This was the question I asked myself 3 years ago when I self diagnosed with ADHD and it seems fitting that it be the subject my inaugural blog post. In the time since then, I’ve accrued a lot of knowledge and coffee table wisdom on the subject. For this post however, I’m going to keep things simple and brief. Not only for your sake of not getting overwhelmed with information when there is probably already much on your mind, but also for mine in order to not let this post spiral out of control into the thousands of thoughts and topics I want to dive into.
In short, I’ve had and struggled with the symptoms of ADHD my entire life. My presentation is primarily inattentive type in that I struggle to “focus”, and I use that term lightly because focusing is not what root issue of ADHD is. In school and as an adult (and even now as I write this) I’ve had this tendency to “zone out”, stare into space, lose focus, call it what you will. In psychology parlance this would be known as dissociation in which the primary attention of my mind involuntarily leaves the current situation I am in. From the outside it looks like I’ll be present in one moment and then the next, I’ll be staring off into space for moments, minutes or however long, completely unaware of my surroundings or my body or whoever is talking to me at the time. I’m sure many people who have struggled with ADHD know what I’m talking about and I’ve seen it in people around me who share some of my symptoms and experiences.
I’ll be clear here that I no longer think that this is an ADHD symptom, rather it is a trauma symptom along with many other comorbid symptoms that often get conflated with one another. Attention issues, memory issues, hyper-vigilance, emotional dysregulation either by excessively acting out or excessively shutting down, maladaptive daydreaming, difficulty with task initiation, difficulty with task completion, catastrophization, attachment issues…the list goes on. These symptoms, which are normally associated with ADHD and its cousin OCD, I believe are actually rooted in trauma. Again, I don’t want to get too far off topic here, just know there is plenty more to this that I’ll get to in future blog posts.
So anyway, you suspect you have ADHD, you’ve done some research on the topic and are finding many things people are saying online resonate with your life, you want to dive in head first into fixing things but there is so much information out there you don’t even know where to start. Well allow me to give you a head start. Here is a list some of the things I wish somebody had told ME when I first got started on this journey but that I had to discover on my own well after the fact of blundering my way through many of them.
#1: Get some medication
Any ADHD medication really. Like seriously, anything.
I’m convinced that fixing this stuff isn’t possible without at least some sort of medication to help you along and you’ve probably already heard of some of them. Medications typically fall into two categories: Stimulants and Non-Stimulants, but let’s be real here it’s basically Adderall/Vyvanse and everything else.
Let’s start with Adderall (mainly because that’s the one what I started with). Adderall is a stimulant. It contains one of two stimulant chemicals, either some flavor of amphetamine or methylphenidate, amphetamine in the case of Adderall, which will work to stimulate some areas in your brain which aren’t as active or as developed as they are in the neurotypical brain. This extra stimulation will paradoxically help you to ‘calm down’ and spin down some of the racing thoughts and impulses that are going on inside of your brain. That is, if you have ADHD. If you don’t, this stuff will just make you hyper and that’s it. And that should be clue number one on the question of if you have ADHD or not. If you start on a stimulant medication and it allows you to ‘relax’ your thoughts, which I’ll tell you is more like being able to control which track of thoughts your thought train decides to take, then you probably have ADHD. If all this stuff does is make you energized and want to get up and do things without any sort of mental or bodily calming side effect, you’re either on the wrong medication or don’t have ADHD.
Now starting any sort of medication is a scary experience, it certainly was for me when I first considered it, so let me tell you what it feels like to be on this stuff.
On a typical morning, I would wake up and feel exhausted. Some people can just rouse themselves awake and fly out of bed in the mornings and that absolutely isn’t me. I have to mentally and sometimes physically drag myself out of bed in the morning. And for a long time after that it feels like my brain is just in a fog cloud. I don’t want to focus on anything, I don’t want to think about anything, my energy is just low. It isn’t until around noon that I finally start to ‘wake up’ and feel some ability to concentrate. And this isn’t just for things I don’t want to do like work, it’s even for things I do want to do like personal projects and self care. It feels like my brain has to push its way through a wall of jelly in order to do anything at all. And that’s literally anything, ordering a cup of coffee, opening up my email, loading up any sort of work task into my brain. Every single little thing throughout the day is preceded by this process of pushing through the mental jelly. And that’s EVERY SINGLE THING. Like unless you’ve experienced this yourself, you cannot believe just how demoralizing this is to have to exert willpower in order to accomplish even the simplest of things that other people seem to be able to just… do.
This is because your brain lacks dopamine (and to all the neuropsych’s out there reading this, yes it is way more complicated than that). One may be tempted to think of dopamine as gas in a gas tank, in that you ‘expend’ your limited supply of dopamine in exchange for some temporary ability to focus on some task. This is not the case. The way to think about dopamine is like a swimming pool. If your dopamine level (that is the water in the pool) is high enough to seep over the edge of the pool, then hooray! That excess water flow means you can initiate and focus on a task in order to stuff done. Anything you want, the world is your oyster shell. But if your dopamine level is any lower than that, then good luck, you’ll be spinning your wheels for the rest of the day. It truly is a binary experience like that, either I’m on or I’m off. Either I happen to be on a day that I can just fly through the things I want to fly through or I’m an undead zombie moaning, groaning and hobbling his way through life.
