ADHD severely disrupting my life

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I need to vent my frustration over this so badly. How should I describe my mind? How can I describe it? There is something about an ADHD brain that requires this constant stimulation, it's like I just can't sit still, I have extreme difficulty concentrating or focusing on anything. On any given day my mind has this chronic stimulation deprivation, and it seeks to fill this void with ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING!! I find myself chronically entertaining my mind with the most ridiculous and obsessive thoughts that re-play in my mind over and over for months with a bunch of different ideas and things that I read or hear about going on. My mind is just utterly chaotic and dysfunctional, so bad that I often find my thoughts jumping literally tens of different subjects in a matter of minutes, I could go from thinking about the bus ride in the morning and that leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else and before I know it I'm thinking about something completely foreign like politics or religion or something like that and I catch myself doing this several times a day, every day. I often stop myself and ask, how did I go from thinking about the bus ride in the morning, to politics. So I stop and trace the train thoughts and often realize I just jumped like 15 different subjects in only a few minutes.

This thought dysfunction going on in my mind is has been really affecting me for years and making it extremely difficult to focus on goals and my personal development, I find myself often declining into a negative obsessive thought-rambling over something so extremely trivial and unimportant, and I do this periodically throughout the day. It's like my mind just cannot get enough stimulation and it seeks constantly by going from one stimulus to the next, in rapid fashion with no end, from the time I wake up till I fall asleep at night. A lot of times my mind is so overactively thinking about stuff that I can't sleep till like 2 or 3 in the morning, sometimes when I know I have to do something in the morning I don't sleep at all and I could do this for a couple of days going on no sleep all because I'm thinking too much.

I don't understand where this lack of mind-stimulation comes from and why my brain seems to require all this external stimulation CONSTANTLY! I just can't put it into perspective how disrupting it is, it's so difficult to get things done and stick to any mid-long term goal. I seek to resolve a lot of bad behaviors, habits and insecurities by means of introspection and self-reflection, but because my thoughts are so chaotic and impulsive it has been extremely difficult to make progress in this area of personal development for me.

So, I hired a psychiatrist and he prescribed me Adderall XR. My self observations while being under its influence twice a day for 3 months have been mostly positive, except that it suppresses the appetite. While on it my mind slows down and I can see things a lot more clearly, I must say I've had some powerful and productive moments of self-reflection and contemplation while on the drug, more-so than I could normally do while off of it since I'm usually so scrambled. While on it I was also finally able to slow down and focus long enough to do some great research on my musculoskeletal system in order to correct a posture imbalance. BUT, I did an experiment and stopped taking it to see what would happen and within a week a lot of the self progress I thought I made I saw regressed into more of the old disruptive and bad behaviors, distractiveness, impulsivity and I also lost sight of a lot of my goals and other self-revelations and self-improvements I had made...

Leading me to conclude; that in order to retain the personal progress I make while on the drug, I would have to keep taking the drug, therefore and become dependent on it, any progress I would make would be somewhat superficial because as soon as I stop taking it, I will regress and a lot of the progress would be greatly lost. Stimulative meds only temporarily subdue the symptoms of ADHD and are not a permanent solution, and I am also justifiably concerned about unseen long-term consequences of taking an amphetamine, enough so that this is one of my main reasons for discontinuing it. I don't believe these lab synthesized drugs are the solution, not even a temporary one. I seek out an alternative method such as diet, sound stimulus, and I'm looking into certain herbs as well. My research has been slow mainly because I'm having trouble keeping focused, but I believe there has to be a way.

This is quite something to deal with... I hope others will understand what I'm going through.

If you had astigmatism, wore glasses or contacts, and were able to read easily while wearing them, would you quit wearing them 6 months later because they "were just a temporary solution"?

If you had diabetes & had it controlled with insulin, would you throw in the towel, quit taking it 6 months later, and just wait to die because it didn't permanently fix your problem?

Eating doesn't permanently fix hunger, but that probably didn't stop you from having breakfast today. Or lunch. Or dinner.

Do you drink coffee or soft drinks for breakfast to get caffeine? How, qualitatively, is that different from Adderall? At least the Adderall won't give you diarrhea if you overdose, and it won't give you a splitting headache (the way caffeine does) if you build up a tolerance to it, then go a day without taking it. It won't give you lung cancer the way smoking cigarettes for the nicotine will. And you're far more likely to die from a heart attack before you're 50 if you spend your life in a state of perpetual stress and panic from untreated ADD than if you just do the sensible thing and keep enjoying the benefits of Adderall.

