>I let some non-ADHD friends try a low dose of Ritalin when I had switched off of it and had some left over, and they were bouncing off the fucking walls -- I would strongly not recommend taking stimulants unless medically necessary.
>For people with ADHD, they can be truly life saving. For recreational use, avoid.
Just so you are aware, amphetamines are and have been used widely, and successfully, by people without ADD/ADHD. It has addictive qualities for sure, but I appreciate that people are allowed to try whatever substances they would like to try.
> and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating
I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them.
The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes.
The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state.
The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first.
A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
> I would at least try the meds for a couple of months.
Whether or not you have ADHD, amphetamines will improve your life if you measure quality by how much you get done.
So I think the real question is: Are you prevented from functioning according to your expectations without daily amphetamine use, or not? And do you even see that as a problem?
I've used various (legal) amphetamines and modafinil variants for years, and they always made me very productive and happy, because I like getting things done. They also make me very high-energy.
Disclaimers:
- Amphetamines are physically addictive
- Being productive is psychologically addictive
- Take time off, or the productivity effect will even out, just like too much coffee.
>Just because stimulants _can_ get you high and be addictive doesn't mean they will when taken appropriately.
I'm definitely calling out inappropriate usage, so I don't disagree.
>Plus both cause slight dry mouth, appetite suppression that I have to forcibly eat through, and insomnia if I take them too late in the day. Not to mention the fundamental hassle of taking pills every day within narrow bands of time, something I regularly procrastinate and/or forget.
Yeah the side-effects are not great. Throw in teeth-grinding, compulsive behaviors, irritability, aggressiveness, etc.
>If I had no ambitions or responsibilities, I would be more than happy to throw my medicine away and sit around on my computer all day every day. Unfortunately, I do have ambitions and responsibilities and medication helps mitigate my crippling, career-threatening inability to get things done. So I'll take that tradeoff.
I'm happy to hear about your self control. I wish I were effective as a person naturally, I'm sure you can relate. Unfortunately they don't work for me as well as they once did.
> However, being on stimulants is very exhaustive for your body, and it temporarily stops the racing thoughts many people struggle with, even some time after taking it.
Exhaustion is not the mechanism by which stimulants calm people with ADHD, as far as we understand it. Very approximately their internal world is less stimulating than that find restful so they’re constantly looking for more stimulation to reach a pleasant level. The stimulants let them reach that level without more environmental stimulation. One of my friends doesn’t drink anything with caffeine in it because it puts him to sleep.
> 1. What if it’s the most amazing thing ever, like ADHD medication, what if you get insanely productive, and you then have to go back to being mediocre?
Probably a good time to remind everyone that ADHD medication will not actually make you insanely productive forever. Good for treating genuine ADHD, but trying to use it like a limitless pill just leads to tolerance, dependence, and burnout.
The more involved doctors will actually start people on low doses and titrate up so patients don’t get the wrong idea about what the medicine is supposed to be doing for them. It’s usually the people who took too high of a dose they borrowed from a friend in college or something who have an idea that stimulants are a magic limitless pill without consequences.
> can’t for the life of me find the motivation to do it. Check with a Dr if it’s that sort of thing!
To be clear: Stimulants are not motivation in pill form. The motivation boost is a short-term side effect and tolerance definitely develops quickly.
I think a lot of people get the wrong idea after seeing people use stimulants to cram for finals in college. Long-term treatment won’t do anything like that. It can improve focus and reduce distractability, but you’re not going to become a code-writing machine for the next decade on stimulants.
> stims [...] provide even more impulsive tendencies
In people who suffer from ADHD, stimulants actually have the opposite effect, and are prescribed specifically to reduce the disregulation of executive function.
> I don't have data on how high the risk is, but it does exist.
While addiction can occur in anybody, the data seems to support the opposite conclusion^1 in regards to ADHD people and addictions to prescribed stimulants. Though a simple search on the topic can yield you many other sources citing the same observations.
In fact, people with ADHD are far more prone to developing addictions if ADHD is not treated properly. In an elementary way of thinking, the ADHD brain craves dopamine. So, in a sad way, the options for many ADHD people are:
1. to acquire their dopamine through the care and monitoring of licensed and trained medical professionals => improving their life.
2. to acquire their dopamine through whatever means works for them, typically the ways of boosting dopamine are quite dangerous, unproductive, inefficient, etc.
