Adderall

evenflow wrote:

I've been on it for almost ten years now. I'm up to two in the morning and two more in the afternoon. I was on the time release, but it wasn't covered by my insurance, so I had to switch to generic, which is why I have to take so many. Now I don't even feel them anymore. I will say this though, I was diagnosed with severe ADD and Dyslexia, and I would have never made it through college if it wasn't for the adderall.

It wasn't untill a couple of years ago though that I finally found out why it works for people with ADD. I was told that the normal human brain operates in four basic stages, theres sleep, then the foggy stage when you first wake up, then there is a middle stage where you spend most of your waking day. This is when you function but could still slip off into a daydream or something like that. This is the stage where you do the tasks that don't take a lot of thought. Then the fourth level is when you are focused and attentive, like when you study or are working on something that requires a lot of attention.

People with ADD have a hard time getting their brain to stay in this fourth level. For whatever reason we just chill in the third level. The Adderall speeds us up and as a result helps kick the brain up to the fourth level.

And I had always wondered why they would give speed to someone who doesn't pay attention already. This explanation makes a lot of sense to me.

lanners wrote:

I tend to hyperfocus by times, but i'm finding that it's not as prominent as it used to be. My biggest problem that was interfering with my work was having 9 things on the go and never finishing one...i'd start writing a letter and suddenly switch to doing the mail, to filing, to surfing the internet, to taking phone calls, to remembering something i wanted to tell someone at the other end of the office...and i'd never really notice that I was doing it. I'm more cognizant now when i'm doing it. I try to keep my multitasking down to one or two things (when i catch it).

I also had a problem with impulsivity (speaking, thinking, shopping, etc) and that's pretty much gone now (which is awesome!)

My biggest problem that's not helped by the meds is my ability to deal with switching gears...like when things are humming along and suddenly something unexpected comes along. According to my therapist, my temporal lobe starts to misfire and i panic. We're going to start working on some way of controlling this at the end of the month.

Did i mention i talk a lot more? I always was a little chatty, well now i'm a regular motormouth.

I just wish i had been diagnosed at a younger age instead of at 35. I might not have racked up such a huge student loan debt and still have no university degree!

jeffwmartin wrote:

Damn, I could have written this post. I wrote something so similar to your first paragraph in my journal that it freaked me out for a second. I was diagnosed at 34, but am 35 now (at least for next couple of weeks).

lanners wrote:

I am a girl too...or at least i was last time i checked.

When we were kids in the 70s, kids like us were just slow, lazy or bad. In the early 80s we were hyper or lazy or sometimes stuck in remedial classes for those ones we just couldn't get a handle on. In the later 80s only the boys bouncing off the walls were even considered to have ADHD. In the 90s they suddenly started looking at the other kids who didn't perform to their "potential" and saw that maybe they could have this problem too.

Now there's a whole generation of "kids" who are suddenly realizing that after years and years of feeling inadequate and suffering through low self-esteem it was really for naught.

While I wasn't thrilled over my diagnosis (or the cost of it), that bit of validation has lifted 30 years of self-doubt and loathing off my shoulders. It is nice to hear from other people my age who are just being diagnosed...in a strange way it's comforting because we've all been through similar things that other people can't relate to.

Ramble...ramble...ramble...i didn't take my meds today...this message has taken an eternity to write.

writersu wrote:

I have been diagnosed with the same condition for about 3 oe 4 years now. I am taking Adderall and it has helped me alot. At first, the doctor had to see how much I needed and what sort of Adderall; XR or just the regular version. XR is the time released version.
After like a month, I was regulated in my medicine and then it worked much better.

sponger wrote:

So, if you really have ADHD, then you probably won't notice the meds that much.