How many of you — diagnosed or not — have blamed ADD or ADHD for some of your behavior?
I know I have.
So many people in my age group, especially women and girls, went undiagnosed as kids. Our male counterparts were often the ones outwardly expressing their distractions — bouncing off walls, unable to sit still, impossible to ignore. Girls like me were quieter about it. My distraction looked like daydreaming. Staring out the classroom window, most likely thinking about horses and desperately wanting to be outside.
We weren’t disruptive. We were just… elsewhere.
A Walk That Changed How I See This
A conversation I had with my partner a few weeks ago hasn’t left me.
We were out on one of our evening walks — quiet streets, most of the world winding down. I now love walking in the dark. There’s something about it that I find deeply peaceful.
I made an offhand joke: “Oh, there’s my ADD again!”
He paused and gently asked what I meant when I said things like that.
I launched into my explanation of my ping-pong mind. How I can bounce between five completely different thoughts while trying to check a single email. How one thing leads to another leads to another until I’ve lost the thread entirely.
And then he said something that stopped me.
He pointed to three things: time, evolution, and technology.
How the Pace of Information Has Transformed Human Life
Think about what life looked like in 1526 — 500 years ago. The vast majority of people lived within a few miles of where they were born and would die. Global literacy rates hovered around 10–15%. News traveled by foot or horseback and arrived weeks or months after an event occurred. The pace of information a person encountered in an entire lifetime would barely fill a single morning of scrolling today.
Move forward to 1776 — 250 years ago. Literacy was growing, particularly in America. The printing press had transformed access to ideas, and newspapers were becoming more common. But the world was still overwhelmingly local. Most people lived and died within the same community. The stimulation of a single day was incomparable to what we now absorb before breakfast.
And now — 2026.
We are confronted with more information before noon than our ancestors encountered in months. Notifications, news cycles, social media, emails, texts, podcasts, advertisements — all competing for the same finite bandwidth of our very human, very ancient brains.
Why Overstimulation and the Human Brain Are on a Collision Course
Here’s the thing: our bodies and brains haven’t caught up to the pace of modern life.
We are still, neurologically speaking, mostly wired for that older, slower world. The human nervous system evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to track predators, tend relationships, read weather patterns, and navigate a relatively contained physical environment.
It was not designed for this.
No wonder so many of us feel scattered, overwhelmed, and unable to focus. No wonder ADHD diagnoses in children are rising at alarming rates. The collision between overstimulation and the human brain is not a personal failing — it is a structural mismatch between ancient neurology and a modern world that moves faster than human biology was ever meant to keep up with.
Some people adapt more easily. But if you feel distracted, overstimulated, and perpetually behind — there is nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. You’re human.
What if we gave ourselves a little grace around that?
The Missing Piece: Our Disconnection from the Earth
We are now more disconnected from the natural world than any human culture that came before us. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are also the most overwhelmed, the most distracted, the most overstimulated.
Nature doesn’t move at the pace of a news cycle. The earth doesn’t send notifications. And when we return to it — even briefly — something in us exhales.
The relationship between overstimulation and the human brain may not have a perfect solution, but it does have an antidote available to all of us, right now: slowing down enough to remember what we actually are.
A Few Questions to Sit With
In what ways can you find pockets of time to slow down and honor your true nature?
What would it look like to reconnect to the earth — even in small, ordinary ways?
And what might shift in you if you stopped calling it a disorder, and started calling it what it actually is: a very human response to an inhuman pace of life?
