im confused as to why people with adhd have this and i have heard stories that my mother (who has adhd) has taken handfuls of methamphetamine salts and then just gone straight to sleep despite them being stimulants.
is this real and if so how do they work?
In: Biology
I don’t have an answer for the first question but nobody here has properly explained how ADHD works, so I will (using data from Dr. Russel Barkley)
Put simply, your brain has Dopamine, which bind to receptors. Your brain gives you dopamine as a reward for positive actions like eating. This makes you want to do that thing more.
Dopamine makes you feel good. It regulates movement, helps you remember things, helps you control impulses, and indirectly motivates you.
When your brain decides you’ve had enough dopamine, Inhibitors kick in and stop dopamine binding to receptors.
People with ADHD (like myself) have too many of these receptors, so the brain ends up blocking far too much dopamine resulting in not enough.
This is where the symptoms of ADHD appear. Without dopamine, the impatience, moving around alot and jumpiness are seen because dopamine isn’t there to help regulate it.
The attention side isnt because people with ADHD can’t pay attention, it’s because they have barely any dopamine to motivate them to pay attention.
This is also seen in Parkinsons, where patients lack dopamine too. That’s a big reason why you see videos of people smoking weed and their shakes easing .
Drugs effect different people differently.
Too dumbed down for you?
Put a rat in rat in a cage and give it no stimuli except drugs, and you can create a drug addicted rat.
Put a rat in a cage with lots of stimuli, including drugs, and you have the same rat who could take or leave the drugs.
Table sugar is 8x more addictive than cocaine; we have an obesity epidemic, but war on drugs.
A war on drugs cannot be “won”. It can cease, or it can continue on forever.
And if you want a vision of the future of the war on drugs, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
You know how you teleport round the map when you’re lagged to fuck?
Speed up the connection, start to move normally. You can keep up with everything that’s going on, and don’t constantly fly off at a tangent.
The Brain of a person who has adhd is in constant need of stimulation that’s why it chooses to stimulate itself (by changing topics, changing focus, being active in some cases) stimulants do that for them and now they don’t need to self stimulate which makes them more calm and focused
The part of their brains that deal with concentration and impulse control are essentially under stimulated.
Yes it’s real, I took an adderall from my friend (his moms meds) for fun before a concert and ended up feeling extremely calm and focused / bored all night!!! That confirmed to me I have a slight case of ADHD but high functioning and doesn’t really show up to people.
A friend of mine has ADHD and says they feel like they are over-tired, you know that level of tired where you’re drunk and can’t control yourself well. The stimulants make them less tired and they regain control. That’s how they see it.
EDIT: Which they say is also why they can take TOO many stimulants and be wired just like everybody else.
In ADHD part of the brain is not stimulated enough, which leads to the patient constantly seeking input.
Stimulants bring this part of the brain back to normal.
In my many years on Adderall l, I can say that the stimulants still have a classic stimulant effect on our bodies, but they also correct chemical imbalances in our brains, allowing us to pay attention more effectively and stay more on focus.
So far everyone is giving very technical answers, but this is explain like I’m five, so that’s what I’ll do. (I have ADHD and take extended release adderall.)
Picture your brain as a TV set. The different thoughts you have are ‘channels.’ You can ‘flip’ through your channels at will, going back and forth right? Well, someone with ADHD can’t control their TV channels. They will be focused on one channel, then all of a sudden, the channel changes. They can’t focus on this new channel because they still remember the last channel, but not really. Also, some channels are louder than others. Some channels have picture in picture or are paused or going double speed.
All of this is EXHAUSTING to keep track of which drains your focus and energy. Adderall and other stimulants gives your brain the energy to keep up with itself, ‘giving you back the control of your TV.’
Hope that helps!
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