Image not quite for ADHPeeps but I feel this sort of thing happens regularly for us as well.
Extreme anxiety.
For the longest time, I couldn’t recruit enough concentration to get homework or big projects done until it was this huge looming threat. Frequently, that would involve an all-nighter since it was something due the next day. Other times, it meant cranking out last night’s math assignment in home room mere minutes before it was due. It turns out that adrenaline and other stress hormones are great at shoving all the ADHD noise out of the way, however temporarily.
Interesting experience. My partner who we suspect has ADHD always used to be up all night writing essays on the deadline in uni too.
This was it for me, entirely. Deadlines were my drug.
Alcohol. Before getting formally diagnosed and medicated, drinking was the only thing that would quiet the inner restlessness. It worked but it’s not a healthy lifestyle at all.
This is something I like to bring up to people who are hesitant to medicate their kids. Yeah, I know you think Timmy is fine because he’s not completely failing in school, but you should at least show Timmy that he has options and that it’s OK to talk to a doctor and take medication if he needs it. He doesn’t have to rely on Jack Daniels and Folgers to eek his way through life.
This one surprised me, too.
I had a nasty habit of waiting until the evening to do my papers in college, because that was when it was acceptable to have some wine or whiskey while I wrote. But it was amazing just how much easier it was to stay on task after having a drink, and during finals - or after college when i was on deadline - i would alternate between liters of coffee in the morning and several drinks in the evening.
Now that I’m medicated both coffee and alcohol are just occasional indulgences… well, alcohol is at least. But I didn’t expect it to help curb my impulsive consumption habits like it has- it’s been a game-changer.
Neurotypicals think they have this superior discipline and attitude to “get on the task”, and I believed them, too! Now, medicated, I realise that they only work on these constant dopamine micro rewards in their prefrontal cortex. Which I now get, too.
I’ve been cutting back on caffeine finally because I thought it was my medicine giving me anxiety, and I’m pretty sure it’s the caffeine. Now I’m usually at about two cups of coffee in the morning (the mug I have is American large, and I always seem to fill it up).
My exam trick was no coffee for two days before the exam, then a couple cups the morning of. Worked great. In other news, holy crap, do I have ADHD??
Weed to let me take things slowly. Otherwise thoughts spiral out of control, I want to do 1000 things at the same time and can’t focus on a single thing. Weed gives me focus, and those eye blinders that people used to put on horses so they would have a narrower field of view, whatever they’re called. I’m not english I’m so concentrated I almost forget to eat on days I have an edible,… and I’m a foodie
They’re called blinkers - the horse vision limiters
Thank you
Mini thins (gas station speed) and Red Bull. At least that’s what I did in the 90s before I was diagnosed. Oh and pulling all nighters since my tired brain worked more like a normal brain.
This is caffeine acting on brain and unlikely any change in blood pressure per se. You can try measuring bp a few time before and after chugging red bull to see how much it changes.
Oh it does change, it’s still a stimulant. AFAIK basically all stimulants increase blood pressure. The degree varies of coarse…
it gets very fun with adhd where stimulants calm you down. So you’re sitting there chilling, slightly sleepy, and then you see your hands shaking lmao
Man, very true. I used to be totally in the zone after a coffee, because I rarely drank it, but I hated the physical nerviness that came with it. Bizarre mixture of mental calm and physical anxiety.
I remember one time I randomly had a really bad reaction to caffeine. Normally I have no real physical reaction to caffeine, but this time my body went crazy, hands shaking, dry mouth, I was kinda panicking honestly.
It made me completely bomb a game of tf2 6v6 and my maincaller got really mad at me :c
W dad
Chewing gum almost every waking moment of the day. People used to assume I was trying to quit smoking, I would joke that I was actually trying to build my way up to starting.
I used to love chewing gum until a dentist scared me away from it. As a result, my undiagnosed grinding destroyed most of my teeth…
I’m sorry. If you can still chew, ice breakers has Xylitol which is good for teeth.
What’s “ice breakers”?
It’s the gum I chew instead of grinding my teeth and also when I’m sticking to my diet while feeding my husband ice cream (he’s quadriplegic and skinny)
A brand of gum and mints.
