Have you just tried curbing your enthusiasm

I have often said to myself, “Why don’t you just try to curb your enthusiasm?” Not as a joke, and not as self-mockery, but as a serious internal instruction. A reminder to be careful. To slow down. To not get carried away by something that will inevitably cost me later. The voice is calm, reasonable, and sounds like experience talking. It frames enthusiasm as something unreliable, a little embarrassing, and potentially dangerous if left unchecked. The implication is that if I could just learn to manage it better, life would be more stable and less messy.

That instruction did not come from nowhere. It was built from pattern recognition. From years of watching excitement lead to commitment, commitment lead to consequence, and consequence eventually harden into regret. Over time, curbing enthusiasm began to feel like maturity. Like learning. Like evidence that I was finally growing up.

This piece is for people who suspect that the problem was never enthusiasm itself, but what happens when you stop trusting yourself to follow it.

The pure joy of a new interest is something I live for. Not as a preference or a pastime, but as a driving force. When something new catches my attention, it does not sit politely at the edge of my life. It reorganises how I think, how I spend time, and what feels meaningful. It gives my days momentum and coherence. When I go too long without that pull, I do not become calm or balanced. I become flat. Life continues to function, but something essential is missing, as though the signal that tells me what matters has dropped out.

For a long time, I became afraid of following my passions. Not because they were shallow, but because they were real, all-consuming, and, quite quickly, expensive. The pattern was familiar enough that I started policing myself in advance. I would find something new, go deep, learn the system properly, invest, and commit. Then, at some point, the centre of gravity would shift. Not disappear entirely, but move. When it did, the evidence remained behind in physical form: tools, equipment, subscriptions, half-built identities, hobby graveyards, and the quiet sense that I should have known better by now.

Woodworking is the most expensive example. I did not dabble in it. I built a workshop. I upgraded tools as my understanding deepened and my standards changed. I ended up with four table saws, not because I was careless, but because I was learning. I got deep into epoxy resin table making. Each decision made sense in isolation. Each purchase was part of going deeper. When the interest waned, the garage stayed full. The receipts stayed real. I have never had the cognitive function to return anything and get money back. The regret did not come from the learning itself, but from the visible proof that my enthusiasm had outpaced its shelf life.

Over time, I learned the wrong lesson. I learned to associate excitement with consequences, passion with cleanup, and joy with future self-reproach. So I started dampening it early. Keeping it private. Waiting to see if it stayed. Treating my own enthusiasm as suspect until it proved it could last. That is often described as maturity, but it has a cost.

When I curb my enthusiasm too effectively, life goes flat. I still work. I still function. I still show up. But curiosity becomes cautious, decisions lose colour, and the part of me that feels properly alive goes quiet. Enthusiasm, for me, is not an indulgence. It is regulatory. It is how my nervous system organises itself around meaning. Suppress it too hard, and I do not become stable. I become dim.

I took this to my psychiatrist, framing it as regret and impulsivity, as another example of behaviour I should have grown out of by now. He said something deceptively simple. He said that some people learn to fly as a hobby. They pay for lessons, log hours, and at the end of it they have nothing tangible to show. No plane. No equipment. Just the experience. What you have done, he said, is pay to learn a new passion. You paid for the joy of total immersion and learning, and you also have something at the end of it. 

That reframing landed immediately. It was not about excusing behaviour or denying cost. It was a category shift. The woodworking had not failed. It had completed a learning cycle. The tools were not evidence of waste. They were evidence of depth. Almost immediately, regret loosened its grip. Not into pride or justification, but into permission.

It also made me notice something else. I go back. Not always quickly, and not always predictably, but I do. Sometimes after a year. Sometimes after three. The skills remain. The understanding returns faster. The interest hibernates rather than dies. My passions are not short-lived. They are cyclical. Once I understood that, I could stop trying to eliminate the pattern of regret, and start not fearing the end as final.

The real problem was never enthusiasm. It was unbuffered action. I used to leap straight to the best of the best, partly because I value quality and partly because my brain interprets a new interest as urgent. If this matters, I should do it properly. If it matters, I should commit now. Over time, I learned to insert a pause. Not a joyless pause, but a useful one.

Research became part of the hobby. Investigating options. Comparing trade-offs. Reading manuals. Watching hours and hours of reviews. Planning how something would fit into my life before it arrived. I get almost as much pleasure from investigating as I do from using. The excitement still has somewhere to go, but it no longer discharges immediately through spending or identity-level commitment. Medication helped here, not by removing enthusiasm, but by giving me enough space to hold it. Enough inhibition to separate excitement from purchase. Enough working memory to enjoy anticipation rather than needing to resolve it immediately.

People often talk about inserting a pause for ADHD in terms of stopping impulsive behaviour, whether that is blurting out the first thought or making a snap decision. What I learned is that the pause does not have to be a brake. It can be a redirection. Enthusiasm still flows. It just flows somewhere safer first.

I have noticed the same pattern in how I make friends. I tend to connect through interests, not casually, but deeply. Shared depth is the basis of belonging. Because my interests are disparate, my friendships are too. They are almost entirely segregated by passion. Different groups for different things. Different languages. Different contexts. Not because I am inauthentic, but because no single group could reasonably carry the full force of my enthusiasm without it becoming too much.

