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Comment by ReaLNero | Hacker News Reader

Why did you stop taking meds? Curious what would be your reasons against it.

I'm not GP but I also stopped taking meds (actually recently for me, and I'm 27). I'm sure GP's reason is different. My reason was that I had realized that a lot of my old ADHD symptoms were actually still happening. I was still procrastinating, still getting stressed when forced to focus on stuff I don't care about, still forgetting stuff. As an experiment, I decided to keep lowering my dose to see what happens. I kept lowering it until 0 and basically nothing has changed. I still do great at my job, can study stuff I'm interested in, can function completely normally. Makes me wonder whether the effects had simply worn off after so long, or if it was placebo from the start.

> My reason was that I had realized that a lot of my old ADHD symptoms were actually still happening. I was still procrastinating, still getting stressed when forced to focus on stuff I don't care about, still forgetting stuff.

Anecdotally, I've watched a lot of friends and colleagues go through this exact cycle: Going on meds and then just focusing more intensely on their distractions. I really think we're doing a disservice to all the people who get a prescription and get sent out the door without a more involved framework for how to use the meds as part of their ADHD treatment strategy rather than a presumed cure in a pill.

N=1, I can confirm this effect. I started to call stimulant medication "sticky". As in, when they kick in, I find it much easier to focus on doing whatever it is I am doing at that time. So, if they kick in while I'm on HN, I can kiss the next couple hours goodbye.

It's a trap that took me too long to figure out, and one I still fall into quite often (the period between taking a pill and it kicking in is long enough that I may habitually start procrastinating), but wrt. differences in my life on vs. off meds, in times when I feel similar to what GP described, I'm reassured by my wife who can smell me taking a med break even if I don't tell her, because from her POV, I change for the worse in the scope of a day or two. She sees the change even before I feel it.

> I really think we're doing a disservice to all the people who get a prescription and get sent out the door without a more involved framework for how to use the meds as part of their ADHD treatment strategy rather than a presumed cure in a pill.

As much as I believe the meds are a net benefit overall (they definitely are for me), I 100% agree with this sentiment.

This feels so validating to read. I was having problems with my attention cannon and they just handed me a bigger one.

I stopped when I caught myself in a deep dive about the different types of flour in Germany.

It also affected my mood in really unpleasant ways, both for me and people around me. And it gave me a productivity boost at work at the expense of my life past 4PM.

Nowadays I just have a coffee before work.

Everyone's different. In my case, medication almost entirely eliminates the anxiety that's been a constant background presence, slow-burn torture, for most of my life. They also stabilize my mood. If the meds were to suddenly stop having any other positive effect, and kept the negative and neutral side effects, the anxiety reduction and mood stabilization alone would make them worth their weight in gold for me.

This was my experience with adderall in college, as someone who I don’t think suffers from these conditions.

Similar for me. It is like shooting a bullet. If I was pointed at a distraction by god I did the shit out of that thing. Maybe I was supposed to be reversing an app for a project but instead I made the most beautiful CSS thing I had ever created. Or some other highly unrelated tangent O_o

> Going on meds and then just focusing more intensely on their distractions

... shit, that was today for me. Oops. (But in all fairness, I'm still recovering from a flu.)

I'm curious... Are these not things virtually everyone struggles with to some degree? There are no end to time management books and people who wish they would spend less time on their phones/playing video games/etc.

No when you have ADHD it's really really hard to get started on a new task, but you do obsess over a task once you get started on it.

You'll do everything you can to avoid it first though, until the stress of the deadline overweighs the dread to start.

I always find that portion of ADHD somewhat amusing. Getting fixated on a task and unable to context switch is a big thing, which I think is surprising for many people.

This is also something that has crossed my mind. In the early days of my diagnosis, it was a challenge to explain that I even had a problem. People would (rightfully) say "isn't that basically everyone?" and I would have to struggle to say "yeah but mine's worse. I'm diagnosed." It was a real drag at the time but nowadays I'm thinking maybe they were right.

Virtually everyone struggles with it to some degree, some of the time. ADHD people struggle with this to a high degree, all of the time, to the point it interferes with their ability to function, and causes no end of anguish.

It's like accidentally giving yourself a small burn when pulling things out of an oven, vs. having a 2nd degree burns on half of your body. Technically the same thing, but scale matters.

k [deleted]

That's not ADHD. That's normal.

As a next experiment, give Atomoxetine a shot. Works nicely for me and is not a stim. I feel it makes me more emotionally involved/interested in whatever I'm focusing on, so very easy to get into flow states, provided there are no distractions around. It doesn't warp time or change your mood/personality like the typical stim based meds. It does affect appetite, so if you are trying to lose weight, it becomes very easy.

Mainly because I was also put on anti-depressants, anti-psychotics etc and it was making me much worse (sometimes parents are idiots). But before that the stimulants turned me into an emotionless zombie. Once the meds wore off, crying was a magical revelation, like, "oh! this is what feelings are like! this is awesome!"

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