What is an emotional event stream?
An event steam is like you standing in a river picking up paper boats, with each one of them telling you what emotion and intensity you will experience.
We experience 1000s of events an hour. And 100,000s a day. Each event causes an ADHDrs emotional center to switch from like to dislike, positive to negative, happy to sad. And, with varying intensities. From happy to euphoric, or sad to upset to raging maniac.
Somewhere in there is evil genius hell bent on revenge with a freeze gun and spoon. Why, you ask? Because I think there should be a cross over movie of Robin Hood, Prof Snape and Disposable Me!
Anyway ... 🤣🤣🤣
External events and internal events change our emotional state per event. The more we can recognize this, the easier it becomes to manage ADHD.
Internal events are thoughts, memories, inner monologue, and non-conscious sensory input, listed in another post.
As mentioned, the way to visualize this is as standing in a stream w boats coming to you. I started with a random set of emotions and their intensity. Now each boat has a task, a thought, a memory, or part of a dialogue. You get to choose your emotional response and intensity.
The other fun fact w looking at the event stream in this perspective is 2 fold. 1) you can let events pass you by. 2) you can look upstream at events that have yet to reach you. 3) we can start seeing patterns in the event stream.
This is where another post comes in handy, w future events. Now you can start planning for them, using 1 of 4 techniques ... 1) make the event positive. 2) make the event a challenge. 3) find another way to manage the event. 4) ask a friend for help w the event.
The event stream will always have patterns. Or Loops. You will do one thing that feeds more events into the stream. Which feeds more and more. Most people call these tasks, habits, routines, projects, goals ... But, the idea is the same.
If you remove the sheets from your bed, you have to put clean sheets back on the bed before you sleep on it. And, the old sheets have to be placed into a hamper, washed, dried, folded, and eventually used again. These are events.
The idea of the event stream is not to see life as a series of random events, but to see it as a series of repeating events. Predictable events. And predictable groups are easier to manage. They are easier to create positive events.
The more positive events we have the easier life becomes. Because, when you have a positive event, it's like a small win. And a win makes us happy. And a happy ADHDr wants more wins.
More wins of the same thing, though, gets boring, so we want greater challenges. And, greater challenges, means bigger goals. Why, because we have confidence that we can run the same series of events and win again, and again, and again.
Consistency is a big issue in the ADHD community because we don't understand how the event stream affects us, or how to properly manage it. But, when we do, we can achieve great things.
