What unintended ADHD medication were you taking before you realized?
What unintended ADHD medication were you taking before you realized?
Image not quite for ADHPeeps but I feel this sort of thing happens regularly for us as well.
Alcohol. Before getting formally diagnosed and medicated, drinking was the only thing that would quiet the inner restlessness. It worked but it's not a healthy lifestyle at all.
This is something I like to bring up to people who are hesitant to medicate their kids. Yeah, I know you think Timmy is fine because he's not completely failing in school, but you should at least show Timmy that he has options and that it's OK to talk to a doctor and take medication if he needs it. He doesn't have to rely on Jack Daniels and Folgers to eek his way through life.
Chewing gum almost every waking moment of the day. People used to assume I was trying to quit smoking, I would joke that I was actually trying to build my way up to starting.
Recently got diagnosed with asthma and just have an albuterol inhaler till I can see a specialist in 4 plus months, haven’t been able to get an ADHD test despite my doctors referral, just so you have a preface for my story here.
On days I work toward my goals I generally start with a 16 oz doubled tea, gives me stimulants which I can’t get at the moment and I generally am able to focus on my tasks for 2 hour stents or so. I have some days though that despite getting rest and having a dose of caffeine I get real low energy around my first hour. Recently, during one of these moments I was trying to take a break and realized my breathing was quite shallow and I was somewhat short of breath, so I used my inhaler and I had a rush of energy and was able to knock out all my tasks with energy to spare. Turns out most of my low energy days have been actually about my low blood oxygen and the effects of having undiagnosed asthma. This has happened to me several times now and it blows me away each time. I think to myself “So this is how normal people breath and get so much done.”
So much fucking coffee. My god it was too much.
W dad
I'm in the middle of diagnosis. I do have Bipolar and have been medicated for 4 years or so. My shrink and I suspect that ADHD is there. It seems to be a common comorbidity. I was self-medicating with alcohol, until I got to a very bad place.
Both bipolar and ADHD have a frightening percentage of substance abuse, often as a form of self medication.
I went to the shrink around the time when I got sober. Quitting drinking and meds literally saved my life.
BTW, I got sober thanks to SMART Recovery. SMART is science based and behavior oriented, so even if you don't have an addiction problem (substances and/or behaviors), You can learn a lot of stuff applicable to behavioral problems. Much of the program is based on Cognitive Behavioral therapies, no higher power required. Confidential. Free.
Holy shit! This post gave me an epiphany.
I was a cartoonist for the student newspaper, and drawing a funny comic strip every day was grueling. But I did better when I drank a Coca Cola before I started to brainstorm. Later, guess what - diagnosed ADHD.
Anyway, I probably took 2-3 hours on each comic, and was paid $5 per strip. And spent some of that on soda. So, it was a labor of love and foolishness. Also, I was semi-famous on campus for edgy cartoons that were occasionally funny, most of which I am embarrassed about in middle age.
Tea. Extremely strong tea, the kind russian convicts drink.
Mini thins (gas station speed) and Red Bull. At least that’s what I did in the 90s before I was diagnosed. Oh and pulling all nighters since my tired brain worked more like a normal brain.
Extreme anxiety.
For the longest time, I couldn't recruit enough concentration to get homework or big projects done until it was this huge looming threat. Frequently, that would involve an all-nighter since it was something due the next day. Other times, it meant cranking out last night's math assignment in home room mere minutes before it was due. It turns out that adrenaline and other stress hormones are great at shoving all the ADHD noise out of the way, however temporarily.
Wait what, I have below average blood pressure and have always leaned on caffeine to focus better. I never had any idea the two might be connected.
Similar but Pistachios. The mechanics of opening the shells and eating them allowed me to focus on the college professor's material after an 9-10 hour work shift. If I showed up to class without pistachios or sunflower seeds I was nodding off in class.
When I was younger they gave me Ritalin, mostly to stop me from burning the building down. It worked, because I never burned the school down.. can't say the same for the neighbors shed... plus there was that incident with the bridge, luckily the fire department showed up quickly.
I was put on bupropion for depression and, while it didn't work perfectly, it worked far better than the other antidepressants I had been on. Then I found out that it's frequently used off label to treat ADHD and I started to have some suspicions. Long story short, now I'm diagnosed and on a stimulant and it's amazing.
A friend of mine chews nicotine gum. I have another friend that vapes and drinks like 12 energy drinks a day.
When I was a kid I read that mint flavorings can help the blood vessels in your head dilate, increasing the amount of blood flow to your brain and therefore helping you do better on studying and tests.
Whenever I have a test to study for or to take, I made it a point to keep some sort of mint flavored candy around, and consistently across the board I have always done better on tests than my peers.
That being said, it is entirely plausible that this is a placebo effect, but I like my placebo and it works for me. Perhaps it will work for you as well.
✨ alcohol✨
Rockstar and pseudoephedrine Claritin with a fresh made breakfast burrito. Discovered I could focus easily for hours as the stimulants with a full stomach of food kept me from being overstimulated. Ironically cost me a lot more than Ritalin does as I didn’t have the time or money to pursue a diagnosis at that time.
Weed to let me take things slowly. Otherwise thoughts spiral out of control, I want to do 1000 things at the same time and can't focus on a single thing. Weed gives me focus, and those eye blinders that people used to put on horses so they would have a narrower field of view, whatever they're called. I'm not english I'm so concentrated I almost forget to eat on days I have an edible,... and I'm a foodie
I used to be the one weirdo who could shoot an 8 ball of coke and be perfectly calm, at least for a few minutes until it started to wear off. That was a long time ago, and I was just diagnosed a couple years ago.
My exam trick was no coffee for two days before the exam, then a couple cups the morning of. Worked great. In other news, holy crap, do I have ADHD??
I'm also from a family with low blood pressure. And sugar is a great trick when it falls down even further. It also help me to study longer but it is hard to strick the right balance with extra-energy and reduced concentration.
I developed this unique tea leaf / tree bark mix over 20 years ago, and I could swear it changed my life. I studied for 14 hours per day sometimes and absorbed all my training within a few years. Then the effect was gone.
Looking at it objectively, maybe the trick was that it had just the right amount of caffeine, but unlike pure black tea, not too much at once and with a lot of water. Possibly also compensating a micro nutrient deficit. Could also be complex indirect effects, e. g.: ADHD related to gut biome, additional problems due to bad bacteria / yeast overrepresented, medicinal plants in the mix fighting that, to a mild degree.
Treating digestion problems with medicinal tea in combination with caffeine and love for black tea started the whole idea, IIRC, so it's not entirely impossible.
