Suddenly ceasing stimulants does not involve nearly as acute or prolonged a withdrawal as opiates. There's no risk of seizures like there is with benzos. Your dopamine receptors will reset their tolerance much quicker than the 6 months I see cited throughout this thread. I have stopped stimulants many times with no more than a 1 week (maybe 10 day max) period of physical dependence symptoms.

When people experienced prolonged withdrawal symptoms from ceasing stimulants, I think it is usually due to being forced to confront life conditions that were being avoided.

I'm wondering if it's life conditions in many cases that is part of the reason for using in the first place? Yes, needing to work long hours is very real, but maybe the drugs also help to avoid life conditions that we don't want to deal with...

I see "helps me work" used pretty often as a rationalization for drug use that's actually a coping mechanism.

> I think it is usually due to being forced to confront life conditions that were being avoided.

This certainly may be part of it.

However, there are long-term changes in the brain that occur with chronic stimulant use/abuse. I'm looking for the correct number, but I believe it takes about 24 months for the brain to revert to its normal state after stimulant cessation.

"changes in the brain" is too vague to be useful.

Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS) is supposedly a thing that can last months, but it's just an observation of a collection of symptoms - no analysis of a specific mechanism causing it that I have seen.

> "changes in the brain" is too vague to be useful.

I would hope that someone trying to do something useful concerning addiction and the brain wouldn't go by a comment on Hacker News that was posted via a cell phone.

Anyway, please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477351

Source? (not nitpicking, genuinely curious)

I'm pretty busy so I can only do a cursory search. I cannot find the source I originally read this on, however I will try to find it when I am at home.

Here's what I could find via a preliminary Google search on my phone:

From drugabuse.gov [0]:

> In the aforementioned study, abstinence from methamphetamine resulted in less excess microglial activation over time, and abusers who had remained methamphetamine-free for 2 years exhibited microglial activation levels similar to the study’s control subjects. Another neuroimaging study showed neuronal recovery in some brain regions following prolonged abstinence (14 but not 6 months). This recovery was associated with improved performance on motor and verbal memory tests. But function in other brain regions did not recover even after 14 months of abstinence, indicating that some methamphetamine induced changes are very long lasting.

Here's a graphic they included [1].

This is another source [2]:

> Stopping drug use doesn’t immediately return the brain to normal. Some drugs have toxic effects that can kill neurons—and most of these cells will not be replaced. And while changes to connections between neurons in the brain may not be permanent, some last for months. Some research suggests the changes may even last for years.

I cannot find the studies these articles cite, but I'll try to find them later.

This is related, but is not specific to stimulant or methamphetamine use:

Delta-FosB, an enzyme that is critical to achieve an addiction state in the brain, has a half-life of ~208hr [3]. Multiply that by the standard 7 half-lives to estimate significant elimination, and that alone yields a maximum of 60 days until it is cleared. This enzyme is key in drug and behavioural addictions.

This paper [4] speculates about changes in the brain that last longer than the time it takes to eliminate elevated Delta-FosB levels in the brain.

[0] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/meth...

[1] https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/met...

[2] http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/brainchange...

[3] http://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/17/13/4933.full.pdf

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC58680/#__sec5ti...

I went cold turkey because I did not like the fact that I needed the drug to go about my day. I also started to get into crossfit/fitness and the really high dose stimulants made intense exercise feel like it was taxing my body way more than it should have.

I wanted to achieve everything naturally. I knew going off the drug would slow me down, but I was willing to trade general health and well-being for a drop in productivity.

Do you ever feel like everyone around you is doing some substance to make them work faster or better, and that you'll somehow fall behind or be at a professional disadvantage if yo don't?

My anecdote: In undergraduate engineering, a lot of the people around me were on ritalin. I never felt disadvantaged because I felt it didn't give anyone a clear advantage in the hardest subjects like mathematics or nonlinear control. From what I saw, it didn't seem to improve intelligence that much; rather it helped the distractable people to not get distracted from studying for example.

I felt that sense while I was down in the dumps after going cold turkey ... but now that I have more of a grasp on my life (married, dog, money in savings, living a healthy lifestyle, etc...) I no longer feel that way.

I don't live in Silicon Valley any longer though... so that might be part of the reason I don't feel the pressure.

Right now I might call myself a big fish in a little pond (not really, I am more humble than that) but compared to SF where you are a small fish in a big pond ... there is a lot more pressure to stand-out and be excellent.

Good point. And I'm interested in knowing how being in SV, as opposed to outside that particular fish bowl, affects drug use