Is ADHD a real disorder?

Sometimes I think of my goal as being to just keep slogging through the stuff that's hard for me until I get to a level where I can delegate all of it. I have certainly worked for people who I have a feeling are similar and did the same.

ugh i slept horribly last night. didn't fall asleep till probably 1am and woke up every couple of hours until 6:30 or so. just felt wired all night despite taking the adderall first thing in the morning. does that go away once my body gets used to this stuff a little?

IIRC, there was a period of general adjustment, but I think different people just react differently. I've had pretty much no issues with sleep at all (but a very pronounced stretch of bad insomnia during the year or so that I was off meds altogether). Dosage may be a factor, so you may want to bring it up with your doctor if it's persistent.

good to know, thanks! i see my doctor in a few weeks so if this persists i'll definitely bring it up. dosage felt right all day, just was a little hard winding down before going to sleep. we'll see how it goes

it is kind of incredible that with this medication my work becomes way more stimulating and engaging than fucking around on the internet. it's like reward system in my mind is altered. i went on twitter for a few minutes and was just like "this blows, let me get back to work"

on concerta 54mg and missed a dose today for the first time in quite a while (first time missing a does on a work day in probably YEARS) and holy fuck am i useless.

it is kind of incredible that with this medication my work becomes way more stimulating and engaging than fucking around on the internet. it's like reward system in my mind is altered. i went on twitter for a few minutes and was just like "this blows, let me get back to work"

― marcos, Friday, May 18, 2018 8:47 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this describes how I feel when I get like three good nights' sleep in a row, which is really rare. I'm like, wtf, why would I look at my smartphone? There are beautiful trees around me.

I dumbly stuck my meds in my pocket last weekend on the walk back from the pharmacy and subsequently lost them (shout out to the solid dude in my neighborhood who opted to have some fun instead of making any effort to return them, hope their street value served you well you massive douche) so I was doling out a bottle of ancient pills I found with a different dosage until I could get a refill this weekend. Boy, was I ever discombobulated last week and boy, do I ever feel more on the level today.

Like, this is my insanely busy time of the year at work and I was barely keeping it together. I went home every day feeling like I'd run a marathon with no prior training. Doin' a-okay today, though, despite being no less swamped.

Best of luck to those struggling and glad for those making progress.

Tangentially we tried my son on Adderall for a week a year ago. It was... not pretty. Shrieked for hours, trashed his room, emptied all the bookshelves onto the floor.

Now I have a mostly-full bottle of expired amphetamine salt. On the one hand I could throw them out, on the other hand - they may have street value and could be used as barter in the coming zombie apocalypse.

I am pretty skeptical of giving stimulants to children, although I'm not really qualified to say it should never be done

The conventional wisdom is that it's a paradoxical reaction (it chills kids out and revs adults up) but in the real world the reactions are very person-specific.

I think I'm glad that I wasn't popping bennies as a young'un. I'm not convinced that it's such a good idea as a catch-all for ADD-afflicted kids.

Something that is giving me somewhat of a fresh perspective on my own situation is that I've been tutoring/'mentoring' (god help him) a kid who, although not formally diagnosed afaik, is definitely dealing with his own attention issues (which is, I think, the implicit reason why he was assigned to me specifically). As difficult as it can be as an adult to articulate my own difficulties and needs, I'm realizing it's like quadruply hard for a ten-year-old to talk about what he's struggling with. His frame of reference is so limited that this is all he knows. So much of my goal when I work with him is to monitor his reactions when I ask him about his schoolwork and, whenever he's clearly bored or disengaged with the topic of conversation or the gaze kinda drifts away and the foot starts shaking manically, I brainstorm and try to find any method I can to make the topic engaging for him. Which more often than not involves visual aids or something hands-on (one of the few things he's explicitly articulated to me is that he vastly prefers doing a thing to being lectured about a thing). The difference when I find an 'in' is like night and day. I've historically not given nearly enough thought to the different ways I can approach a thing that brings out my best 'Paul Rudd with a lunchtray' impression, but watching these techniques at work (techniques which, natch, obviously exist inside of me and are being underutilized in my own life) is giving me lots of food for thought.

I mean really I was taking prescription decongestants for a huge part of my childhood and those contain amphetamine-like stimulants too. But I don't think it was good for me.

Well-adjusted stimulants are sanity-keepers for many kids and their parents (and teachers). That said, they’re effective when managed with other therapies and skill-building around self-regulation, not as a substitute for discipline/routine.

