Counting

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This may be a post already, but I would like to know if anyone else finds themselves counting subconsciously.

Occasionally, I will catch myself counting steps, breaths, cars, lampposts, keystrokes, . . . whatever. It's like I have an internal counter that just runs in the background while I have other thoughts in the foreground.

I also catch myself memorizing license plate numbers and other number series just out of nowhere.

All very strange. Thoughts?

It's one of the things my overactive mind does. It goes along with my listmaking obsession. I'll get bored and start making lists of objects with the numbers of each.

Sound very familiar.

Yes, I count all the time, hence my username on this site. I must count into the tens of thousands every day in small batches of up to around twenty or one hundred, occasionally higher. Keystrokes, footsteps, mouthfuls of food, the little counter is always running in the background. I'm still counting when I'm in bed trying to get to sleep. I often visualise geometric shapes in two or three dimensions and count the corners (nodes) or the sides. I tap out numbers with my fingers on all surfaces. If I'm sitting watching TV I'm still counting. I never ends.

I count steps, and stair steps, and the number of city blocks I drive past, but that is about it.

I classify the types of license plates. The plate design changes every few years where I live so I keep a mental catalog of the current active plates, and a listing of past plates, and what changes each time.

I do that to a supprising degree. I always count steps, count and quantify time such as working out precicly the amount of time it takes to finish tasks and count pixel spaces such for graphics I count each notch of pixel for precice levels of details. I design system models and this I do to an increadable degree.

I tend to count things when i am upset or anxious....so...fairly often. It's a self soothing sort of thing.

I count my steps a lot when I am alone. For example, I will count the number of steps from leaving work to getting home (which is right across the street). I will either count the steps in total or count in groups. I may just count my steps 1-8 over and over just because it feels right. Or I will do the same thing with breaths. I never have a set number to start with I will just start counting and then start back at one when it feels right and then continue to go to whichever number I ended at the first time. I may find myself counting 12 or 7 breaths over and over just to calm myself. I will also sometimes memorize license plates (passing cars or cars of people I know). My counting never has a grand purpose, it just calms me or helps me relax after work.

Yeah, I count things periodically, either because I have nothing better to do or as something of a calming mechanism.

Not now, but I did count stuff a lot as a kid. Not sure how "sub-conscious" it was, I think I was mostly aware of it. At one point I even decided to just "count" - not any objects, but just saying numbers (integers) in sequence, out loud, until I got to a million. I never got that far, of course, but probably got to somewhere in the tens of thousands. Even got in trouble for counting on at least one occasion, as I've posted before.

Not so much now but I did it a lot when I was younger. I used to count everything, despite being so bad at math. Now I just count the tiles on the floor or the amount of letters in a word, but reading is more my thing now. I have trouble stimming in public so I will randomly read signs and letters or whatever I can find around my environment when I'm feeling too anxious or I will repeat a line or phrase of a song in my head and it usually keeps me calm.