👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
How many tabs do you have open? 📱
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While scrolling on my phone last night, I counted 26 tabs / apps open and running the background. 26!!! Favorites include: my beloved astrology app; my YNAB (You Need a Budget) app that I swear by; recipes ambitiously bookmarked for “later”; and my clock app, where I set alarms to prepare me for the next alarm. (8:00am - soft wake up, 9:00am - seriously, wake up now.) It also made me reflect on the breadth and depth of our human attention span. 🌀 When attention has breadth, it visits different places and flows in different directions, shifting course and responding to whatever is most interesting / urgent / loud in the moment. (Like when you’re scrolling on your phone, get a notification, switch to another tab; then the doorbell rings, your dog barks, and you have to get up; then your oven timer goes off; and so on.) ⭕ When attention has depth, it burrows deeply into a single point of focus for a sustained period of time. (Like when you’re absorbed in a project or a really good conversation, and hours pass by that feel like minutes.) In our fast-paced world, a breadth of attention is necessary in order to keep up with everything (your to-do list, your notifications, your inbox, what’s happening in your personal life, what’s happening in the world). It seems to take intentional effort to enter a state of deep, sustained, uninterrupted attention — to close all the tabs in your brain except for just 1. I believe that our brains benefit from practicing both breadth and depth of attention — because both are needed, and both bring unique types of joy & knowledge. If you feel like you have 26 tabs open right now, I want to share some ways that I’m exploring depth of attention: 📚 reading books as a daily ritual (because the sensory experience of flipping through pages, and moving my eyes bilaterally across the page, slows down my nervous system & makes me feel more present) 🧠 not rushing to Google answers to questions that don’t require an immediate answer, but letting my brain ponder for a bit instead 📱 leaving my phone in the other room, and noticing where my attention goes when I don’t have a screen filled with endless entertainment in front of me 🧵 exploring new hobbies (like pottery and fiber arts), which require my full attention because I’m new at them and can’t just zone out or multi-task These are some ideas that helped my brain. Your brain might be similar, or different. So, why is this important? Because your attention is valuable, and you have the right to decide how to spend it. In a state of deep, sustained attention, you might notice that: ⭕ There’s more space between your thoughts. ⭕ It’s easier to listen to quiet messages from your nervous system (like calls for rest, which you might not hear if your attention is moving around quickly). ⭕ The information that you consume through your breadth of attention (like the news article you read earlier this week, or the text message that you’re still processing from this morning), is able to be integrated & understood more deeply. How do you want to spend your attention today? With care, P.S. Know someone who needs to hear this? Forward it along. New readers can subscribe here. P.P.S. If you’re interested in working together, I’d love to support you. 🌻 For folks who are overwhelmed & burnt out, but too busy for weekly therapy, I offer Nervous System Healing Intensives — three 90-minute sessions, using brain-body modalities (Brainspotting, IFS, EMDR) that go deeper than talk therapy & help you feel better, sooner.
Intensives are a type of short-term, accelerated therapy — for folks who prefer a hyper-focused approach to healing; who need longer than 50-min sessions to warm up & process deeply. 👉🏽 If you want to get an Intensive on the books, click here to book an intro call. I help highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults heal their nervous systems & connect with their authentic selves. 💗 Need a nervous system reset? —> Join me for a Calm Place meditation. |
Liz's Neurodivergent Letters
👉🏽 Subscribe for thoughtful, bite-sized emails — from Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist — on how to take care of your nervous system & understand your brain.
When do you feel most like yourself? 😹 When you’re laughing with friends over an inside joke? 📚 When your nose is buried in a book, making the hours pass by like minutes? 👐🏽 When you’re creating something beautiful/messy/tactile with your hands? 🗺️ When you’re at home? Or on the road? Or waiting at airports, the ultimate in-between space? What I find fascinating is that I could ask 1,000 people this same question, when do you feel most like yourself?, and I would hear 1,000 different answers....
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “nervous system regulation”? 🧘🏻♀️ Maybe you think about breathing techniques or mindfulness skills. 🍵 Or all the teas we’re told to drink, and supplements we’re encouraged to take. 🛁 Or bubble baths, self-care products, and spa appointments. All of the above are valid, and potentially extremely helpful, options for nervous system regulation. Different things work for different people. (I, for one, love my weighted pillow that smells like...
When I sit down to crochet (one of my favorite sensory-soothing activities), my cat always loves to join. The movement of the yarn riles her up, and she’ll swat at it or pounce at me from different angles to attack her prey — I mean, the yarn. 🧶 It’s actually super unhelpful for me — my process ends up looking like two stitches forward, one stitch back, as the yarn inevitably gets tangled by her ferocious attacks. But I don’t get mad, because it makes total sense to me why she does this....