Each group gets a coherent slice of me. The part that belongs there. The depth that makes sense in that context. For a long time, I worried this meant I was fragmented or lacked a core social identity. I see it differently now. This is not instability. It is distribution. The social equivalent of not overloading one circuit. Curbing my enthusiasm socially was never about politeness. It was about not overwhelming the container. Having multiple containers turned out to be the kinder solution.

My hobby is starting new hobbies. That is not a confession. It is an explanation. And once I stopped treating it as a defect, I could see where it had taken me.

It is part of what got me to Managing Director at work. I follow hard problems the way I follow interests. For years, I have advised more junior people to spend roughly eighty percent of their capacity doing the job they are paid to do, and twenty percent on the next thing they are genuinely curious about. The hardest problem they can find. The work they cannot stop thinking about. In my own career, that twenty percent has frequently become the eighty percent over time, usually in cycles of three to five years. I have never changed roles by applying formally. I have moved by gravitating toward the next difficult thing and working on it before it had a name or a mandate.

Running the first global hackathon at my work over twelve years ago followed exactly that pattern. It started as interest, became energy, then momentum. I am still involved in judging today. Seen this way, enthusiasm was never a liability to be managed. It was a directional signal. What mattered was learning how to give it room without letting it destabilise everything else.

I have seen this most clearly since being late-diagnosed as neurodivergent. When I started learning about it, I did not keep it private. I talked openly at work about what I was discovering and what it was helping me understand. That interest quickly turned into conversations, then connection. I founded a neurodiversity network that now has hundreds of members. The more people it reached, the more I wanted to understand, so I could be genuinely useful rather than simply well-intentioned.

I read about neurodivergence extensively. More than fifty books so far, and I still listen to roughly one a week. I trained and certified as an ADHD coach, then as an advanced ADHD coach. I have written an article every week for eight months. I am now building an iPhone app in my spare time to support neurodivergent people, which I will write about separately. Along the way, I trained as a mental health ambassador. None of this was planned. There was no roadmap. I followed the thread of interest and kept going to see where it led.

This is what my enthusiasm looks like when it finds something that matters. It does not burn out. It spreads and evolves.

I no longer tell myself to curb my enthusiasm. I tell myself to slow the spending, not the spark. To stretch the beginning. To let research be part of the pleasure. To allow interest to exist without immediately turning it into identity, investment, and irreversible commitments. When the interest moves, I do not treat that as proof I cannot be trusted. I treat it as a cycle completing, a phase of learning that will return in another form later.

Sometimes the problem is not that we get too excited. Sometimes the problem is that we were taught not to trust the thing that makes us feel alive.

If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start by trying to moderate their enthusiasm or make it more reasonable. In neurodiversity-affirming coaching, the work is not about changing the person. It is about changing the environment they are trying to live inside. I would want to understand what enthusiasm actually does for them when it is allowed to exist, and what happens to them when it is constrained. For many neurodivergent adults, enthusiasm is not an optional extra. It is a core organising force. Treating it as something to be suppressed often removes one of the few reliable sources of energy and meaning they have.

I would also want to separate enthusiasm from action. Many people learn to fear their own excitement not because excitement itself is harmful, but because it has historically been followed by costly or irreversible decisions. Spending money too quickly. Overcommitting. Quitting a job or reorganising life around a feeling that later changes. The work is not about killing enthusiasm. It is about building enough containment around it that the person no longer has to defend themselves against their own nervous system. Slowing commitments rather than curiosity. Redirecting energy rather than shutting it down.

From there, the conversation usually shifts away from self-control and towards fit. Not “how do I stop doing this,” but “where could this actually work.” Finding or creating environments that can hold fluctuating intensity, cyclical interests, and variable energy patterns is often transformative. I have coached many ADHD adults who have gone on to build portfolio careers, combining several strands of work that genuinely interest them rather than forcing themselves into a single narrow role. When done well, this is not chaotic. It is coherent. Each strand draws on a different part of their attention, energy, and skill, and together they form a life that matches how their system actually operates.

What matters is not whether someone has one passion or many, but whether their working life is designed to absorb variation rather than punish it. When work, interests, and energy patterns are aligned, enthusiasm stops being a liability to manage and becomes a signal to pay attention to. It points toward where value, motivation, and sustainability might live.

The aim of coaching, in this context, would not be to make someone smaller or steadier. It would be to help them recognise the conditions under which their enthusiasm becomes generative rather than destabilising. To shift the internal instruction from “I need to curb myself” to “I need to choose environments that can hold me.”

Because when someone’s work and passions fit the shape of their life, rather than fighting it, something important emerges. Energy becomes more reliable. Shame loosens its grip. And what once felt like a problem to be solved starts to look like something that can be built around instead.

I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.

I write one thoughtful piece a week for people who find themselves overwhelmed by things that everyone else seems to cope with. If this resonated, subscribing just means you’ll get the next one quietly, without pressure or expectation.

If you know someone who’s struggling with the weight of something, sharing this might help them feel understood.

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398 (Original work published 2005)

Barkley, R. A. (2016). When an adult you love has ADHD: Professional advice for parents, partners, and siblings. American Psychological Association.