Question for people with #ADHD and take medication for it: what has your experience been like with it? What differences did you notice?
I'll go first. I just started taking Adderall a little over a week ago. At first I felt like I more control over my attention and I had more energy, but now it's more just the latter (especially right when I wake up)
@vn Thanks for sharing! That's exactly the concern I had (and still have): I didn't want to lose the parts of my ADHD that I loved.
What are some of the things you did to handle it? Did those systems stick, or did you have to swap them regularly?
The main reason I wanted to try medication was that the systems that I'd been using stopped working for me.
@joshfreedman that's not an easy one to answer. It depends.
First things coming to mind :
-Sun exposure
-Regular physical activity (kinda... lookup up Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter)
-Regular braindumping - gKeep, Obsidian, Notion.so...notepad.exe
-Todo lists, everywhere. Not just one. Keep in mind that if you don't see something, you will forget about it. They may differ and that is fine.
-Getting comfortable around your todo lists and rewarding yourself accordingly.
-It's OK to do nothing...actually, attempt to define "nothing", as it could just be downtime to reorganize ideas...use that as a topic of discussions with people close to you to have better guidelines.
-Letting go of the stress causing even more stress on my DSPS
-Regulating my pleasure/pain balance (look up Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke)
-Understanding and accepting my differences in my ways of working + making sure this is understood and respected. If I'm in a place where I don't feel comfortable with that, time to change (I'm lucky to be in a position to do so...and also not to have to, anymore)
-Communicate constructive feedback around you and eventually, you will get the same coming towards you and that is a major shift.
-A major hit is when the days shorten and even more when we change clocks....see point 1, getting even harder. Vitamin D3 supplements and sometimes some N-acetyl-L-cystein/tyrosin
-If you have breathing/digestive issues, work on these, as they can affect your sleep (also to check at some point for apnea)
-Diet. Can be easy, can be hard. Learn to live with your hunger and to discern being hungry from feeling like putitng something in your mouth. We're all different, especially in genetics and we have [in]tolerances that we have to learn about and mitigate. What makes you sleepy or hyper, what's not well digested, what....
-That one I'm unsure of still but...here we go : unmedicated ADD people seem to increase general anxiety for surrounding people and we need to be able to communicate properly what is happening in front of them and how we deal with it in order for them to find a consensus on how to deal with it. Otherwise, it's just an infinite loop of unmanaged misunderstandings.
Resources that helped me make sense of everything, on top of previously mentioned books... Dani Donovan's infographics, ADHD Jesse posts on twitter, Drew G Gonzales posts on Quora, initerviews of Tom Bilyeu with Andrew Huberman and Anna Lembke.
Appropriate infographic I saw today :
Josh
vn