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Concerned about mental "noise"


Ralph

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I am not sure if this is the right forum but since it has to do with concentration & distraction I thought this was the closest match. Does anyone know what this is called (is it a symptom, or just something everyone has to deal with), and/or what to do about it?

It seems like my concentration is mainly inhibited by having too much noise in my head. It's like trying to think in a crowded restaurant, or in front of one of those TV displays at a big box store when they are all playing different channels.

Since I've had it my whole life I never really thought of it as a big deal but when it interferes with daily activity, I start thinking that I could perform better if I knew how to handle this. I don't know what this is called though, which makes it hard to try and figure out.

Meditation has helped at times, but it takes about 24 hours of meditation (not consecutively, of course, but three days at 8hrs/day, 12 days at 2 hrs/day, etc) to get a couple hours of relief.

When it does calm down inside my head though I feel so much better that I become more motivated to pursue a solution. I guess I could join a monastery, but that celibacy:eek: requirement stops me dead in my tracks.:D If you know what this is called or have experienced it too, please let me know.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Ralph! Sorry no one has gotten back to you yet on your post. When you say mental noise, do you mean just a mix of different noises that are very distracting? To they match up at all with the noises in your environment at any given time (are you hyper sensitive in your head to noises going on around you)?

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Thanks for replying. This board can be slow at times.

To clarify I meant noise as in the opposite of signal, like multiple threads of thought going on at the same time. This is distinct from auditory noise. I find it difficult to tune into the mental work on the task at hand because of this interference. Part of this may be perceptions of external sights/sounds/etc. but usually more internal.

I don't know if that's normal or not, but on occasion I have successfully tuned out the irrelevant streams to focus on the task at hand. It is a tremendous relief compared to my day to day experience, which makes me wonder how to achieve such focus more often. At the same time, I obviously don't need to pursue this if it is within the range of normal performance which gives me a reason to try and rule it out sooner rather than later.

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  • 1 year later...

You may be experiencing that sense of multiple thoughts because the thoughts change so quickly. The best description I've heard is that its like jumping from A-G without anything in between. Tell me if this sounds similar to what you're experiencing. While trying to perform a task everything else in my life bombards me. It may not even be relevant stuff. But I'll be thinking, oh I need to do my laundry, last week when I had that conversation with so and so did they mean this or that, I'm hungry, I need to buy shampoo, oh god why did I say that, I really wanna travel, I need to do laundry. I've also thought of my thoughts as a web, and not linear as how most of our society functions. I think A,F,G,L,Z, and then back to A. And then it repeats. Each idea takes a turn, then a new idea, then back to an old idea and build on it more. Hyperactivity can refer to how quickly the brain processes, not just physical activity. Medication has helped me with this, but also I think being physically active, almost using up energy helps too. Meditation is a good method of really harnessing the mind too.

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Well I've gotten much better since getting on a better medication. But yeah my thoughts would be more like a web or in my case like a tree (one thing branching off into multiple different threads) but I would tend to lose the original thread and find myself wondering what the original problem I was trying to solve was supposed to be. Basically the mental equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why you were going into the room in the first place, which also happened to me quite often

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  • 3 years later...

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