I really relate with this. It took extraordinary measures for me to get where I can work efficiently without Adderall. Adderall turned me into such a different person that my wife started to be scared of me. Just interrupting me from work was a landmine, I was so mean. The doctor just said “be nicer” when I asked him about Adderall and anger issues. I’m a fun and easygoing person and it was like that part of me would get snuffed out and I’d become a robot on Adderall. I feel like it let me become a programmer. I locked myself in a home office for three months 10 hours a day learning to program, working on a demo project, and got my first professional position. The Adderall definitely enabled this singlemindedness.

To reorient myself in a way that I can concentrate on work without Adderall, I sold my TV, my VR, and my $700 graphics card. I unsubscribed from Netflix, deleted Facebook, and got rid of Twitter. I don’t listen to music as background noise, or in the car. I’ve gone on a ketogenic diet with no MSG (so no cheap meats like sausages). I try to sit without looking at my phone when I’m waiting for five or ten minutes somewhere. The whole idea was to “reset” my brain to a lower level of overall stimuli, and largely it has worked. I feel better and can work harder than I did on Adderall, because I can work in the evenings without having a total breakdown, because taking Adderall after 5pm was always a disaster, I wouldn’t be able to sleep and I’d have really weird thoughts as I went to sleep.

I’m really glad I did all this as it made me realize what’s really important in my life, family and to a smaller extent friends, and the time with them is much more meaningful now. I can actually concentrate on what someone is saying to me. Maybe moreso, I actually care.

That's great (the lower stimuli regimen.) I envy your ability to discipline yourself for greater accomplishments in your future. Good luck friend!

I'll be honest, but I find it very hard to believe that amphetamines can really enhance your cognitive skills. I'm talking from second-hand experience only, but it's pretty clear to me that they can have the effect of making you feel like you're smarter, faster, leaner, better- but this feeling is just a side effect of taking the drug, and does not reflect a real improvement.

I can believe that the drugs can help some people get over some psychological hurdles that are keeping them from delivering a piece of work, but I'm really not sure why the work itself would end up any better than if it was done while sober. Given that a big effect of apmhetamines is to make you stay up all night, for weeks on end, in other words causing sleep deprivation, I find it very likely that the end result is in fact much worse than the baseline.

Personally, the only magic drug that I've found really helps me do better and more is getting enough sleep and doing so regularly, for many weeks. Even if it means having fewer waking hours for work during the day, it doesn't matter, because I can pull twice the work (and twice the quality of it) when I'm well-rested than I do when I'm tired and haven't been sleeping well.

So, taking a drug that completely screws your sleep patterns and just makes you forget how tired you are, sounds like a recipe for destroying the quality of your work, to me. And I think those studies the article quotes, the ones that haven't found any cognitive enhancement from Aderall (to healthy individuals and ADHD sufferers alike) are basically justifying my hunch.

They definitely increase energy levels. A person can stay up for days on them. They are an unwise and partial substitute for sleep but a substitute nonetheless. Like you mention, a large part of what they do is change intrinsic motivation, not intelligence. When you feel "charged" with energy, it is hard to oppose doing intellectual work. Amphetamines are pure energy. And intellect loves pure energy...so does physical work. But its not for free. Amphetamines decrease circulation..they caused Peyronies Disease for me..and I used to take them all the time in college with no issues. Age always brings the true nature of bad habits to bear.

I really hope people don’t read these posts and think oh man I gotta get aderall because everybody is on it. (For people that don’t actually have some serious issue studying.) if you managed to get into a good college without using aderall something tells me you already have the ability to focus very well. I also think this type of post will bring out a large fraction of the small amount of people doing it and make it look substantial.. I for one agree that substantial regular sleep and finding a job that you like, and holding yourself accountable to achieving the goals you set for yourself are far more powerful than temporarily pounding out 1000 lines of code. I have met tons of people over the years who would finish homework before others and half of the time they would be bored and not sure what to do with themselves and end up sort of always confused about what they want to do with themselves and not very passionate vs. the people studying away in the lab frustrated that they don’t “get it” end up finding a love for the material fairly often when they suddenly start “getting it”.. it’s not to say that one day there won’t be a “make you smarter” drug, but I doubt strongly that a stimulant like aderall is it.. more likely it’s equivalent to drinking a small amount of coffee every 15 mins over the period of a long work day. In my case I don’t take anything like aderall and have achieved plenty and been able to work very long and intense hours through a variety of techniques I use. For example, don’t drink all of your coffee right away in the morning, drink it more slowly. When you are on a roll don’t go to lunch or grab coffee with your work mate, just keep trucking. Visualize the feeling you will have when you finish the thing you are trying to get done at the end of the day and stay focused on that when you start to get distracted. Get up and walk around for 60 seconds to get some blood pumping. Kneel down on your knees instead of sitting for say 5 mins. When you get interrupted by a co worker come up with a nice way of saying that you are in the middle of something. Change locations if you are losing interest and focus in what you are working on. Listen to some music without words to help get you into a zone. Come up with a story to tell yourself about why your thing you are working on is important. Think about what food or reward you will give yourself when you get something done that you think is a good checkpoint. Basically my point is that if you come up a set of methods that help you become successful rather than relying upon a drug then you can essentially persuade your brain to keep investing time and energy into your goal and is more resilient long term. It requires you to build up these skills to train yourself to be able to do these techniques, — no silver bullet.