The anti-medication contingent strike me add yay close to anti-vaxxers, with similar rationale, and I don’t know how to explain to them the foolhardiness of shutting down a potentially viable approach to ADHD management for (essentially) superstitious reasons.

Yeah each family's situation is different and they should figure out what works best for them etc. etc.

However I think it's important that any CNS / psychoactive / mental health medication should (IMO) have the right to be seen as medicine to the same extent insulin is.

Nobody is all up in a diabetic kid's grill like "why can't you just manage without that stuff?" Nobody goes up to someone with a broken arm and says "you know, I'm not sure that cast is good for you."

Just FTR, in case I was unclear, I am not against ADD meds for kids.

there's a lot in this thread lately that really reasonates with me especially marcos's experience but i feel like i can't afford to exist right now let alone get health insurance, see a doctor, take a test, pay for a prescription, etc. my ability to function at a basic level just feels so impaired compared to everyone else around me, i constantly space the most basic shit and i get really depressed because of it. i tried zoloft for depression but it made my spaciness worse and just made me feel flattened out tbh. i took an adderall once recreationally and it was incredible, i suddenly felt like i could focus on everything in front of me like one thing at a time and seen them all through, start in the most logical place to start and work through each thing i needed to do in order. n.b. i've done other uppers before like coke or meth but they weren't that great.

I started using Lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse) for my add about 2 weeks ago and it's been a life changer so far.

Started studying again recently and having massive anxiety/panic problems. Kinda glad to know I'm not alone, and that meds might help; not so great to know some of my favourite posters are going through the same shit I am.

so because of the somewhat shitty setup i have with my doctor and pharmacy i had a couple days off my meds through no choice of my own and it really drove home how fucked i am if everything collapses and i can't get my stuff. back on concerta today is a bit of relief but yesterday was so bad that i called in to work and said i'd be late, then just didn't show up or email ot say i wasn't showing up, finally got my prescription delivered to the pharmacy (thx to my gf calling the doc/pharma multiple times to ensure it happened! no CHANCE i would've done this myself given my state) but didn't even make it to the pharmacy until it almost closed because i was so useless.

that post was so winding and pointless that i'm wondering if like the drugs haven't fully kicked in or if missing a couple days has a lagging effect lol

my ability to function at a basic level just feels so impaired compared to everyone else around me

this feels so familiar to me maps.

it feels clearer than ever that my depression is hugely related to my attention problems

maps if helps take a really small step toward something - like if there is even a tiny thing that would move you into the direction of getting health insurance, try to do it. i was so frustrated that weeks and then months were going by after my first call to a therapist about my attention problems before i finally was moving toward an evaluation, and even though it's been almost a full 3 months since that first call, progress was eventually made you know. fwiw this is now like a full year after i first started considering that i might have adhd.

in the meantime you are super active right? exercise helps so much. man alive otm too re: sleep. exercise and sleep gave me a chance of survival before adderall, the adderall seems like a game changer for sure but those two things are crucial even w/ the adderall. w/o them i am fucked.

meditation seems like something i should explore more too, the feeling i have when i am present on adderall and available to the task at hand, able to consider one thought, one thing, one task a time, reminds me so much of the effects of the meditation (however little of it) i've done.

i skipped my adderall yesterday because i was only working a half day. i did yoga in the morning (which i don't normally do, usually i have an evening practice) and holy shit it was like taking medication, the effect it had on my body and mind throughout the day was immense even though i was tired as shit.

I'm sure I mentioned as much upthread, but soooo much of the depression and anxiety I've experienced is directly linked to the attention issues. The frustration of potential accomplishments that feel self-sabotaged. Feeling like a perpetual disappointment to others because I'm such a scatterbrain. The perpetual slow crawl forward relative to the rest of the world (eg eleven (non-consecutive) years spent getting an undergrad degree). There are so many pejorative projections contained in those notions ('self-sabotage', 'scatterbrain', comparing myself unfavorably to everyone else) that I'm much more aware of and less hindered by now but which clearly still linger and have an effect.

I can attest that going through the arduous process of initiating treatment for ADD (without, natch, the aid of therapy or medication) is among the most difficult things an ADD person can undertake but it's so very worth the struggle.

Ok been trying to study this year and basically finding it impossible, overcome by anxiety/panic attacks at even the thought of written work. While I don't wish this on anyone, it's really good to know I'm not alone in this, and good to hear medication has helped so many of you.

