Chasing Quiet: ADHD, Burnout, and the Search for Stillness

First Light on the Lauterbrunnen Wall taken from Wengen

I am too little butter on too much bread.

I am too many thoughts in too little head.

Tyler Knott Gregson

I was diagnosed with ADHD recently. It explains more than I wanted it to, and exactly what I needed it to.

For years I thought I was just “bad with noise.” In truth, I’m hypersensitive. Sounds and smells stack up until they feel physical - a crushing pressure in my skull. My brain runs at about 90% even on a good day; add to this: music from a phone, a clicking pen, a tapping foot, traffic, alarms, or a heavy scent in a room and I tip into overload. It hits as anger or tears, a rush of hurt or abandonment - not intent, just disregulation. The modern soundtrack to life - TVs and smart speakers, videos blaring from mobiles, doors slamming, traffic and alarms, smoke and strong perfumes, less nature and more artificial noise - rarely lets up. My nervous system doesn’t/can’t filter it; by midday I’m overstimulated, by evening I’m completely done in.

The ever changing weather in Glencoe

As the years have passed, the cost has increased. My busy brain moves too fast. I react rather than respond. I interrupt. I go blunt. I zone out or, conversely, fixate. I miss a tone of voice or cue. Later, I replay it all and wonder why I couldn’t slow down. It’s strained friendships and relationships and causes no end of rumination. It weighs heavy.

I was first labelled with depression at 18 then, later, anxiety too. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was also an undiagnosed brain that needed a different kind of help. I can’t help asking: what if someone had spotted the ADHD twenty‑six years ago? How different might school, work, love, and life have been if I’d had the right name and subsequent understanding for what was happening inside my head? Those what‑ifs can be crushing. So I’m trying not to live inside them. Instead, I’m looking at what has always steadied me.

From my notebook — Huaraz, Peru, 2022
“It’s funny: the very thing I’ve actively avoided for the last few years is now the thing I crave, my own company. When i'm at work, I’m living and working in close quarters with people running on high stress, and I realise I’m in a better place when I seek time alone.

Having become more aware over the last few years of my sensitivity to sound and smell, I find that being alone in the mountains, reading, or simply lying in silence are some of the most restorative things I can do when everything feels overwhelming.”

That feeling has a name now: ADHD. The diagnosis doesn’t rewrite the past, but it does explain the pull toward stillness and why solitude has become a kind of medicine.

This part will surprise no one who knows me: the things I love most now make sense in a new way. Base jumping. Climbing sketchy things. Long, solitary days in the mountains. Paragliding. Photography at first light or sunset. They’re not random hobbies. They’re regulation. They’re dopamine. They level me out. They give my nervous system a target and, for a while, a steady line to walk. But regulation needs fuel and lately, the tank’s been running low.

Not just tired - I’m spent. Some mornings it’s hard to get out of bed. Sleep is broken and thin, and even climbing the stairs can feel exhausting. I’m supposed to be in the Himalayas next month, and I’m worried. Fitness that used to be a constant now slips through my fingers. The maddening part is that my brain is clearly exhausted but refuses to switch off. Racing thoughts, overthinking, rumination - the constant churning piles on stress even as my body runs on empty. It’s an infuriating juxtaposition: wired and wiped out at the same time - so for now i’m treating rest as training.

Solitude. Glencoe

Burnout sits in the background of all this. Chronic stress turns the volume up on everything: sound, smell, emotion, guilt. ADHD explains the speed; burnout explains the empty tank. Together they can feel like two hands on the same lever. Some days I can lower it. Some days I can’t. I’m learning not to let those days feel like abject failure - but the self-criticism that comes with perceived laziness is hard. The inner voice won’t let me relax, and ironically that refusal to rest is partly what’s destroying my health. I thought I was learning to slow down; it’s not nearly slow enough.

First light over the Lauterbrunnen Valley

Stillness, to me, isn’t the absence of movement. It’s the moment my brain stops scattering. It’s standing in the wind and hearing only the wind, it’s listening to rain on a tent canvas, It’s the quiet before the sun rises in the mountains and the world hasn’t started shouting yet. It’s watching birds in the garden or listening to their chatter. That’s why I make the pictures I make. It isn’t decoration. It’s how I come back to myself.

It isn’t all negative. On good days, it can be momentum. When focus comes, I can edit photos, write or push myself physically for hours. The same sensitivity that overwhelms me in crowds can make me a better listener: I hear tone, pauses, and what isn’t said. It’s helped to grow compassion and empathy. ADHD makes the world loud, but it also makes details sharp. With direction, it can be an asset.

What changes am I making?

Small, practical things: leaving space when the noise spikes; saying no sooner; earplugs and noise‑cancelling headphones; learning to have firmer boundaries around sleep; gentle training when my body allows, rest when it doesn’t; honest conversations with the people I love. And when I get it wrong, as I undoubtedly will, less time between reaction and repair and more learning about measured response.

If any of this sounds familiar - to you, a friend, a partner - know that you’re not broken. I'm learning that a fast mind in a loud world is a tough combination. It needs compassion, not shame. It needs space.

My work will keep pointing to that space. Quiet images, made to quiet minds. Stillness gives me, and maybe others, a way to meet it without falling apart.

Lone hawthorn, Winskill Stones, Sunset

If you’ve been chasing quiet too, I hope you find a patch of it today, somewhere, if only for a minute.