I agree with you. If anything I believe the amount of people these drugs assist is actually a tiny fraction.

I've spent years trying to get off adderall, swinging between having serious addictions with it (even pouring bottles down toilets), quitting it for months, and then eventually coming back to it as work/stress accumulates.

A few years ago I quite adderall/dexedrine at a startup, it lowered my productivity as I rushed with caffeine and other things to fill the void, and within a month I was fired as I had become useless.

Adderall changed my personality well before I discovered coding. I discovered coding because it suited my adderall addiction, not the other way around. In fact, almost as a maladaptive trait, I changed my whole career path towards coding away from politics precisely because I realized how well suited this new line of work would be for my addiction: Only in coding could I continue with my dysfunctional adderall-addicted personality, get paid well for it, and paradoxically be seen as a functioning member of society.

-------

But now I'm stuck. I want to quit adderall but I know I can't do it without at least a month of not working.

Every vacation comes around, and I promise myself I'll make another attempt at quitting but back out, but fear prevents me from doing it.

The longest I ever quit successfully was for a few months while traveling around the world. I experienced the best romance I've ever had in my life, because without my personality being blunted by the effects of adderall, I could be my charming emotional self again.

That all faded when the trip ended, when I needed to become productive again and faced the disaster of not being able to perform.

And that, my friends, is what makes Adderall addiction so uniquely fucked up.

Unlike heroin, alcohol, or benzodiazepines, our economy currently rewards and even encourages us to continue our addiction to this drug.

You sure you're not me? I got into coding seriously in college after I started to take adderall to help study, and ended up making a career of it. I was absolutely terrified of quitting, because I felt like I couldn't do the one thing I was good at without it. I tried quitting and lost jobs over it, several times. It got to a point where I couldn't function as a human without it - I'd just sit in bed and feel sorry for myself. My addiction progressed to needing more than I could convince any doctor to prescribe, so I started getting more in various illegal ways.

I've been off the stuff for about 4 years, and I don't miss it at all. I'm actually a much better programmer without it - I don't get sucked into unimportant details, I have a more realistic sense of what I can and can't accomplish, and I'm more creative. More to the point, I have a life outside of a little bottle of pills now.

I got off of it after talking to some people who'd also gotten off - this helped alleviate my fears that I would have to give up my sweet programming career, and re-framed the problem as a matter of underused and atrophied motivation and willpower. It wasn't easy, but with a lot of love and support I managed to quit for good.

Hit me up if you want to talk - jonathan dot j dot mason, gmail.

Very good points. I do notice while on it, that it's extremely easy to get sucked down into rabbit holes, losing sense of time and of what's important.

I've also run into the same problem you described, of running out of adderall due to more and more tolerance. In desperation it even led me once to get some darknet speed pills off the internet, containing what I later found out to be meth... all due to a lack of available prescription alternatives. (I quickly learned methamphetamine is a completely different animal -- far more addictive, dangerously euphoric, and seriously neurotoxic. I learned to never do that again.).

I'm now experiencing my first health wake up call, which I'm convinced is linked to adderall use: just in the last few months, while using my iPhone I started to notice a very slight shaking in my fingers. Turns out: I have a family history of essential tremors and Parkinsons (caused by accumulated damage to dopamine receptors)... with ALS as a possible risk factor. That's right: A L fucking S.

And I'm only in my late 20's.

Terrifying. The illusion of my own invincibility has been shattered. For the first time in my life, it's abundantly clear that my problem with adderall is no longer just psychological: it's physical. That if I don't make changes soon... things could start going downhill for me -- fast.

I may take you up on that offer when I can muster up the courage. Thank you.

> I may take you up on that offer when I can muster up the courage. Thank you.

Please do - it's always a pleasure to help someone out of a bad situation that I've been in. And remember, fear is a prison without walls - you just have to make a decision to walk through that fear, and you're free.

I felt the same way about cigarettes (and then sugar) for awhile. They helped me focus and think about hard problems (or so I thought). Anyways, not as good example as Adderall, whose effects are probably more effective than what I imagined.

Have you considered taking a personal leave to kick your habit? I mean, don’t take a vacation, but take a leave from your job and then quit the drug while instead working on personal projects and trying to remain productive. You will slump at first, but if you like what you are working on, you’ll probably pick up again after a few weeks.

I know not everyone can afford to do that, but it’s the best solution I could think of. Good luck!

I started taking Adderall recently and so far, I've had the inverse experience socially. It's made it much easier for me to meaningfully engage with people. By gaining control over my focus, I can now overlook "the little things", and I'm no longer compelled to "chase dopamine".

