If Hyperactivity could speak it'd beg us to stop trying to slow it down

Hyperactivity.

It’s a word most historically associated with boys and with physical movement. Climbing the walls, erratic behaviours, swinging on chairs, from the chandeliers…

This is naught but a stereotype, based on an era that understood everything through behavioural paradigms. If we couldn’t see it we didn’t understand it, until neuroscience began to fill in the gaps.

Thankfully as technology has increased, and conceptual understandings of the brain/body/nervous system have expanded, hyperactivity is having it’s day! We are finally beginning to understand it better.

And it’s about time too, because word on the street is that hyperactivity is *very exhausted* from all of this trying to slow it down….

There are many reason why humans experience hyperactivity. We all relate to the sensation, and the antsy way we jiggle when it hangs around. But we don’t all identify as hyperactive.

Hyperactivity is a physiological state that all humans experience when our brain is hyper stimulated, when our nervous system is aroused, when our body is detecting unusual input. This is a fact.

It’s not because we had too much sugar, or are too excited, or need to work on our behaviours or any other variation of how hyperactivity used to be viewed. (Triggers can lead to hyperactive states of course, but they aren’t the ‘problem’.)

Hyperactivity, like anxiety, is something every single human will experience in varying rates, for various reasons, throughout our entire lives. Which leads to a few obvious questions…

• why are some people called hyperactive and others aren’t?

• why is hyperactivity demonised in some and not in others? (or demonised at all!)

• why is hyperactivity almost always used in reference to a perceived disorder?

And the number 1 most burning question of all…

• Why are we always trying to slow hyperactivity down????