Why Can't I Stop Thinking About This? When Neurodivergent Brains Get Stuck on Unsolvable Problems
- Sarah Hardy
- Jan 15
- 6 min read
There's a particular kind of mental exhaustion that comes from thinking about the same thing, over and over, when you know rationally that continuing to think about it won't help.
You're not researching because you're about to make a decision. You're researching because not researching feels unbearable. The tab stays open. The mental file won't close. You're aware it's happening, but awareness doesn't stop it.
In coaching sessions with neurodivergent adults, this pattern comes up frequently not as a failure of logic or discipline, but as something more fundamental about how certain brains process incomplete information. The person isn't confused about whether they should stop thinking about it. They literally just can't.
The thing they're often stuck on is genuinely unsolvable right now. There isn't enough information, the variables haven't settled or the decision isn't theirs to make yet. But the loop continues anyway.
What We're Actually Looking At
This is different to procrastination and it's also not indecision in the traditional sense. While it can look like anxiety or obsessive thinking, it often sits somewhere adjacent to those things without quite being them.
What I've observed in sessions, and what I've found in research on cognitive closure and executive function suggests that this is about the brain's need for resolution meeting a situation that can't be resolved yet.
The psychological term for this tension is the Zeigarnik effect: the finding that incomplete tasks create a persistent cognitive load. Our minds hold onto unfinished business. It's why you remember the tasks you didn't complete more vividly than the ones you did or why an interrupted conversation nags at you for hours.
For most people, this effect creates mild background noise. For neurodivergent brains, particularly ADHD or autistic ones, it can become consuming.
Arie Kruglanski's work on "need for closure" explores individual differences in how people tolerate ambiguity and unresolved cognitive tension. Some people are comfortable leaving questions open; others experience unresolved information as genuinely distressing.
Neurodivergent adults often sit at the higher end of this spectrum due to how their executive systems manage (or struggle to manage) open cognitive loops.
When you add ADHD's dopamine-seeking tendencies, the pull toward novelty, research and more information, you get a perfect storm. The brain is trying to close a loop it can't close, so it keeps seeking. New tabs. New angles. New possibilities. Even when you know none of this will resolve the situation, it happens because the seeking behaviour itself briefly satisfies the system.
Autistic thinking patterns add another dimension: a drive toward completion, pattern resolution, and informational coherence. If the full picture isn't available, the mind keeps working and often it's not optional. It's based on how the system is wired.
Underneath much of this? Unresolved threat. Uncertainty, particularly around decisions that matter, can register neurologically as a low-level alarm. The research spiral becomes a way of trying to manage the discomfort of not knowing, even when more research won't actually reduce the uncertainty.
Why "Just Stop Thinking About It" Doesn't Work
If you've ever been told to "let it go" or "stop overthinking," you already know why that doesn't help.
The loop isn't maintained by choice. It's maintained by executive function doing what it's designed to do, trying to resolve incomplete tasks, in a context where resolution isn't available yet.
Telling someone to stop thinking about it is like telling them to stop being hungry. The drive is neurological, not voluntary.
Other complicating factors often mean the person can't solve the problem yet because:
They don't have all the information they need
Key variables are outside their control
The decision isn't actually theirs to make right now
The resources required (time, money, clarity) aren't available yet
So the mind is trying to solve something that is, by definition, currently unsolvable. That's where traditional problem-solving frameworks break down. You can't problem-solve your way out of a problem that doesn't have a solution yet.
The Strategy That Actually Seems to Help
What I've seen work, not universally, but consistently enough to be worth naming, is something I'd describe as artificial closure or permission-based containment.
It's not about solving the problem. It's about giving the brain permission to stop working on it, even though it isn't solved.
This works by creating a temporal boundary, an invented but defined endpoint that allows the mind to file the task as "paused" rather than "unfinished."
Here's what it looks like in a session:
A client is caught in a research spiral about a career change. They're scrolling job boards daily, reading articles about adjacent industries, comparing salary data – but they're not actually applying for anything. They don't have a clear enough sense of what they want yet, and they know this. But the loop continues.
Rather than trying to "solve" the career question or force a decision, we introduce a boundary: "I'm not making any decisions about this until June."
Not because June is magic. Not because the answer will definitely be clear by then. But because the brain can work with "this task is scheduled for later" in a way it can't work with "this task is unfinished and unscheduled."
The Zeigarnik effect – that persistent cognitive tension around incomplete tasks – seems to be satisfied not by completion, but by acknowledged deferral. The mind can let go of something if it believes the task has been appropriately handled, even if "handled" means "scheduled for later."
Why This Works (When It Works)
From a psychological standpoint, this strategy seems to address several mechanisms at once:
1. It reduces executive load. Executive function has a limited budget. Every open loop, every unresolved question, consumes a portion of that budget. By creating a defined boundary, you're essentially telling the executive system: "This is handled. You can allocate resources elsewhere."
2. It interrupts dopamine-seeking loops. ADHD brains are drawn to novelty and stimulation. Research spirals provide that – endlessly. By setting a boundary, you're removing the dopamine bait. There's no point opening another tab if you've decided (even if invented) that you're not engaging with this until a specific point in time.
3. It satisfies the need for closure without requiring resolution. Kruglanski's research suggests that people with high need for closure aren't necessarily looking for the right answer – they're looking for an answer, or at least a sense of structure or control. A timeline provides that. It's not resolution, but it's enough cognitive scaffolding to quiet the alarm or perceived threat.
4. It externalises the decision. One of the most exhausting aspects of these loops is the constant internal negotiation: Should I keep researching? Is this useful? Am I wasting time? By setting a boundary, you're no longer deciding moment by moment whether to engage. The decision has been made. That removes a significant layer of cognitive friction.
What This Isn't
This isn't avoidance. Avoidance is driven by anxiety or discomfort with the task itself. What we're talking about here is the opposite: too much engagement with something that can't be productively engaged with yet.
It's also not suppression. You're not trying to force the thought away. You're acknowledging it, respecting the brain's need to do something with it, and then redirecting that energy in a way that's sustainable.
And it's not procrastination. Procrastination involves delaying something you could do now. This is about pausing something you can't meaningfully do yet.
Giving Yourself Permission
What often emerges in coaching is that people know, intellectually and rationally, that they could stop researching. They just don't feel allowed or able to.
There's an unspoken belief that if the problem is unresolved, you should be working on it. That stopping means giving up, being irresponsible, being unprepared or risking a bad outcome.
But sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is stop working on a problem that isn't ready to be worked on.
Learning to give yourself that permission, to say, "I'm allowed to close this loop, even though it isn't solved", is often the shift that makes the strategy possible.
And once it's been done successfully once, it becomes easier to recognise the pattern and apply it again. The brain learns that deferral is safe. That you can pick something back up later. That not everything needs to be held in active awareness all the time.
When to Consider This Approach
If you notice yourself:
Researching something repeatedly without moving closer to action
Holding a question in mind constantly, even though no new information is available
Feeling unable to "let go" of a decision that isn't yours to make yet
Exhausted by your own thinking, but unable to redirect it
This might be worth exploring.
Not as a solution, I'm not suggesting this works for everyone, or for every situation, but as one way of working with a particular kind of cognitive pattern that seems especially common in neurodivergent adults.
It's not about fixing how you think. It's about finding a way to work with how you think.
If this feels familiar, the question isn't "What's wrong with me?" It's "What does my brain need in order to let go of this right now?"
Sometimes the answer is structure. Sometimes it's permission. Sometimes it's just a date on a calendar that allows everything else to quiet down for a while.
If this feels familiar and you’d like support turning insight into action, you can book a free discovery session here
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