I'm addicted to adderall and it's slowly tearing me apart and ruining my life. It's made me self-absorbed, anti-social, unreliable, irresponsible and despicable.
When I stop taking it I become depressed and unmotivated and can’t get out of bed and i don’t care about anything. Doing physical things is one thing, but sustained mental effort becomes nearly impossible and i can barely think. I know these effects will start to subside if I am clean for a week or two, but I don't know if I can go that long without really fucking up in all my classes and the rest of my life falling behind (i'm a student). But in the long term that will happen if I take it anyway.
If I could just reduce my dosage and stop abusing it then i could fix that problem, but taking just a little adderall makes me more impulsive and confident and i always end up taking more.
Now and again, after staying up all night and fucking myself over 6 different ways, I start sobering up and reconnect with myself. I start thinking about my family and my friends, thinking about who i am and who i could be if i could really just stay true to what I know is right and good, and work hard and honestly, clean and sober, at every part of my life. I think about how I'm destroying myself and I know I'm going to hurt all the people I care about. All the opportunities I'm wasting. This is the state I'm in now. Right now I can see clearly and I feel in touch with myself.
The problem is, I only ever get here, to the state of mind where I can just see clearly, after a binge. If I just wake up tomorrow and don't take adderall, I'll be in a different kind of distorted world view that is also dissociative. I've let myself build these habits of denial, like invisible walls in my brain that set me on predictable behavior patterns, and i'm conditioned not to see it— I’m trained not to think outside of it once I’m in the pattern. Whether I'm on or off adderall I just can't remember the love I have for people I care about, or the hope and vision for a good, authentic, meaningful future. The further I go, the deeper I get. I think I can feel like myself after a binge— even though I’m burned out and feel terrible— because I’m basically sober, but I’m also temporarily outside of my habits. It will reset with sleep.
I’m sorry I don't really have a specific question because I don't really know what to ask or how. I feel like I've been possessed by a demon, and suddenly it has let me go just so I can look around at what's happening and know that when I wake up the demon will have me again. Basically, tomorrow all I've written here will be unconscious again, and I'll carry on on this terrible path. Maybe you could say I sold my soul more than I’m possessed, um, so to speak. Maybe both.
Brayden Brown
gib
Daniel Fisher
I suppose at a pretty deep level I feel like I need drugs because they help me be who I want to be. But not really. The gifts they give always become like something out of Dante or the Twilight Zone, and meanwhile the rest of you atrophies and becomes corrupted. Drugs train people to lie too. Or you could say people train themselves to lie when they use drugs. But that's one of the worst parts I've seen with others. After a certain point, you've betrayed yourself so much that you can barely recognize when you're lying or admit to yourself what’s right or wrong, and you can't have any respect for yourself. People you love no longer trust you, maybe they even resent you, and deep down you know they have good reason to. And when the people you love the most resent you, and for good reason, it’s pretty hard to bounce back or to feel okay about anything.
I'm not there yet. But I don't want to be. But I will be if I don’t fix it. I just wanted to write about this somewhere to make it real. To admit it. I've known this stuff at the back of my head, but I’ve never told anyone about this. Barely even to myself. I’m getting too good at keeping secrets and it's scaring me.
Hunter Sanchez
Now I need to cancel a music lesson I'm supposed to be at in an hour. It doesn't have to be this way I was looking forward to this fucking lesson but instead I'm laying in bed strung out, worrying about my heartbeat and a mystery pain in my side, trying to decide if i will be helping or hurting myself to attend classes today. And I can't stop thinking about death. The worst thing I could ever do-- the single thing that would be more terrible than anything i can imagine-- would be to fucking leave myself dead in this apartment for my brother to find me. Wtf. How could i ever fucking let myself do anything that might allow that to ever even be a remote possibility? I don't even care that much about being dead. How could I do that to my family? How? Wtf. The pain it would cause my brother and my parents and the harm i would cause them. I would not just die, I would taint the life I lived. My entire legacy would become a sad painful thing and that’s all I could give to the world once I’m gone like that. Everything I’ve done in life will always be looked at with a tinge of sadness. The happiest things will become the saddest things in memory. Horrible grief and pain. Everything I did and loved will become painful to my family and friends. I’ve already hurt them too much just by not being there for them, by letting myself not care about them, by failing in so many ways to do what i could have done, and they don't even know it.
But if I can just stop. this. stupid. shit. and be fucking honest with myself and just be a relatively sober, honest, responsible person-- if i can do that then things don't have to be terrible.
Gabriel Allen
>When I stop taking it I become depressed and unmotivated and can’t get out of bed and i don’t care about anything. Yeah, Adderall withdrawal is a huge bitch.
I get the feeling from reading your post that you take it on a “demand” or “as needed” basis rather than a fixed, rigid schedule of an exact dosage at an exact time. One of the keys to getting off painkillers is gradual weaning using a rigid schedule. Adderall weaning should work the same way.