This is why ADHDer’s hyperfocus. This is why ADHDer’s do things at the last minute. This is why ADHDer’s self-medicate with stimulants such as coffee (another thing that tipped me off to my diagnosis).
In short, ADHDer’s have figured out ways to fill this pool up with stuff. As in your brain doesn’t produce enough water to fill the pool, but you know you still have to get that water line up to the edge to be able to get the things done you need to get done, so what do you do? Find stuff to throw into the pool. Throw in the beach ball, the pool chair, the lifeguard post. Tables, chairs, towels, pool noodles, those umbrella thingies, discarded swimwear, towels, goggles, heck throw your friends in too if they’re willing. Anything you can find, throw it into the pool. Because if you can just get that water line high enough to even barely touch that edge, you’ll be golden. You’ll be able to do all the things, accomplish your tasks, achieve all your dreams and everything you wish for will come true. Right?
What I’m actually talking about here are the things ADHDer’s have figured out work in order to ‘trick’ their brains into cooperating, and I’ll name a few I’m very guilty of doing.
- Waiting until the last minute so that the emotional pressure of a looming task rouses you into action.
- Hyperfocusing some piece of work out because you know if you let up off that gas pedal you’ll never be able to get it done. FYI – I’ll be writing an article on hyperfocus in the future. For now think of it as intense concentration on a single task to the point of being unable to switch off to anything else.
- Offloading task management onto others because if somebody is there to hold you accountable then you don’t have to fight through the pain of task initiation. Also known as body doubling.
- Putting intense mental pressure on yourself to the point of shaming yourself for believing you are a complete failure in life. Which ends up becoming a self fulfilling prophecy resulting in the formation of the inner critic, another topic for another day.
- Coffee. Lots of coffee.
All of these things result in that pool being filled, but it also results in that pool being polluted. Because yes, you’ve gotten the things you need to get done done but it has come at the cost of filling your mind with so many things that doing anything additional to that becomes neigh impossible. Not to mention the side effects that all those things cause that you now have to add onto your list of things to take care of. Not to mention all the maladaptive behaviors and coping mechanisms that come out of it that now have knock on effects for your entire life. Not to mention all the exhaustion that comes with having to juggle this delicate balance of unicycle wire walking fire juggling you have to do just to drag yourself into work and get through your morning meetings.
And that’s Every. Single. Day.
Feel tired yet? Feel exhausted? Any wonder why you don’t want to get out of bed in the mornings? I certainly didn’t.
So what does medication feel like?
First off, relief. You get this sense of stability. Like that mental fog clears up and that jelly turns to fruit punch that you can wade through with ease. You can think on a single train of thought. Maybe not indefinitely, but enough to not get distracted halfway through some task. What’s more, there seem to be less thoughts in general. You can be present without having to deliberately refocus your attention. You have control over your mental state. Maybe not full control but oh so much more than before.
Second, and this is especially true for stimulants, you can just… do things. Like you can think to yourself ‘I want to wash those dishes’, ‘I want to clean up my room’, ‘I want to get out of bed and go for a walk and enjoy the day’ and you can just do it. That mental barrier is no longer there. The intense pressure you have to put on yourself in order to do ANYTHING AT ALL seems to be gone. Or at least highly diminished. For once in your life, you can just do, you can just go, and let me tell you, my god is that a good feeling.
This is the way ‘normal’ people feel all the time. You think of something to do, maybe you don’t want to do it, but all you really have to do is ‘decide’ to do it and all of a sudden you’re going. You rouse yourself off the couch and all of a sudden you’re doing the dishes. And you don’t have to concentrate or force it. You just sort of go. Is it any wonder why ADHDer’s feel a sense of calm with these medications that non-ADHDer’s don’t. Like imagine the curtain lifting for the first time in your life and the stage isn’t so scary anymore and you can dance and leap and fly through the world at your hearts content.
That is what it feels like.
This is why I recommend getting on any sort of medication at all. Because even the tiniest bit of help to get you going in the mornings will benefit you. Even if there are side effects, even if it’s not the right medication for you (and I’ll get to that topic too), even if there is still a mountain of trash in your life you need to deal with. At LEAST you have some way to start on it. And that’s worth it. It’s worth it just for that. You HAVE to start somewhere and if there is any single starting point I can think of that turned things around for me it’s starting on Adderall. To be clear, that was very much not the end of it, only the beginning. But if you’ve read this post and resonate with what I’ve said, take this to be the very first thing you can start with. Find medication, get help, worry about the rest later.
To be continued…