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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2686 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 22, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I just got prescribed Adderall for the first time-- my wife and I long suspected I had some form of mild inattentive ADHD, but I'm a successful software engineer so it wasn't incredibly apparent.

I was always able to focus on things interesting to me, and often get into extreme tunnel vision hyperfocused states where I can quite literally not hear anything around me except what I'm focused on. My impression after 2 weeks of ~10mg Adderall in the mornings is something like:

  1. I don't feel like I'm using stress or willpower to get things done or get them started. I would often end work with terrible neck-and-shoulder pain and a lot of exhaustion, stress, and frustration, but I haven't felt that once since starting.
  2. I'm able to focus on bigger picture more effectively -- like I'm considering and doing tasks that are most important but not necessarily most interesting to me at the time. This is subtle, but it's an incredible improvement.

I've also cut down my coffee consumption from around 4-6 cups per day to 1, which is significant. Ultimately, I think Adderall has been effective in ways I didn't expect, I anticipated that it would just increase hyperfocus and ultimately not really help, but it has had some surprising effects. I think the only negative side effect is that I have noticed more headaches at night, but I figure that'll slowly go away as I develop some tolerance to the acute effects.

Could the headaches be caffeine withdrawal?

...

Perfect description of ADHD medication. I havent had the headaches, but the positives effects are very similar.

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