So, being a young adult with a suspicion of having some sort of the aforementioned, I’ve read that the treatment involves medicine of the stimulant sort.
Wouldn’t that make the underlying anxiety and restlessness worse? Or is it some sort of “shove” to artificial motivation, like making an old engine start up? Thanks in advance.
In: Biology
Different parts of your brain communicate via a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine basically tells some parts of your brain that whatever you’re doing right now is very important. If you have ADHD, some parts of your brain receive too little dopamine and they can’t communicate with each other properly. Let’s say you want to do homework. The network that’s responsible for your consciousness is aware of how important this is, but the part of your brain that is actually used to focus on that doesn’t receive the signal. That means you consciously want to focus but you physically can’t.
Stimulants generally increase the concentration of dopamine. If you didn’t have enough dopamine before, now you have, and you can normally focus on the work you want to do. If you however do not have ADHD, stimulants make you have too much dopamine. With too much dopamine released in your brain, suddenly everything becomes extremely important. You are extremely awake, you don’t think about eating or sleeping anymore because other things are more important, and eventually you cannot focus anymore because everything around you becomes equally important.
That’s where the unexpected reaction comes from. Stimulants actually always work the same, it’s just that some people don’t really need them so they would take too much and automatically have non-lethal overdose side effects, if you will. Please note that this is a huge oversimplification, as dopamine does a lot more than that, and another chemical called norepinephrine or noradrenaline usually also plays a role in stimulants, but that would be way too much for an ELI5 🙂
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