Pause
Check current capacity. Use a shorter route—or stop—when reflection itself would add load.
Do I have room for this now?
The Inner Map approach
A field method for learning from your actual life.
The framework does not begin with “How do I fix this?” It begins with “What appears to have happened, under which conditions, and at what cost?”
Try it with one momentFive repeatable moves
A loop, not a ladder.
You can enter anywhere. Sometimes the useful result is an experiment. Sometimes it is a clearer question, a boundary, or permission to stop.
Notice
Record one observable moment and the conditions around it. Specificity is what makes patterns visible.
What happened before, during and after?
Make sense
Consider needs, fears, habits, adaptations and temporary states without settling on one explanation.
What are two possible readings?
Test
Change one factor in a small, reversible way. Reduce risk, cost and the pressure to get it right.
What is the smallest useful test?
Review
Notice what changed, what the experiment cost, and whether the result holds in another context.
What deserves keeping or revising?
The areas you can map
Different questions. One developing picture.
These are lenses, not separate identities or scores. A single moment may sit across several of them, and you do not need to complete them all.
Capacity
What changes what is available—not only how motivated you feel.
Regulation & recovery
What helps you settle, mobilise, recover or return after demand.
Sensory environment
Which kinds, combinations and durations of input seem to alter the cost.
Attention & initiation
What helps you begin, switch, focus, stop and re-enter a task.
Masking & identity
Where adaptation protects you, costs you, or obscures your preferences.
Communication & people
Which formats, rhythms, expectations and repair processes fit.
Work & environment
How structure, autonomy, place, pace and recovery affect sustainability.
Meaning & life design
What gives energy, belonging, agency and a life worth maintaining.
Inner Map tool
These eight lenses are an organising device written for this site. They are not a validated model, a set of subtypes, or a description of how autism or ADHD are assessed. They exist to make a moment easier to describe—nothing more. How evidence is labelled
An important distinction
Observation is evidence. Explanation is a working hypothesis.
Most self-blame happens at the moment an explanation is treated as a fact. Keeping the two apart is the single most useful habit this method asks for.
Observation
“After three hours of meetings, I could not reply to a simple message.”
Specific, time-bound, and open to further examples.
Possible explanation
“Social monitoring may have used more capacity than I noticed at the time.”
Plausible and worth testing—and not automatically the only cause. Tiredness, illness, hunger, stress, medication, the content of the message or something else entirely may fit as well.
Small experiment
“After the next meeting block, I will protect 20 minutes without messages.”
Reversible, observable, and small enough to review.
Begin small
Make one map before building a system.
The first tool gives you a complete stopping point. You do not need a new routine, an app or an identity, and an incomplete map is still a useful map.
Create a first signal map