I am thankful that my dentist talked me into switching to a sugar-free brand years ago. Probably saved me a couple teeth so far.
ADHD, self-medicating behaviour from childhood in the form of candy seeking. Impossible impulse to control and occurs when experiencing a dip in concentration/boredom. It helped me focus for very brief moments.
Ooooh man as a kid I didn’t really like stuff that was strongly sweet or sour. But as an adult sour candy were my thing to the point that I burnt out them even tasting sour. I’d eat a family size bag of sour Skittles on long drives to help me concentrate.
Only sour candy though.
Sour candy still has a lot of sugar in it. Plus, acid can make us feel awake. Works well against nausea too.
Oh yeah for sure it has a ton of sugar. It’s just well masked by the sour.
I used to drink 4 red bulls or 2-3 rockstar energy drinks per day. This was on top of any coffee.
Now, diagnosed and medicated, I’m down to zero and I rarely drink coffee.
I was clearing three, sometimes even four Rockstars per day not too long ago. Just got to where they didn’t even affect me much, and cracking open fresh ones throughout the day just made me feel alert and good. I got it back down to just one every morning around 5 or 6am, with maybe a second in the afternoon once per week – usually on a Saturday or Sunday when running errands and trying to survive parenthood. I’m in my late-thirties now, and need to find an effective alternative, but coffee makes me feel poisoned… almost like there’s toxic metals coursing through my veins.
Tried pairing coffee with taurine to counteract the negative side-effects of the caffeine, but it doesn’t work quite as well without whatever witch’s brew they throw in with it in energy drinks.
I love redbull and I have Gamersupps powder that is basically energy drink in a powder. It’s a good replacement for when I don’t have a redbull handy. Very very similar effect on my body
Try caffeine pills instead of coffee.
Caffeine pills gave me heart arrhythmia for like 2 months. I had to wear a monitor and everything.
Pill form is so much more potent, and I was splitting them, effectively bypassing the coating that helps it dissolve slowly. Your body is just not meant to absorb 150mg of caffeine instantaneously. Crazy I know.
Recently got diagnosed with asthma and just have an albuterol inhaler till I can see a specialist in 4 plus months, haven’t been able to get an ADHD test despite my doctors referral, just so you have a preface for my story here.
On days I work toward my goals I generally start with a 16 oz doubled tea, gives me stimulants which I can’t get at the moment and I generally am able to focus on my tasks for 2 hour stents or so. I have some days though that despite getting rest and having a dose of caffeine I get real low energy around my first hour. Recently, during one of these moments I was trying to take a break and realized my breathing was quite shallow and I was somewhat short of breath, so I used my inhaler and I had a rush of energy and was able to knock out all my tasks with energy to spare. Turns out most of my low energy days have been actually about my low blood oxygen and the effects of having undiagnosed asthma. This has happened to me several times now and it blows me away each time. I think to myself “So this is how normal people breath and get so much done.”
Dang a pug with ADHD. I’m glad you have it somewhat sorted, though.
Too accurate lol.
What were your oxygen levels?
My sympathies as a fellow asthma sufferer, but congrats on the medication at least. It’s really crazy how much easier everything in general is when you can breathe!
For my own research purpose, would you be able to test your oxygen levels with those check oxygen meters that we get or may be one of those inbuilt Oxygen meters in smart watches?
I’m too poor to own a smart watch, maybe an idea for when I can.
Edit: Also they haven’t gave me an oxygen meter. Perhaps that is something the specialist does but not doctor in my state?
You could get one of the fingertip sensors, they’re not terribly expensive.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I was put on bupropion for depression and, while it didn’t work perfectly, it worked far better than the other antidepressants I had been on. Then I found out that it’s frequently used off label to treat ADHD and I started to have some suspicions. Long story short, now I’m diagnosed and on a stimulant and it’s amazing.
I have some heart issues, so my doctor put me on bupropion to see if it would touch my ADHD symptoms. I don’t think that it has, but it has helped a bit with my depression.
