why do stimulants have a calming effect for people with ADHD?
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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.
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