Do you have one of those meds sorters? Like that have separate holes for each day of the week?
Adrian Mitchell
I'm just in so deep already. And there's only one thing that makes me feel like i can solve all my problems, and gives me the confidence and motivation to work towards them-- for a couple hours or a day before i get lost blowing all my time in inconceivably stupid, ludicrous, conceited bullshit ways and waking up next week feeling how i do now, but that much deeper into the ocean of shit. And then waking up in a month or a year with my life trashed in God knows how many ways. Depending on drugs just makes you regress. Habits, attitudes and internalized responsibilities get blown out. Eventually people will be crushed when they learn how immature, careless and callous I’ve become. I’ll feel crushed. Right now I can still coast along on the reserves of who I used to be, but eventually the tank will be empty and so will my bank account. I’ll feel small. An inflated ego that’s popped and shriveled. But if I could just shed all the pretense and be real and know that I’ve got my feet on the ground instead of running in place in the thin air like an idiot cartoon character, then that could be worth it.
>post is called addicted to adderall >it’s 5,384 pages in five volumes, unedited prose with 3 forwards, an introduction AND an author’s note.
Thanks man that's good advice. I do take it on demand and it's definitely a big part of the problem. A lot of the time I'll make an adderall decision to redose late. Then I end up staying up all night. Then redosing to get through the next day, then passing out and sleeping 12-16 hours. Wake up feeling like a zombie. Does once. Get kind of impulsive, decide to take another. Then repeat.
It's the staying up all night that really gets me. I do it because I think I'll be productive but I end up wasting the whole night hour by hour. Then on mornings like this I have nothing to show for it. The whole reason I did it was to finish some assignments and now I'm not even going to class.
It largely comes down to trying to be productive for me. I have a million things I want to do. I think a lot of people who get hooked on adderall and amphetamines generally have some kind of big ambition or ideal of being really productive at whatever they do. The other side of it is low self-esteem which they're probably trying to compensate for. Adderall makes you feel like you can do anything. And it kind of does make it so you can do anything but then it trains you to make terrible decisions and spend all your time doing other shit.
Elijah Gutierrez
It varies. In the last 28 hours I took 6 XR 20 mg. That's a high tide for me though.
3 a day is probably average for me, but some days I don't take any. I usually need to take 2 to feel normal. When I get into a binge cycle like this it's usually around 5.
Bentley Sullivan
This thread is mostly you venting your feelings
You sound like a typical smart but lazy with no aspirations
Christian Powell
Howdy user. Fellow adderall abuser here. I quit periodically then end up taking it again, but not as habitually as before. I'm considering cutting out a factor in my life that is making me want to use. So, adderall causes intense anxiety during and while coming down. Even the next day withdraws. I started having totally false palpitations that led me to believe that I was going to have a heart attack, that led to an intense panic attack. It also can make me super super irritable. That being said, you need to wait. Wait until school is on holiday and then quit it cold turkey. If you try and quit while you have all this shit going on, you'll just use again. In the mean time, learn to manage your anxiety better, and make a list of all your basic needs and if you're keeping up with them, and if not, how you can do better.
Owen Sanders
Also, make some fucking rules. You are not allowed to take it past a certain time. You are not allowed more than x amount. Realize that this is serious. You are taking more than you even need to. Convince yourself that it's about resetting your tolerance, at least.
Hunter Scott
OP here.
You were on track at first but far off with the aspirations part. If i had no aspirations i would never need adderall. I probably wouldn't even enjoy it much.
I'm actually someone who can't relax most of the time. I have many aspirations and I spend most of my time doing things related to them.
But I have a lot of clear goals for myself and my life in the short-term and long-term that require a lot of work to reach. That's probably the whole reason adderall is so attractive to me.
Mason Robinson
>make a list of all your basic needs and if you're keeping up with them, and if not, how you can do better.
Damn, that's a really good idea. I'm not sure how to get much better about anxiety right now though. I have a bunch of different problems of different magnitudes and time frames, but my perceptions of them are always skewed depending on what/how much drugs are in my system. Adderall alieviates certain kinds of anxiety and makes you more confident, but it also increases other kinds of anxiety, more general physiological I guess.
But yeah, setting a rule on when to dose would probably help get that part under control. I've always rationalized liberal dosing one way or another, but i can't do that any more. If i could just stop these binges that might be the biggest single short term problem i could fix.
Levi Foster
>120 mg XR in a roughly a day Holy moly, that's a lot. 60 mg of IR a day is the most I've ever seen prescribed.
I think the package insert for XR says 50 mg/day is the max. Typically you might get 30 mg in the morning and a "booster" of IR in the early afternoon.
Scheduling doses is a good idea. Dialing back is a good idea. What's your blood pressure like dude?
