why do stimulants have a calming effect for people with ADHD?
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People with ADHD, depending on what the root cause is, can have a situation where the part of their brain that governs their focus is a little underactive. Stimulants can give that part of the brain a boost, which enables them to concentrate their attention more easily.
One part of the brain that is highly stimulated by ADHD meds is the frontal lobe, which is in charge of “executive functions.” These are things like planning, prioritizing things, impulse control, etc. People with ADHD have executive functions that can be “overwhelmed” by inputs from the rest of the brain, stimulating the frontal lobe’s function therefore helps it manage everything more effectively.
To put it even more simply: it’s a misconception that people with ADHD are overexcited and need to be calmed down. The reason is actually because their brains are inclined to be “slower”, so if they’re not continually getting stimulation, they become distracted and do other things. The reason why the ADHD kid is walking around poking people or swinging on a chair isn’t because they’re over-stimulated; it’s because their brains *need* stimulation.
Hence, ADHD medication is meant to provide that chemical stimulation on the brain. This allows the person to be more attentive because their brains aren’t pulling them away to find stimulation.
It doesn’t calm them. They become focused, which makes them appear calm on the outside.
Amphetamines are a stimulant. There is no known animal whose central nervous system is depressed by them.
Meth users sometimes appear more calm too, and it’s because if they’re not overly stimulated by a high dose, and are on a more moderate dose, it’s enough to get their brain more active thinking about something.
Imagine the brain is a city with a lot of cars going everywhere. Now the problem is that the traffic light system is slow and uncoordinated. The person controlling it is just too slow. ADHD medication stimulates the person controlling the traffic lights, making the flow of traffic smoother. Same amount of cars, but now the regulation of them is enough for optimal flow.
Ps.: thank you kind internet friends! I’m sure I was borrowing the analogy, most likely from here: https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-brain-prefrontal-cortex-attention-emotions/
People with ADHD aren’t actually “hyper,” in the traditional sense.
It mostly comes from the fact that their brains don’t give the “good job,” signal that non-ADHD brains do when the person completes a task. As such, their brains are constantly looking for stimulation in a bunch of different places, leading to the appearance of hyperactivity.
Stimulants help by essentially *always* giving the “good job,” signal to their brains, allowing them to stay focused on whatever they’re doing.
We have less dopamine. We try to bounce around from thing to thing to get the dopamine we don’t have. Pill gives dopamine. Now we don’t need to look for it.
ADHD isn’t so much energy to do a lot of things, it’s more like constantly being bored by everything and needing to do something else. The stimulant makes them not get bored by something so they can do it for a longer period of time
Here’s how my psychiatrist explained it:
There’s a part of your brain dedicated to keeping track of what’s going on and deciding how important it is and what resources to allocate it. When a loud noise suddenly starts up, it takes notice immediately and orders the rest of your brain to try and recognize it, to get ready to move in case it’s a danger, to listen more carefully for further noises, to move attention away from other stuff to handle this, etc. As that noise continues for 10 minutes (turns out it’s just the new air conditioner starting up) that part of your brain cancels its orders and instead tells everyone to completely ignore it, it’s not important after all. Your brain totally tunes it out and after a while you don’t even realize it’s there anymore. Eventually the air conditioner turns off and things sound weirdly quiet, and you think “oh huh, I guess that noise has been going all day.”
That part of you is constantly doing stuff like that, tuning out the unnecessary details you might notice so you can focus on the important stuff. A pigeon lands in your backyard, visible in the corner of your eye. A car drives past on the road outside. Your roommate watches a movie down the hall. A breeze ruffles 3000 hairs on your head. You hear it, you see it, you feel it, but your brain is mostly filtering it out.
When you have ADHD, that part is over-aggressive. It too often tells you that whatever you’re currently doing or talking about or listening to isn’t much more important than an air conditioner and starts filtering it out. This can mean becoming simply inattentive and unfocused. Or, if it’s severe, it can mean that ants-on-your-skin feeling of boredom so intense you crave stimulation. But every stimulation you seek eventually gets filtered out too. That’s where the hyperactive go-go-go can’t-sit-still association with ADHD comes from, especially in kids.
Stimulants are drugs that effectively make your brain think whatever it’s currently doing or seeing is much more interesting and exciting and important than it normally would be. A non-ADHD person adding strong stimulants to their brain can make things weird and get into pathological or bizarre situations; if something seemed of average importance before it suddenly becomes fascinating, and if it was fascinating before it can become obsessive. But adding them to an ADHD brain is more like bringing their calibration up to normal. The calming effect comes from the fact that you no longer have the ants-on-your-skin ten-days-in-solitary feeling of craving for stimulation that never gets satisfied. On stimulants you can pick up a book and read the book for an hour and your brain will tell you that this is of moderate importance and you don’t need to filter it out.
If an ADHD person takes *enough* stimulants they still get the effect a non-ADHD person does, it’s not like a fundamental immunity or total inversion. They’re just starting from a much lower baseline.
Here’s how it was explained to me. The brains of some people with ADHD are like motorcycles with bicycle-sized brakes and handlebars. As a result, they have trouble remaining in control and may quickly and erratically change their focus from one thing to the next. Stimulant medication boosts their brakes and steering so that they can be more in control. Gradually increasing the dosage lets the doctor find a medication level that adds enough control without overstimulating other areas or causing too many side effects.
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