The average person is either ignorant or refuses to admit that ADHD psychostimulant medications are by far one of the most well researched and well understood medications ever utilized in medicine. This might sound a bit alarming for those unaware, but it's actually hard to find a medication that has this large of an benefical effect with so few side-effects in the large majority of individuals who use them properly.
Speaking of dangers, almost no one ever mentions the dangers of a person with ADHD going untreated. If you want to learn more, I would recommend you read points 78 - 136^2.
Yeah, no. That's just really misleading. The first day on stimulants was the calmest I experienced in years. The whole idea of hyperactivity is (extremely simplified) that your brain fills the space of missing external stimulation. That's where self-stimulation comes from.
Very much this. The nice thing about stimulant medication is it provides more of the ADHD brain regulation with a lower impact on your body (jitters, increased heartrate, etc).
> I'd 100% recommend having stimulants in your toolkit, and chances are you're already supplementing with worse stimulants (like mountains of coffee or soda), so do give them a try, but be careful.
I'll second this. I've got an old friend and former coworker who clearly has serious ADHD and self medicates with tons of coffee/soda/cigarettes. He's killing himself and he knows it, but hates doctors and has a negative view of shrinks.
Anec-data: I cut out carbs and only eat during certain windows and that has done wonders for focus and stick-to-itiveness. Coffee and alcohol hit me extra hard, and I've cut back on them.
> For folks without ADHD, you should know that stimulants, like Ritalin and Adderall, do not usually cause the same response as in non-ADHD people.
I can confirm; I have ADHD and this even applies to stronger stimulants like cocaine. Cocaine doesn't do much for me, so I never understood why my friends were always bouncing off the walls while I was just chilling, like "what's the big deal with this drug". I didn't get it until I was diagnosed with ADHD and understood how our brains are wired differently.
>It's natural for "ADHD" people to work in waves. Long sprints and rest in between. I know it's popular to advocate drugging yourself, but people reach for that too quickly.
>Society is the problem, not them.
I wish it was that easy. It's not. ADHD is an extremely broad spectrum. There are some habits which CAN bring me into hyperfocus, but they don't work all the time.
What do you mean by people reach to fast for stimulants? Coffee and energy drinks basically have the same effect as methylphenidate on me, they just don't last as long.
Before my diagnosis I was always flabbergasted that people were so astonished as I told them that coffee and energy drinks bring me down. Now I know the reason why. But in the end reducing my coffee and energy consumption, but taking meds in a controled way works a lot better for me. But I also know people where meds don't work at all (in a beneficial way). There is really no way to sum up "ADHD people". It's just way to nuanced.
Edit: I am literally sitting in the office right now, hyperfocusing on the weird typing frequency of my neighbour and just can't put on my headphones and start coding. I would even try to hear that with my noise cancelling headphones on. Gotta get up now, take a short walk and hopefully when i come back i can start.
> If you feel like you need stimulants to perform well in a job, you need to reconsider your career choices.
OR you may have a medical condition such as ADHD where stimulants are a useful prescribed tool to deal with it. Not everyone who needs stimulants to work is abusing them.
> It’s amphetamine. The energy is from the amphetamine.
Energy still comes from food, and if you forget to eat on stimulants your body will eventually catch up with you.
Like coffee, stimulants let you better tap into that energy.
> The mechanism of action (norepinephrine and dopamine reputable inhibition) isn’t far from that of cocaine or methamphetamine.
Yep, they’re all stimulants. ADHD meds however, are manufactured in very controlled conditions, and taken in specific doses. Street drugs are more variable in quality, ratios, ingredients and strengths, and so not relevant to the treatment of ADHD.
Methamphetamine is a legitimate treatment for the most severe ADHD cases, it’s often a last resort. It’s sold as Desoxyn. It’s rarely used, but it _is used legally and successfully_.
> Let’s be real here. Amphetamine is known to skew one’s self assessment of their performance while on the drug.
If you don’t need it, stimulants are going to have a different effect.
People with ADHD are in my experience, going to be able to self-assess performance on their meds better than off them.
Don’t assume one experience is universal, especially when we’re talking about neurodiversity. Even among those with ADHD, experiences are not universal. We may rhyme, but we don’t always repeat.
That would have to be stimulants, because all the other kinds are very unpleasant to quit suddenly.
(This is the opposite of the common belief that stimulants are addictive and everything else is safe.)
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