Restless Leg Syndrome vs. Autistic Leg Stimming
Are you autistic and at times find you can’t keep your legs still while seated or in bed?
Why So Many Body Image Mental Health Influencers in Therapy?
Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find many body image and mental health influencers sharing stories of “healing journeys.”
Unconvinced Autistic’s 6 Questions About Rapid Prompt Method
I’m autistic and am disbelieving of the “rapid prompting method,” which is just another name for facilitated communication (long disproven by science).
Why Don’t People Want to Live Past 100?
When there’s news about someone dying at 112 or having a 108th birthday party, the comments roll in about the misery of living that long.
ADHD: Impulsivity, Distraction AND Innovative Thinking!
Ever notice how people with ADHD often come up with the wildest, most original ideas?
Scientists are starting to confirm what many already suspected — that ADHD’s “wandering mind” might actually be fueling creativity.
Before angrily ordering that distracted child to sit still and keep their hands quiet, maybe put some art supplies before him or her and see what happens!
Research presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) congress in Amsterdam found a clear link between ADHD, creativity and mind wandering — when your thoughts drift off on their own little adventure.
The study, led by Han Fang from Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, is the first to explain how ADHD and creativity are connected.
Fang says in the report that past research has possibly linked the wandering mind in ADHD to creative juices, but there’d been no investigation into whether there’s a direct connection.
To dig deeper, Fang’s team ran two separate studies — one in Europe and another in the UK — involving a total of 750 participants.
Some had ADHD and some didn’t. Studying two different groups allowed the researchers to cross-check the results and make sure the findings were solid, not just a coincidence.
When the Mind Wanders, Magic Happens
Everyone’s mind drifts sometimes — like when you realize you’ve been daydreaming in the middle of a meeting or zoning out while on a treadmill or stationary bike.
And unfortunately, daydreaming can also occur while driving.
But for people with ADHD, this kind of mental detour happens way more often.
The researchers wanted to know if that constant stream of thoughts might actually spark more creative ideas.
The team looked at how ADHD traits — like inattention, impulsivity and a tendency to switch focus quickly — interacted with imaginative thinking and mind wandering.
Not surprisingly, participants who had stronger ADHD traits also reported higher levels of mind wandering.
But not all wandering minds are the same. The report points out that there are actually two main kinds.
- Spontaneous mind wandering – when your thoughts drift without you realizing it, like spacing out mid-task, while showering or in between sets at the gym.
- Deliberate mind wandering – when you let your mind drift on purpose, on a more conscious level.
Both types can fire up ideas, but deliberate wandering — when you consciously give yourself permission to drift — might be especially powerful for visionary thinking.
Measuring Creativity
To measure creativity, researchers used standard tests — for example, asking people to come up with innovative uses for ordinary objects, like a paperclip or a brick.
The more original or flexible their ideas, the higher they scored on creativity.
Across both studies, people who had more ADHD traits also tended to score higher on creative achievement.
The researchers found that deliberate mind wandering played a big role — the more someone intentionally let their mind explore different thoughts, the more creative they were.
Mind wandering, especially in a purposeful sense, was tied to higher creative flow in ADHD’ers, says the report.
Turning a “Distraction” Into an Advantage
What’s exciting about this research is that it could actually help shape better support for people with ADHD and de-stigmatize this neurodivergent condition.
For example, programs could be designed to help people channel spontaneous ideas into imaginative projects, turning what’s often seen as being “scatterbrained” into being original or ingenious.
On the therapy side, mindfulness-based approaches could be tweaked for ADHD — not necessarily to eliminate mind wandering, but to help people guide it in more productive directions.
This kind of approach could help reduce some of the daily challenges that come with ADHD while boosting the natural creativity that often accompanies it.
The report mentions that more research is needed to confirm the findings.
ADHD Strength
Many of the most groundbreaking thinkers — inventors, artists, entrepreneurs — have admitted to having restless, easily distracted minds. Maybe this was their ADHD.
The very thing that makes focusing hard might also make it easier to think outside the box, connect unrelated ideas and come up with fresh perspectives.
This sounds like a feature of Level 1 autism (minimal support needs), and in fact, some traits of Autism Spectrum overlap with those of ADHD. This includes hyperfocus. Yes, ADHD comes with hyperfocus, despite the distractibility component.
So maybe the next time your mind drifts off mid-conversation or you catch yourself daydreaming instead of ticking off your to-do list, don’t be too hard on yourself.
That mental detour could be your brain’s way of connecting dots no one else even sees.
Slim Influencer Triggered by Other Thin Ones Getting Smaller
What is this world coming to when a successful lean influencer gripes that seeing other influencers shrinking in size is unbearable?
Must AI Image Creators Censor Requests About Bodies?