Bentley Miller
You definitely hit the nail with your post. I liken using drugs to using cheat codes in a video game. Remember when you found all the cheats to GTA? At first its amazing, you instantly have millions of dollars, all the weapons, invincibility, the game becomes way more fun.
But it doesnt last. After a while it becomes too easy. And then just plain pointless. So you go back to playing the game 'how it was supposed to be', but now that just seems unfairly hard, slow, and tedious.
My drug of choice is weed. Im 25, started when I was 18 and been pretty regular user since. I stopped last year for 4 months, I really had no desire anymore. Traveled out to colorado, was tempted several times before I finally caved, best high ever, and now ive been binging for months since.
Now 3 days sober and beginning to see the hole I fell back into. But when you're in the hole, you dont even know you're in one.
Lucas Barnes
I wasn't wrong. I'm saying you simply don't aspire. You dream but your ADHD gets in the way of working towards it more often.
Jeremiah Moore
Yeah, i never do that back to back. But maybe 3 days out of a week, with off days in between.
I'm actually only prescribed 20mg a day. So these kinds of binges really screw me up because i run out way early. I can buy more pretty easily, but that gets expensive.
My blood pressure can't be good most of the time, although i just had it checked and it was 115/72 somehow. I wasn't on anything at the time though. I am pretty concerned about my health at this point though and any long-term neurotoxicity.
Jaxon Bailey
Dude you’re a moron. I know how I spend my time. You’re partly right here, but only because you changed what you were saying after I told you you were wrong.
>You dream but your ADHD gets in the way of working towards it more often.
That's the most pussy-footed way to change your what you were saying. Yeah, of course I dream and ADHD gets in the way. How'd you figure that out? When I said I take adderall?
That doesn't mean I'm lazy and ambitionless. I actually think I am more driven than most of my peers, and I do work hard and I do accomplish things. Especially back before my life was in shambles, but even these days. I make tangible progress and I have plenty of accomplishments that would commonly be considered things to be proud of.
About a year ago I was working 24-28 hours a week, taking 15 hours of university classes and playing in a band, practicing ~12 hours a week with the band. All of that's not including my own practice for the band and for other instruments I play. And of course it's not including homework.
I'm not handling all that now, of course. I'm mostly just watching my life fall apart in shambles. But you don't know what you're talking about.
If anything dude it sounds to me like you’ve just got some kind of compulsion where you like to box people up in these faggy cardboard cutout ideas about what they are and how they work, so that you can validate you're boring-know-it-all, hollowed-out worldview and have a make-believe person to be better than.
If you can stick your little lable-box shit categories on me or anybody else and imply “not like me.” And I guess that makes you feel all good and faggy inside like some kind of.. faggot or something.
Idk man, I just don't get it.
Luis Martinez
OP here,
Yeah man I could totally see that being the case with weed.
I've never been a big smoker, but I have definitely noticed that effect. I did like it in high school when it was always like kind of a special thing on weekends or whenever and it was always fun and ridiculous.
I can't smoke much though because it makes me paranoid and easily confused, lol. It makes incapable of functioning in about 90% of situations, except maybe with extreme discomfort.
But one thing I've always loved about weed is how much it enhances appreciation for music. And it's something you can take with you a bit back to the sober world. It enhances art and beauty in general. It kind of amplifies things, if that makes sense. Feelings, beauty, creativity, perceptions. I also like the creative thinking that comes with it, and it can be inspiring, but I often find things to be confusing and overwhelming after I smoke. And to top it off, I find that it raises things that are normally unconscious into conscious awareness. Some of that stuff's kind of hard to deal with, especially in social situations and all that. It will always reveal unconscious attitudes and feelings and stuff that I have to me. It kind of feels like I'm thinking too many thoughts at once, or like there's parallel streams of thought, or like I'm picking up on different frequencies that are interfering. It's really confusing. Especially when I start really breaking down my own mind as it's running.
I don't really think it's good for my mental well being. Deep epistemological skepticism starts seeping in through the cracks under the doors if you know what I mean. I think some people are comfortable with that. I find it very destabilizing. Leaves me feeling all stultified and shit. Kind of like Hamlet or something. You know, talking to ghosts and contemplating clown skulls. "To be or not to be," and stuff.
David Lee
I'm amazed how offended you got by that. Your reproach tells me more than any admission of truth
Chase Rivera
Haha, dude. You're just gonna pussyfoot in exactly the same way as before? What a cop out.
I enjoyed writing the post, and there's nothing there that implies personal offense. It's pretty straightforward, organized and logical writing actually. I am assuming you concede every point I made then as long as you get to keep pretending you're winning? I understand that I explained how dumb your posts were and you had no retort, but could you be more obvious about proving the speculations i made about you later? I was half joking man..
Honestly though I really hope you'll actually share what my reproach "told" you though. Since that's totally not meaningless pussyfooting and empty cliche or anything.