Have you considered other medication such as Atomoxetine?

I apologize my wording made it appear I was abusing drugs, I don't condone that. In fact I'm the opposite: I microdosed Adderall. 5mg a day for the longest time, then bumped up to 10mg. My doctors over the years pushed me to take more but I always said no. Instead I would take breaks and let tolerance die down before resuming.

I first got a prescription when I found I would rather spend 2-3 hours of my work day staring at a wall than work on a tedious task (literally, I did this). I was either hyper focused on a task and spent all day and night on it, or would rather be left with my thoughts.

I went home many days wondering what was wrong with me and waited every day to hear the news I was fired. I eventually went to a doctor around the age of 20 and he said, without a doubt, I have severe ADHD.

I have found other ways to cope with the condition. Many already shared in this very thread what has worked for me: no sugar, exercise, plenty of sleep, and a tinge of coffee. Even when on small doses of Adderall, if I had more than a handful of Oreos, I would have to go home because work is impossible. This actually happened! I know it's hard for people without ADHD to understand. It's not about willpower, it was an impossibility for me to work.

I was convinced that I had ADHD by the time I was 21 after a lot of struggling in high school and college. I went to a psychiatrist and he asked me the basic DSM IV questions and he said it was a 90% match. So he put me on Ritalin and then eventually Adderall. I also had severe insomnia so this exacerbated my abuse potential in order to make it thru multiple days with higher performance without sleep. Within a year or two, I got off all the stimulants because I was falling apart.

Almost 13 years later (and a lot more serious work struggle) I started talk therapy and began to realize that confidence, self-esteem, chronic anxiety and depression were my real underlying problems. It's hard to focus when you feel anxious all of the time. It's very hard to think deep - which reinforces the confidence and focus problem in high performance work situations. A vicious circle. So we tried the usual SSRIs, sleep meds, and benzodiazepines - which all have their own problems.

Another 12 years later after being on these meds, I stopped early in 2016. Life was slowly getting worse - and my physical health as well. In the start of this year I to realized that SSRI/SNRI are not fully effective if you don't change your lifestyle. So I cut out sugar, juice, sweet fruits, simple carbs, alcohol, and limited my caffeine to the morning - all of which makes a world of difference. Now I'm struggling to form the daily habits of cardio in the morning and mindfulness meditation a couple times a day. I feel 100% more focused and stable.

Only wish I had figured this shit out when I was a younger man.

Thanks for sharing this! I am pretty sure that I have ADHD but I was never diagnosed, nor did I ever try visiting a doctor for this purpose. As someone with relatively low access to healthcare, I am always concerned about taking any medicines, even if they are supposedly "good". I realized that most of my ADHD symptoms stem from inflammation. If I take away any inputs including dietary(sugar, gluten, dairy, egg, etc.,) and environmental(pollutants, cold, dust, pollen, etc.,), I am as focused as ever. So that's what I focused all my effort on. My focus levels have improved quite a bit but I am still not there yet. If your symptoms are similar to mine, you might benefit from Spirulina and Turmeric. Both of them help reduce inflammation and provide several health benefits.

Thanks. It wasn't clear in your comment. Working with your doctor is the right way. Your original comment made it seem to me that you weren't.

Life is not a playing field full of fun and games, even though you could frame it in terms of game theory. People want to be successful, not to evaluate their "innate" performance against other people. Moral justification for doping is unimportant, because it's arbitrary. In reality, however many competing actors make me miserably insecure by their superiority, whatever is their percentile relative to the general sample, I wish to win, I wish be more than what I am all the same.

Please read the article.

I did.

Doesn't change what I said, nor should it. The OP was potentially offering dangerous advice. I see all too often people suggesting things about ADHD, medication and drugs that are dangerous. Speak with a medical professional.

If you are taking drugs you have not been prescribed, see a doctor.

As for your "want to be successful" argument, that's a fallacy. You are causing more harm by abusing drugs to get ahead than you realize.

Read the article? No, go see a doctor.

Its terribly easy to be prescribed these drugs by doctors. I feel like you feel less responsible and even coy by pushing the discussion off onto the "See your doctor" rails. But what good is that when any psych will hand these drugs out like skittles?? I have 4 boxes of unused adderall sitting in my cabinets from a script I was given. Acting like doctors are going to solve whatever explanation you are obliged to give is just silly. Lets hear the whole story..

If most people are stronger than you, and steroids make you stronger, does taking steroids to ‘even the playing field’ constitute abuse or just taking medicine? How is that substantively different from taking adderall?

Regarding your first question: is this prescribed by a doctor, or simply you deciding to use it?

I can't answer the second question until you answer mine.

Yes, it talked about the dangers. I took the parents comments as saying that you don't need to take drugs. The reality is, you shouldn't take advice like that from a comment. See a doctor. Work with them to find what works for you.

What I saw from the OP was dangerous advice.