AI Image creation censor bots often generate the NSFW response when my requests pertain to the human body, particularly size.
The world we live in has become softer than Charmin.
The AI threshold bar for detection of “potentially harmful” or “toxic” requests is set WAY too low.
An example of how ridiculous this censorship is goes as follows:
I wanted to write an article about leg fidgeting. So I requested an illustration of a woman on a sofa using a computer, legs fidgeting.
The result showed the legs in a kicking motion with squiggly lines near them to indicate movement. Good.
The laptop was actually in her lap and not hovering above it. Good.
But her head was too big for her stubby short body, and her shins were crazy short; it looked like a caricature.
Several times I asked to “make the head proportionate to the body.” When that didn’t work, I asked, “Make her legs longer.”
That didn’t work, either. To get around this, I made a request for a “lean body with longer legs.”
Bing’s AI image generator then gave me the following response below:
Obviously, it was the “lean body” that triggered the AI to produce this highly unpalatable image result. Why was the AI programmed to think “lean body” was unsafe?
I then made a request for a “slender body with longer legs,” and the resulting image showed a fat body — with no change in leg length.
Prior to that, Bing’s AI image creation tool had given me the ugly dog result to some of my requests for “realistic photos” of “obese” women doing certain exercises — yet had no issue with serving up a fat body when I hadn’t requested one.
I write a lot of fitness and workout content. Some of it targets obese people (e.g., how to do the barbell squat, deadlift or incline barbell press to burn fat or feel empowered).
But free photo stock galleries come up quite short when I search for photos of very heavy people performing these types of exercises.
So I must use thin or buff models for these exercises. This isn’t as relatable to the obese person reading these articles.
I got really enthused upon discovering Bing’s AI software, because it produces a pretty decent human replicate.
At first, the software was accepting of my requests that contained the word obese.
Then suddenly, I got the rejection, along with that frightful looking dog. All I had requested was an “obese women doing squats with dumbbells.”
I’ve run into the censorship over body descriptions with other AI platforms: Freepik and DeepAI.
I’m betting that many fitness, weight loss and nutrition writers have run into the same problem.
The Charmin Culture
Our culture has become increasingly overprotective when it comes to how we talk about body size, even bodily health, particularly among teen girls and young women.
Conversations about weight, appearance and one’s self-image now often feel like walking on eggshells, as though any mention of these topics might cause harm to their mental health.
The wicked irony is that many of the influencers (who come in all shapes and weights), who fall into this Charmin category, encourage the use of heavy makeup – which contradicts their messages of “Love your body just as it is” and “Anyone can have body insecurities.”
This sensitivity has grown alongside a wave of social media influencers who discuss body positivity and self-acceptance.
Many of these influencers, despite having conventionally attractive bodies (e.g., the enviable height of 5’10 easily fitting into size 10 clothing), focus on showing how social media can distort perceptions of beauty.
For example, by revealing how posing or lighting can dramatically change one’s appearance (no kidding!).
While their intentions may be to promote authenticity, the result can sometimes feel paradoxical:
Young women who already fit society’s beauty standards are often the loudest voices warning of its pressures.
Young women who already fit society’s beauty standards are often the loudest voices warning of its pressures. Something deeper is going on here — but that’s a whole different article.
These young women with massive body insecurities – despite having a shape that most women would kill for – aren’t built that way by accident, either. They watch their diet (though they call this “intuitive eating”) and regularly do gym workouts.
- They don’t look great without some regimented effort.
- Yet they preach their paradoxical messages.
We are witnessing widespread body dissatisfaction on both ends of the continuum — from women with idealized figures struggling with insecurities, to women who feel alienated because of their larger size.
It raises difficult questions about whether our current approach to body image, though it seems well-meaning, may also be unintentionally fueling mental fragility rather than resilience.
And it’s because of all of this that AI is so strict about requests that include descriptions of a human body. I think even “flabby” got a request censored more than once.
Another nasty irony is that Microsoft’s Image Designer consistently creates noticeably underweight women when the request has absolutely nothing to do with health, size, weight loss or dieting.
Gee, if I request “woman strolling in the rain in a park,” the resulting body will likely be anorexic looking.
AI image tools should not be jumping onto the bandwagons of these hypocritical and wildly insecure and often over-privileged influencers.
There is nothing wrong, unethical or immoral about requesting specific body appearances to AI image creation platforms.
Lorra Garrick is a former personal trainer certified by the American Council on Exercise. At Bally Total Fitness, where she was also a group fitness instructor, she trained clients of all ages and abilities for fat loss and maintaining it, muscle and strength building, fitness, and improved cardiovascular and overall health. She has a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Top image: Freepik
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Adults with Intellectual Disability Attending College?