I wish there was a stimulant out there that didn’t risk making my heart issues worse. I think getting my ADHD under control would also go a long way towards helping with my depression and anxiety. Unfortunately we’ve mostly been addressing the symptoms of the depression and anxiety and not the ADHD.
A friend of mine has the same issue and they just got put on a beta blocker along side the stimulant. According to my psychiatrist, that is fairly common.
But also yeah, controlling my adhd almost completely removed my depression and anxiety symptoms. Doctors tried to treat just my depression/anxiety for over a decade with only marginal results. I had the same experience with the bupropion, it helped with the depression but it didn’t do much for the actual executive function.
So much fucking coffee. My god it was too much.
My dad still swears it was the red bull and snickers and not the medical …
Wild that someone would think the Red Bull and Snickers are doing it directly without going through the some-ingredients-in-these-products-are-affecting-your-body route.
When I start having a feeling of getting a cold I drink Bayer’s Aspirin Plus C. It’s literally just aspirin and vitamin C but I swear it works. Not drinking aspirin and vitamin C but only this overpriced combination. When it is dissolved in water, grossly enough. Nothing else works. If I don’t drink it, I get a cold.
I literally worked in pharmaceutical science and I know this is complete bullshit borderlining homeopathy but I still swear by it. I wrote a whole academic work on vitamin C supplementation having no effect on getting a cold. And I still do it 😭
placebo is one hell of a uh not drug!
i noticed that sometimes when i have something important coming up, and i start feeling ill, i can just, force myself to stop? Literally tell myself “nuhuh, we’re not getting ill right now, that’s not the time” and it works? well not always, but more than it should
That might actually be cortisol released by a stress response. Do you tend to get sick a couple of days later when “there’s time”?
sometimes! other times it goes away entirely. I vividly remember the first time it happened, it was the first day of vacation at my great grandmother’s place. i started feeling ill but got so mad at that fact i woke up the next day feeling healthy again, and got to enjoy my vacation fully :)
Nice! That’s a great sign of how our mind can control our body. Something that we biomedics sometimes struggle with, in our eternal search for pathways.
I often had this when I had to study for exams. I was so stressed that I didn’t allow myself to get sick, and once the last exam was done, the stress level fell and I got so sick.
I learned about Linus Pauling’s ideas on Vitamin C supplementation. Pretty interesting stuff, especially wrt heart disease. I’m paraphrasing but if I remember correctly he theorized that our appendix used to produce vitamin C and that it somehow mutated away from that, and the lack of the vital nutrient causes heart disease problems with humans and all the great apes. Apparently we all get heart disease like cats have bad kidneys. He thought huge doses of vitamin C were the answer.
Yes, he is usually (and anecdotally) used in every introduction to works that cover vitamins and supplementation 😅 but unfortunately his ideas weren’t really backed by science. If you eat more vitamin c than you can absorb, you just pee it out. We actually did that in university (control group, breakfast group, breakfast + 1g of vitamin c group, testing the pee and I think capillary blood). Now, I think there are some findings with intravenous vitamin c acting like an oxidizing agent and killing cancer (?) cells, but macrodosing orally just doesn’t give you any effect.
Also, fun fact, your RDA can be met by eating one frozen pizza because vitamin c is used as a food additive everywhere.
macrodosing vitamin c gives my awful stomach cramps :(
Wow people that drank redbull have kids in college already, I guess it does make you move quicker
Red bull was invented in ’87…
Big if true! Would’ve never thought red bull was older than me!
I definitely haven’t drunk it this millennium
True, but it depends on their country. Wasn’t brought to the UK until '94 and the US in '96. And on top of that when did they become widespread in their respective country?
Very well could be true, could be an anachronism, or could be someone who refers to all energy drinks as red bull.
But the real irony is doing this research for an ADHD meme.
Or I’m old enough that I was drinking red bull when it came out, in college in the early 90’s and stopped by about 2000 when I was in uni because it was what gave me the worst hangovers… sometimes “research” is just remembering things
Sorry, I meant my research not yours.
I was drinking Red Eye before I could drink beer (18 in Australia) so probably in 1993 or '94. That has the same caffeine level as red bull, tasted better too.