Will you become "dependent" upon Adderall? Physically, no. You won't. You might establish expectations that can't be sustained without it, but that's not "dependence", and giving up Adderall to avoid it makes about as much sense as throwing away your glasses and giving up your ability to read just because you might lose them someday.

In the long run, we're all ultimately dead. Put another way, the short run matters. It's silly to give up something you yourself have admitted was a net benefit just because it's not a "permanent" solution.

Your analogies are weak and reflect a lack of understanding and research on your part. I did not intend this thread to be a discussion about Adderall and I would rather it not go in that direction because it is rather unimportant compared to the bigger picture of my post. But briefly, I found evidence that taking Adderall could make the problem worse and have other adverse effects in the long run. And as far as physical dependence goes, yes it can be, as well as psychologically, during my 3 months taking it every day I noticed this personally. For you to casually assume that an AMPHETAMINE that you probably have never even taken, can not be physically dependent contradicts every known fact about amphetamines. Comparing glasses worn externally on your face to ingesting an amphetamine stimulant drug composed of 4 different chemicals is a shallow comparison.

I feared that this might turn into a discussion about Adderall and I wish it will not. I'm not trying to convince anyone anything about this drug, nor am I open to be persuaded otherwise from what I have learned about Adderall.

I know exactly how the OP feels.

Its fun having ADHD, AS and Depression all at once. You need constant stimulation, your mind never shuts the f**k up, no matter how much you meditate. Psychiatrist appointments don't even help (the even took me off the meds because of no noted improvements). You can't even focus on your interests either because you have to constantly do something else every few moments. Not to mention tossing in the depression on top of it, if my mind decides to go and randomly think about certain BS in my life, I go from depressed to meltdown really quick. (not to mention it is unpreventable as to what subject my thoughts wander to. Don't even suggest meditation when I have been practicing it for a few years and it hasn't helped with this, it just helped with anxiety.

So yeah, the break becomes one huge clusterf**k of a mess.

With these words you have bullied a respondent to your original post. You were not attacked. Why bully in response?

It's ok, I can handle it. I'm just scratching my head and trying to figure out why somebody would basically shoot himself in the foot and quit taking meds that work and benefit him in blatantly obvious ways. I personallly have no qualms about better living through chemistry. I owe my quality of life and career to methylphenidate and amphetamines, and I'm not the least bit shy about admitting it. It hurts to see others needlessly struggle and be miserable just because they have a hang-up about meds. Especially when they don't see the irony of substituting caffeine and/or nicotine, and drowning out their sorrows with alcohol (not saying that HE personally does, but I've seen so many postings from people who think there's something smart or enlightened about substituting them for amphetamines or methylphenidate, I just kind of feel tragic schadenfreude whenever I see them).

Also, just to reply to his assertion that I don't know what I'm talking about with regard to ADD meds, probably the only person here who knows more about them than me is Tambourine-Man (he knows more about amphetamines, most of my experience up until about a year ago was with methylphenidate). NextFact doesn't list his age, but if he's younger than 30, I was taking oldschool Ritalin before he was a sperm cell, and Desoxyn is the only stimulant med I *haven't* tried yet (but will possibly be adding Desoxyn the list in about a week, thanks to the Great Amphetamine Famine and Tambourine-Man's overwhelmingly positive opinion of it).

my own issue is with the damn psych I went to, and there aren't many options where I live either, you get what you get. No way am I going through hell of finding one perhaps 100 miles away.

I have asperger and add and I I actually have a much better life due to the add. My pits of depression are never as dark as many other aspies, because the add side kicks me up and forces me to do something. I'm also more social than I would probably be if I was just as. Sure, it sucks that I have to take medication to be abled to concentrate fully on my university studies, but that's life. One thing that I've found really helpful with the concentration problems is working out at the gym. When you get rid off that extra energy, it's much more easy to focus (and working out is good for your health)

I find that my mind is constantly racing. I'm constantly thinking, and worrying about even the smallest things. It's great though when I'm trying to independently solve a problem through critical thinking - because my mind can multitask quite well, and form multiple concepts at one time, and combine them and formulate a solution in a pretty short amount of time. So it can be cumbersome, but it can also be pretty cool too. People with ADHD are usually very interesting people.

I'm like you too. It's 2 am here in Canada and I can't get to sleep because I want to study economics on the internet.

Also

I am exactly like this. But only on my "good days" then my BPD gets the best of me