Anxiety Traps, ADHD, Trust, Intuition and Escaping Duality

Anxious people fall into repeating traps that keep them stuck in internal conflict. One part of us wants life to be different; another part generates doubt, fear and self-sabotage. The result is exhausting duality. This video looks at some of those traps, explores how ADHD-type wiring often sits underneath the anxiety, and offers practical ways to reduce the conflict so more of your natural capacity can come through.

A simple biological trap first

Hyperglycemia (excessively high blood glucose) can produce symptoms that feel almost identical to anxiety or depression: fatigue, restlessness, tingles, itchy skin, heart palpitations, tremors, confusion, inflammation, forgetfulness and more. It is common in people whose diets are high in sugar and carbohydrates, and alcohol often makes it worse. If that describes your eating pattern, it is worth experimenting with a one-month reduction in sugar, carbs and alcohol simply to see what happens. When I follow a lower-carb, higher-fat approach my energy improves, cravings drop within a week, and after a few weeks my thinking feels clearer. The brain can run on glucose, yet it evolved primarily to use fats. Trying this for a month costs little and may remove a hidden physical driver of symptoms you have been attributing only to “anxiety.” Watch how your mind may try to talk you out of even testing it. Acting in the face of that internal sabotage is itself useful training.

The demand for certainty

A deeper trap is the demand for certainty. Anxiety thrives on doubt and treats certainty as the only acceptable state. Yet most of life cannot be made certain in advance. The attempt to eliminate all doubt keeps the nervous system on high alert and prevents quieter signals from being heard.

ADHD as wiring, not a disorder

For some of you, another important perspective is the labels ADD or ADHD, said to affect around 11% of the population. I am not a specialist, but I have worked with many anxious people who have this type of brain, and I want to share how I see it.

Rather than viewing it as a disorder, I see it as part of the brain’s wiring and core personality. In the language I use, these people sit clearly in the nomad group: rich imaginations, follow their emotions, hate boredom, lose interest easily, daydream, love to play, and are mentally creative. They can be forgetful, late, and disruptive of other people’s plans through spontaneity and losing things. At the same time they are often funny, free, adventurous, animated, creative, and live fully in the present — qualities I find genuinely lovely.

Very loosely, more boys show the hyperactive side while girls are more often distracted and lost in imagination (what used to be called ADD). They are starters rather than finishers, have strong FOMO, can think on their feet, love change, and hate being controlled by rules or other people.

They usually do not have anxiety or OCD. When they do, it is nearly always because their nomadic nature was repressed in childhood by school or parents who forced them to comply and become more settler-like. They end up believing they should be friendly and dutiful, while underneath is a strong desire for freedom and expression. That conflict is exhausting and often produces anxiety plus the Pure-O style of OCD — more intrusive thoughts than visible compulsions.

One documentary I watched suggested that in early human evolution this personality type played a valuable role. These were the people confident and adventurous enough to leave the main group, explore new territory, think on their feet when danger appeared, and make contact with other tribes. Many modern entrepreneurs, performers, artists, explorers, writers and activists have the same wiring. They are often happiest when they channel that energy into subjects they feel passionate about, in ways that suit them rather than conventional expectations.

So please do not let the labels hold you back. These can be superpowers that relatively few people possess. Stepping into the truth of who you are usually means dropping some of the forced settler niceness, becoming a little more honest about what you actually want, reducing the need for everyone to like you, challenging a few unnecessary rules, and starting to follow your emotions rather than only the logic of the conditioned mind. The brain is not broken; it is wired differently. The work is to align identity more with the nomadic side, learn ways to switch off the constant external radar so focus can stay on one task when needed, and rebuild any self-esteem damaged by years of being told off for not fitting in. Meditation is hard for this wiring but worth the effort. Martial arts or other disciplined physical practices can help train single-pointed attention. Letting the playful side out — choir, amateur dramatics, a band, creative projects — is often key.

Intuition beneath the noise

Intuition is the ability to know something without analytical reasoning. It is usually felt as a subtle instinctive feeling or response from the body. At the simplest level, your hand rises to protect your face before you have time to think. At a more complex level you may meet someone and simply feel they are not to be trusted.

We are emotional creatures who learned to think. Anxious people often live the other way round — as thinking creatures trying to control their emotions. That is exhausting and uncalibrates the original emotional intuition that sits beneath thought. Long-term anxiety leaves the amygdala hypersensitive, the mind full of exaggerated worry, and the body flooded with adrenaline.

Intuition is not the stream of thoughts. Those are mostly unconscious programmes firing. Your intuition may quietly know the door is locked while the mind insists on checking it another twenty times. It seems to reside deeper, as an energetic connection to the environment. Everything is energy; nature knows what to do; animals know what to do; we are part of the same system. The signal is subtle, so it is much easier to notice when the mind is quieter and the body calmer. That is why good ideas often appear in the shower, on a walk, during meditation, or just before sleep.

I try to use intuition as the primary sense and the thinking mind as secondary support. The work is to get beneath the stories and the fear. Meditation, creativity, time in nature, movement, and deliberately acting from feeling more often than from conditioned thought all help.

Escaping the duality

The core of the video is learning to notice the anxious part without letting it run everything. The part of you that wants a different life is equally real. When we stop treating every anxious thought as urgent truth, space opens for clearer decisions and for the quieter knowing underneath. Trust and intuition grow in that space — not as magic, but as the natural result of repeatedly choosing actions aligned with the life we actually want, even while the mind is still protesting.

A practical next step is to begin designing a simple decision-making framework and importance hierarchy so that, when doubt arises, you have something clearer than the anxious mind to refer to. That work continues in the following videos.

The full video explores all of this in more detail.