Coping With a Racing ADHD Brain

I've mentioned it here before, and I'm far from the first person to describe it this way, but having an ADHD brain is a lot like having a Ferrari engine with the brakes of a bicycle that doesn't steer particularly well.

That's how my brain has operated for as long as I can remember.

I always knew my mind ran a little faster than most. What I didn't know — for decades — was just how fast, or why. That answer didn't arrive until I got my ADHD diagnosis in my fifties, and suddenly a whole lifetime of moments started making sense.

My First Attempt at Solving the Problem

I don't remember exactly how old I was when this happened, but I was probably somewhere between eight and ten years old. For the sake of the story, let's say I was nine.

I had an incredibly difficult time sleeping as a child because I simply couldn't get my brain to shut off. So, like any resourceful nine-year-old, I asked my mother to buy me sleeping pills.

Being a responsible parent, she informed me that nine-year-olds don't take sleeping pills. (For what it's worth, once I was old enough to buy them as an adult, it turned out they didn't work for me anyway.)

At the time, it never occurred to me that not being able to shut my brain off was anything other than normal.

The Great Viking Cheese-Making Incident

Years later, while dating the woman who'd eventually become my wife, she'd regularly get frustrated with me because I had a habit of changing subjects quickly and dramatically.

We could be talking about something completely ordinary, like the weekend weather, and I'd suddenly be talking about the cheese-making habits of early Vikings. (To be clear — that's not a literal memory. It's just the kind of wildly unrelated tangent my brain regularly created without warning.)

She was, understandably, confused. More than once she genuinely wondered if I'd had some kind of medical episode, because the leap made zero sense from where she was sitting.

When asked to explain, I could calmly and precisely describe the 10–15 mental steps I'd taken in about two seconds while she was talking — while still managing to comprehend what she'd said — and explain how I had, very logically, arrived at this completely new path of conversation. The jump wasn't completely random.

At least, not to me.

The Cost of a Racing Mind

By now, you might be recognizing some of this in yourself. Or maybe you're expecting me to eventually reveal the "trick" — the strategy that finally slows an overactive ADHD brain down to a manageable speed.

Truth is... I don't have one.

My mind still races. Thoughts show up constantly, at full speed, with no warning. Sometimes one of them is genuinely brilliant — the kind that deserves real attention, real development. I'll start shaping it, building it out, following it somewhere interesting.

And then three or four new thoughts crash into it at once, and the original idea starts drifting out of reach.

And… it's gone.

That, to me, is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD. It's not a shortage of ideas — it's an overwhelming surplus of them. And please don't mistake this for bragging — it's definitely a case of quantity of thoughts over quality.

Books get started and never finished. Projects get abandoned halfway. Genuinely good creative thoughts disappear before they ever get the chance to become anything. And on the harder days, your own mind gets so loud that it's genuinely difficult to figure out which thought even deserves your attention in the first place.

Finding a Place for Those Thoughts to Land

I do have one thing that's worked for me — for me specifically, not necessarily for you — and that distinction matters.

Building and maintaining this project has turned out to be genuinely therapeutic, in a way I didn't see coming when I started it.

If you know my story, you know the idea behind Conquest Mindset came from a handful of different ideas that had been rattling around in my head for a long time, plus some inspiration from the book Life Is Good. Eventually I stopped thinking about it and committed to doing it.

I expected the project to satisfy a few needs I already knew I had. What I didn't expect was that it would give my constantly racing brain something it had never really had before: direction.

The thoughts still move just as fast as they always have. They just have somewhere to go now.

Find Your Version of Conquest Mindset

To be clear, this isn't some perfect fix.

I still procrastinate more than I'd like to admit. I still pick about 30 books I'm interested in reading immediately, fully intend to start reading them, and then somehow end up landscaping instead. I still land on strange little observations out of nowhere — like the fact that if you take one more and one less than any squared number and multiply them together, you always land exactly one below the original square. (8 × 8 = 64. But 7 × 9 = 63. See? My brain just does that sometimes.)

What's different is that running a project like this demands consistency — social media content, blog writing, product design, and a long list of behind-the-scenes work that never really stops. All of it helps improve the site — at least I hope it does. But none of that is actually the biggest win.

The greatest benefit is that I've finally found something that allows me to direct that mental energy toward something creative and constructive.

If you've got a mind like the one I've just described, here's the only suggestion I've really got: find your own version of Conquest Mindset. It doesn't have to look anything like mine.

Maybe it's finally learning that musical instrument. Maybe it's throwing yourself all the way into a hobby you've been circling for years. Maybe it’s learning a new set of skills to improve yourself. Maybe it's volunteering somewhere that actually matters to you. Maybe it's building a small side business out of an idea you can't stop thinking about.

I can't tell you what your version looks like. Only you know that.

But if your brain refuses to stop racing, maybe the goal was never to make it stop in the first place.

Maybe the goal is to give it somewhere worth going.

That's what I found.

Mind Over Limits.