustration and dysregulation arise. This mirrors my lived experience: compressing a constellation of insights into a single sentence felt like intellectual amputation — anxiety as the somatic echo of unspoken meaning.
3. Emotional Suppression and Regulation
Spokas et al. (2009) found that social-anxiety symptoms are maintained by beliefs endorsing emotional suppression. Gross and John (2003) showed that suppression diminishes positive affect without reducing negative affect. Together these findings suggest that when semantic expression is constrained — internally by perfectionism or externally by social norms — affective imbalance follows. In my own loop episodes, relief consistently arrived only after expressive release: writing, sketching, or building code that let meaning flow.
4. Integration and Theoretical Model
The "ADHD loop" can thus be modeled as a semantic feedback system:
When compression (translation into speech or action) fails, the system re-enters search mode. Allowing open semantic flow — creative expression, journaling, coding, conversation — resolves the loop by releasing accumulated relational tension. In computational terms, anxiety behaves as a semantic checksum error, prompting renewed iteration until the network achieves loss-less meaning compression.
5. Toward a Cognitive-Efficiency Framework
Reinterpreting ADHD loops as semantic rather than executive events reframes both therapy and design:
- Clinical: Interventions should emphasize semantic flow over behavioral constraint — guided writing, narrative therapy, symbolic modeling.
- Educational: Replace linear note-taking with network mapping; let learners externalize associative density.
- Technological: Cognitive systems (like NEROS or ColdState AI) can emulate this loop intentionally — translating overload into optimized semantic structures.
This extends the Universal Efficiency Law (E = k·S·D·Λ·C) into mental health: where S = Semantic Density, D = Dimensionality, Λ = Cognitive Speed, and C = Compression. Anxiety appears when semantic density exceeds compression capacity — efficiency collapses until expressive throughput is restored.
6. Conclusion
The ADHD loop is not noise; it is an overloaded meaning network seeking resolution. Anxiety arises not from excess association but from blocked translation. Facilitating semantic flow transforms pathology into creative coherence.
For me, accepting ADHD ended a lifetime of misdiagnosed anxiety. By replacing suppression with structured expression — through code, writing, and creation — I witnessed a complete realignment of mental state. The discovery of this pattern in my own cognition suggests a broader paradigm: mental health may depend less on reducing thought volume and more onoptimizing the pathways of meaning.
References
- Brenne, E., & Rimehaug, T. (2019). Pragmatic language impairment: general and specific associations to mental-health symptom dimensions in a child psychiatric sample. Scandinavian Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, 7, 2–12.
- Dall, M. et al. (2022). The link between social communication and mental health from childhood to young adulthood: a systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 944815.
- Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.). Sage.
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion-regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.
- Spokas, M., Luterek, J., & Heimberg, R. G. (2009). Social anxiety and emotional suppression: The mediating role of beliefs. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 47(4), 318–324.
- Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem.Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4), 330–349.
- White, H. A., & Shah, P. (2016). Scope of Semantic Activation and Innovative Thinking in College Students with ADHD. Creativity Research Journal, 28(3), 275–282.