Curing my AuDHD induced decision paralysis with a pendulum.

My autism and ADHD cause me intense decision paralysis on the regular so I'm using a pendulum to fix it (hopefully)

1-27-2026

Personally, my ADHD and autism make it so that I can’t make basic decisions to save my fucking life. Ice cream shops are often torture, I often get hungry and take so long to decide what to eat that I start having a meltdown because the stress of being so hungry is making it too hard to make a decision, and every time my parents got a variety of Klondike boxes for the house, I would get upset because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to try all of the flavors before they were gone (which is often the reality of having 5 siblings) and therefore had to pick which flavor to prioritize.

I enjoy divination quite a bit. My favorite method is tarot cards, a classic, but I’ve been trying other kinds lately and I recently went to a metaphysical shop and bought a pendulum.

A pendulum with an aventurine cyrstal

Pendulums are, essentially, a weight of some kind attached to a length of string or chain or something similar. You hold the string/chain draped over your fingers and allow it to naturally swing in a particular direction and use which direction it swings in to determine binary outcomes or decisions.

It’s great for getting yes/no answers, which can sometimes be hard with tarot and other divination, but unlike flipping a coin or rolling a dice, it does feel like there’s more interaction between you and the object, so I like it more.

But something I also realized is that it’s super portable and can actually be used for any simple decisions. Even if there are more than two options, I’ve found success with simply asking yes or no for each option.

So, I’ve decided to try taking one with me everywhere.

My aventurine pendulum is very nice and I already feel connected to it, but I don’t want to take it everywhere because, being crystal, I could break it by dropping it (which I frequently do with my pocket objects). So I’ve decided to make a more durable one by tying spare yarn to an old metal fidget ring I don’t use.

a homemade pendulum; it is a metal ring with yarn tied to it.

I already used it to decide on lunch, but I’ll have to see how well it works after a while.

Stay tuned!