For most of my life, I thought I was neurotic. I thought the way I watched my own thoughts — noticed my own patterns, catalogued my own reactions — was just another flavor of anxiety. Another wire crossed somewhere in my brain that kept me looping when I should have been living.
It took me until my forties to realize: most of that was not neuroticism at all. It was metacognition. And the fact that nobody helped me separate those two things cost me decades of misidentifying a feature as a bug.
The Observer and the Alarm
There are two things happening inside your head that can feel identical from the inside but are fundamentally different operations.
Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It is the ability to observe your own cognitive processes while they are running. You notice that you just defaulted to people-pleasing. You catch yourself running a mental simulation of how someone will react to your email before you send it. You recognize a pattern in your behavior across multiple situations.
That is the observer. It is watching the system run.
Neuroticism is different. Neuroticism is the alarm. It is your threat-detection system firing and your brain scrambling to resolve the threat. Did I say the wrong thing? Are they upset with me? What if this goes wrong? Should I have done that differently?
The observer takes notes. The alarm hits the panic button.
Both involve a lot of internal processing. Both can look like “overthinking” to someone watching from the outside. Both can keep you staring at the ceiling at 2 AM. But one is a telescope and the other is a smoke detector. They are not the same instrument.
Why Autistic People Get This Confused
If you are autistic, you probably have both of these running at high volume.
The metacognition comes with the territory. Pattern recognition is one of the core features of the autistic brain. And pattern recognition does not shut off at the boundary of your own skull. You notice patterns in traffic, in code, in music, in soil composition, in conversation dynamics — and you also notice patterns in yourself. In how you think. In what triggers you. In the scripts you run automatically.
That is not neurosis. That is your pattern-recognition engine doing exactly what it was built to do, pointed inward.
But here is the complication. As I wrote in The Open Loop, the autistic nervous system also runs a continuous threat-assessment loop with a shifted baseline. Your alarm is already activated before anything goes wrong. You are processing social input through the sympathetic channel. The smoke detector is not just installed — it is already beeping.
So you get both systems running at once. The observer is watching your thoughts. The alarm is flagging your thoughts as potentially dangerous. And from the inside, it all feels like the same churning.
I spent years thinking the whole thing was neuroticism. All of it. The self-observation, the pattern-noticing, the ability to catch my own cognitive distortions in real time — I thought that was all pathology. Because it felt the same as the anxiety. Same location, same intensity, same 2 AM ceiling.
The Recursive Trap
And then there is the version that really ties your brain in knots: being neurotic about being metacognitive.
Here is what that looks like. You notice a pattern in yourself — genuine metacognition. Then the alarm fires: “Am I overthinking this? Is this neurotic? Should I stop analyzing myself? Am I making this worse by paying attention to it?”
Now you are thinking about your thinking about your thinking. And each layer adds anxiety. The metacognition was fine. It was just noticing. But the alarm grabbed it, stamped it as a threat, and now you are spiraling about whether the noticing itself is the problem.
That is neuroticism hijacking metacognition. The observer made a neutral observation, and the alarm treated the observation as an emergency.
If you have ever caught yourself thinking “I need to stop thinking so much” and then immediately thought “but that thought was also thinking too much” — you have been in this loop. It is recursive. It feeds on itself. And if nobody ever told you that the noticing part was healthy and the alarm part was the problem, you end up trying to shut down the whole system. Including the parts that were working perfectly.
How to Tell Them Apart
This took me a long time to figure out. But there is a reliable signal.
Metacognition has a quality of noticing. It is observational. Calm, even, when it is working cleanly. “I just people-pleased in that conversation.” Full stop. No urgency. You see it the way you would see a bird land on a fence post. Data.
Neuroticism has a quality of urgency. It is alarm-driven. The same observation becomes: “I people-pleased again — do they think I am fake? Should I text them? What if they saw through it? Am I even capable of being genuine?”
One is a scientist recording field notes. The other is a security guard who just found an open door at 3 AM.
The content can be identical. “I noticed I was masking in that meeting.” That is a metacognitive observation. It becomes neurotic when your nervous system grabs it and starts running threat scenarios. The observation was not the problem. The alarm was.
Why This Distinction Matters
This matters because the response is completely different.
Neuroticism you manage. You learn to down-regulate the alarm. Breathing exercises, environment engineering, therapy, medication if needed. You reduce the threat response so the alarm stops firing at every shadow.
Metacognition you do not manage. You leverage it. The ability to observe your own processing in real time — to see your biases, catch your scripts, notice your patterns before they complete — that is not a flaw. That is an instrument.
If nobody ever makes this distinction for you, here is what happens: you try to shut down everything. All the self-observation gets filed under “overthinking” and you are told to “just stop worrying about it” and “get out of your head.” And because nobody separated the telescope from the smoke detector, you throw out both.
The metacognition goes dormant. You stop trusting your own observations. You dismiss your pattern-recognition as anxiety and learn to ignore it. And you lose one of the most valuable things your brain can do.
I did this for years. Every time I noticed something about my own processing, I filed it under “being neurotic” and tried to suppress it. I thought the goal was to think less. It was not. The goal was to think clearly — and to know which voice was the observer and which was the alarm.
For the Person Reading This at 2 AM
If you are autistic and you have been told your whole life that you overthink everything — that you are too in your head, too neurotic, too analytical about your own behavior — I want you to consider something.
Some of that is your alarm system. The shifted baseline, the open loops, the nervous system that never fully classified other humans as safe. That part is real, and it does need management.
But some of it is your pattern-recognition system pointed at the most complex system you have access to: yourself. And that part is not pathology. It is perception.
You might be neurotic. You might be metacognitive. You are probably both. The important thing is knowing which is which. Because one of them you quiet down. And the other one you turn up.
The Protocol: Metacognition is the observer. Neuroticism is the alarm. They run on the same hardware and they feel like the same process, but they are not. One is a telescope. The other is a smoke detector. Stop throwing out the telescope because the smoke detector keeps going off.