It's probably kinda 'no doy' but should be noted that meds are basically training wheels. They'll help you stay upright but you still have a lot of peddling to do on your own. My job is still pretty mind-melting at times but I don't know that I'd be able to keep so many plates spinning without pharmaceutical assistance.

yea that makes a lot of sense. while i'm so much more productive on the meds i still have to adjust my thinking from "what do i have to accomplish for today" to "what can i do today to put me in a better, more prepared place for the next few weeks/months", i still have that procrastinator's mindset that i have to work on

btw adderall really fucks with my sense of time. sometimes what feels like 20 minutes turns out to be just 4 or 5 minutes. other times what feels like 20 minutes actually turns out to be a couple hours.

That's just my brain in general, and why I've come around to thinking of ADD (for myself, anyway) as a disorder of focus regulation rather than attention deficit. It's not that I'm always incapable of filtering an overwhelming array of stimuli in order to train my focus on a single thing. Sometimes I'm incredibly hyperfocused to the unfortunate exclusion of all the other things I should also be paying attention to. And, yeah, time seems to operate differently depending on which end of that continuum I'm on in a given moment.

(eg On the rare occasion when I'm not actively fucking around on ILX, I get through my work day and wonder how that could've possibly been an entire eight hours.)

i need to learn better time management skills. medication has hugely improved my confidence and ability to get things done but often within the same bad work habits that i've always had. "oh i bang that out in an hour" well now I actually can, which is an improvement but I still have a delusional sense of what is reasonably possible in time spans longer than that

maybe it is more "task prioritization" than "time management" or maybe it is both.

most adhd people are to optimistic about how much time its going to take to do something - from what I've read

I have a saying "Do less, achieve more." There is no sense in having a bunch of half finished projects lying around for years. Only work on the most important things. I agree, prioritize!

I think it's time blocking and being honest and kind with yourself... building 'drift' time into the schedule and forgiving yourself when you drift away from the schedule.

Cause I don't know about you, but I had a dislike and avoidance of schedules when I wasn't able to follow them, but they're really helpful for stuff that NEEDS a longer time to complete.

The productively industry (and cottage productivity industry) is huge, if you look into it you might find tools you like and will use.

I think its a good idea to make a schedule but only as a guide and feel free to change on the fly

I was just reading an article about rejection sensitivity dysphoria in ADHD sufferers and the author of the article is... an acquaintance who suddenly unfriended me on facebook a decade ago while not-unfriending any other similarly distant acquaintances, leading to an (embarrassing to relate) evening of paranoid sadness on my part.

lol (& I post that contemplating recent unfollows of me)

Yes, sad lol. It seems at times that I've engineered much of my life so as to minimize the amount of rejection that it's even possible for me to experience.

anyway I am majorly struggling right now. medication helps me maintain a very basic stasis but if I have other stressors I still get really overwhelmed by obligations and expectations

also I am learning that my depression is definitely related and intertwined with adhd but still requires its own treatment. I am considering antidepressants after like a decade of denying they might help

same xp, and I suffer for it. im doing that way less in the last year but it has been utterly terrifying and stressful

Yeah, high stress just like totally overrides the efficacy of my medication. It sucks, so you have my sympathies.

ADD > anxiety > depression form a really fun comorbidity triangle, I find, although my most profound side-symptom tends to be the anxiety. Had someone at the weekend tell me that I'd always seemed 'happy-go-lucky' to him and I'm like, huh, if harnessed properly, you could probably use my anxiety to consistently supply power to a small town with nary a flicker of the lights, but I guess I'm doing something 'right' if I've managed to disguise my howling terror from the world-at-large! (clicks heels and dances a merry, carefree jig for all assembled)

I was taking methamphetamine and it completely cured me. I could just stare at the TV static for like 8 hours. Or longer...

I'm...not sure that's what I'd call 'cured'.

add and i feel this, thinknig "writer" was a miserable career choice, need a career path that isn't 1000000 no responses in a row who has ideas

writing in general is an excruciating task for me. a single email can take me an hour. writing for my work - drafting policy & strategy documents, or writing for scholarly & professional journals - is even worse, paralyzing even. i've avoided scholarly writing in particular throughout my entire career since it is so hard for me. i also feel like i have to read like a dozen articles to feel confident enough to write a single paragraph, and reading in that depth can be just as hard as writing. there are so many ideas i have though! and things i want to write about. but it can feel impossible.

all of that is so painfully relatable

ADD + open-plan office = an effect not unlike someone blasting 'Bang the Drum All Day' on an eight-hour loop. The effort involved in not tearing my own face off and flinging the tattered scraps at some loudmouth or another is, at times, gargantuan.

noise-canceling headphones my dude