This.

They mean thoughts shouldn't normally be racing.

The amount of people misunderstanding this meme makes me sad.

This part:

Racing thoughts may be experienced as background, _or may take over a person's consciousness. _Thoughts, music, and voices might be zooming through one's mind as they jump tangentially from one to the next.

actually does describe what it's like inside my head. I think of it like background chatter. There are usually two to three tracks of thought that my mind hops between with a song playing in the background (currently it's I Second That Emotion by The Miracles). It's there when I wake up in the morning and it's there all day long. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's there. That can be annoying because it makes it hard to fall back asleep. During the day I can quiet it down by concentrating on something else - e.g., listening to a podcast - but if I'm doing something that doesn't require much thought, my background chatter comes to the forefront again.

It is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It hasn't kept me from being successful and it doesn't really bother me except when it makes it harder to fall asleep. I'm guessing it's just an overactive imagination? I've described it to my husband and he can't relate - he says his mind is blank unless he's actively thinking about something (and I can't relate to that lol).

I think this is just what's normal for me. If it caused distress or confusion, I think it might indicate some pathology, but that's not the case.

There's always something coming in and going out, something different every other second.

My previous doc already noticed hyper awareness, but he had me talk about things that trouble me and doing that kicks it in overdrive.

End result: i got some anti psychotics and pointed out the door asap, it felt like i said something wrong for a singke second that made the therapists employer go: "nope, not today buddy. Strike 3, you're out."

That medication made me so tired but man did the silence help, i felt like i could breathe for once without being interrupted. It had me sleeping 14h a day AND taking naps the moment i got to sit still for a minute.

I have difficulty bringing across what is going on which makes it feel impossible to let people know how and what is going on, making therapy useless as they'll just decide: "this is going nowhere".

Thanks for the clarification, I was definitely conflating a bit... having said that, even with the more accurate description I do believe I experience Racing thoughts at lot more often than not, certainly not close to zero.

One thing I have noticed is that, when I do try to quiet my mind and reduce stimulus, this is when more often than not my thoughts do fucking race. At its peak, it feels like watching people in a fair from a thrill ride, it's a blur of barely distinguishable snapshots mixed in with sounds, lights, smells... it does make me feel like I am insane; fortunately, when it gets to that state, it does not last long

Because it isn't, everyone have sequential thoughts with almost identical "speed", the difference is that some ppl can focus on their interlocutor and stop their train thought (or fake interest in their conversation), while others can't

Racing. The meme is about thoughts racing.

Man, I have the same sometimes. The words are random and sometimes it is a part of a sentence or one line of a song.

Marble Olympics on youtube