Was diagnosed young, and again when I was 21, have been taking Adderall 20mg for years, and thought i was managing the symptoms well, until I spoke with the psych again. They ADDED 5mg and I am already feeling waaaaay slower and clear. How does something that is supposed to speed/”wake” you up, slow a person down?
In: Biology
For those with true adhd, hyperactivity is the body’s attempt to stimulate itself and to stay stimulated. So when you give someone with adhd stimulants, the body no longer has to move to stay stimulated, the meds do it. It’s why when people who don’t have adhd take stimulants they are highly energetic.
There’s a part of your brain that stops you being chasing after all the squirrels. In ADHD it’s too slow. Stimulants speed it up so you can stop your brain before it runs after that squirrel.
Imagine your thoughts as birds flying in the sky and your ability to focus on those thoughts as a crosshair. Those with normal brains, the crosshair is able to keep up with a single bird and follow it through the sky. Those with ADHD have a slower crosshair so they can’t keep up with a single bird. In fact, as they try to keep up with the original bird, other birds will intercept their crosshair, thus confusing the individual. Stimulants speed up the crosshair, allowing someone with ADD/ADHD to have the ability to focus on a single bird.
From what I’ve read online, Its basically dopamine.
Our brains are either too full of dopamine(hyperfocus) or extremely lacking in it, so we have no motivation to do anything and are as such just super bored because of that.
stimulants make it so you generally have a more balanced amount of dopamine in the brain.
Also apparently cortisol, which causes anxiety reduces dopamine in the brain. So when you’re nervous about doing something you’re bad at, you’ll lose motivation even faster.
The simple version
Your “stimulant” level in your brain is supposed to hang around zero. You work fine with zero. If it goes above zero you get jumpy and shit.
ADHD is when the stimulant level averages a NEGATIVE number. And because your brain is short on this, it physically lacks enough “power” to stay focused, which is why they are easy to distract.
When you add stimulants like Adderall to the body, it actually brings you brain from negative back to zero, so you aren’t distracted by everything and can focus properly.
All the twitchy stuff they do is the body’s attempt to make it’s own stimulants (it works, but just barely, like only 1%)
I can’t give you the medical terminology however I have been on ADHD meds (I have tried all of them, not even joking) for almost 10 years and when I was 14 I asked my psychiatrist how they work and he dumbed it down for me by explaining that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance. Too much drug, that’s where the “zombie” effect comes from, too little, well you know but yeah can’t sit still, brains on fire, can’t focus etc. etc. Adderall had too many stimulants in it and made me hallucinate and want to kill myself. I now take 60mg of Vyvanse bc it has much less stimulants however it is long acting (adderall isn’t) so I haven’t slept properly in 5 years. You win some you lose some. Hope this helped a little, i’m not an expert, I’m just heavily medicated and my bottle is sitting next to my bed lol
Adhd stimulate medications are meant to stimulate our brains into making the neurochemicals norepinephrine and dopamine, so that our neuro-pathways work more closely to typical than not. This enables us to better use our executive function and manage things like focus and motivation. Without behavioral techniques and active management of our adhd, meds are useless.
It’s like putting race fuel in a geo metro. It’ll go fast for a bit until it melts under pressure. You have to train yourself to focus, motivate and control your adhd while your meds make your brain more capable of such things. The meds won’t do it for you.
If your general level of dopamine is low, you end up trying to get more by finding new stimuli and reward, so you get distracted. It’s like you aren’t getting enough satisfaction from something that others would, so you need to keep changing it up to get the dopamine fix.
When you raise that basic level of dopamine, you are sufficiently stimulated in the tasks you are doing that you don’t need to get more.
ADHD medication works by raising the general level of dopamine (that is available to be taken up). Drugs of abuse generally flood dopamine into the pathways, which screws with the basic levels of dopamine, and while it feels good, also screws with the delicate balance of how the brain releases and uses dopamine for long-term goals and rewards.
Because people with ADHD cannot inhibit themselves. ADHD is more of an inhibitory disorder than an attention one—the attention problems are a consequence of the person-affected-with-ADHD’s inability to inhibit themselves from doing things that, at the moment, may be more pleasurable than whatever task they are currently doing, but shouldn’t be done because it’s not what they’re supposed to be doing.
Stimulants fix that by making it so that they introduce more *dopamine and norepinephrine* into your brain whilst also, at the same time, making it so the neurons in your brain end up taking more time reabsorbing these neurotransmitters. And those two neurotransmitters are responsible for regulating attention and executive function, two things people affected with ADHD struggle with. In people with ADHD, the neurons reabsorb these two chemicals too quickly, lending the issues and symptoms synonymous with ADHD. It’s why we often feel stupid or unable to plan things out effectively. Those medications aim to fix that.
At the end of the day, it’s inhibition that differentiates people that are “normal” and those with ADHD. The former can inhibit themselves naturally, while the latter can’t. Stimulants help to bridge the gap to help you feel “normal,” even if temporarily. They help you be productive when, otherwise, it’s very difficult for you to force yourself to be so. It helps you inhibit yourself and focus on what’s important, not (always) what’s more pleasurable.
The part of our brain responsible for locking onto a topic is underpowered.
As such, we’re the mental version of velociraptors: our vision is based on movement. Anything that isn’t constantly changing and jumping up and down to grab our attention… fades into the background over time.
It’s not that we have too much energy, it’s that we’re constantly running through this fog of fading phantom concepts, trying to track down something that isn’t a mirage, and stays put long enough to look at it. Like a player in an FPS game that’s lagged to hell, everyone else sees us teleporting all over the map, while we’re just trying to keep up.
Add some stimulants to the mix, you lower the arousal threshold, and things can remain significant even if they haven’t grabbed our attention in the last few seconds. We can slow down, take a breath and things are *still where we left them* so we don’t need to keep chasing new ones.
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