Adderall "happy pills" at first....

by anonymous
(Puerto Rico)

I am 21 and I started taking adderall 2 years ago. I wish I haven't started in a first place.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 18 when I got into college and paying attention in classes more than an hour long was almost imposible for me. The first couple of months on it was heaven. I could study for EIGHT hours nonstop and I used to tell everyone how good these, "happy pills" or "orange helpers" (as I used to call them) were.

The problem with this medication is that once you take it a couple of times the effect starts decreasing and thats when you start taking higher dosages. It all got worst when I realized I was eating once a day (to prevent fainting because I wasn't even hungry),I was sleeping 2-3 hours a day and I was planning my week not only by how many exams I had but also by how many pills I had left.

I live with the fact that I depend on them but now I am given a specific quantity of pills for the week so that I can't take more than 20mg a day. Now studying without it is even more difficult than before it was prescribed to me. If could go back time, I wouldn't have started.

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Oct 05, 2017
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starstarstarstarstar 		delaying the inevitable
by: Anonymous

1. Take magnesium citrate supplements regularly. It slows down/prevents tolerance. This is not an urban legend, there's a reason why scores of people swear it works on drug forums... Also, adderall causes anxiety and anxiety [supposedly] depletes minerals like magnesium. My fingernails were going soft after a few years until I started taking magnesium supplements...

2. If adderall causes you anxiety, avoid Teva/Barr and switch to CorePharma or better, Sandoz. Teva/Bar and some others use certain excipients (the non-active drug-releasing ingredients) that can cause serious but unnecessary anxiety. This is not just my opinion. I have gone to pharmacies that have told me they are sought out by patients specifically because they stock generics that don't cause horrible anxiety.

3. Take Adderoliday's. In school, 3 days off and 4 days on was sustainable for me. Try not to rent your brain out during summers and holidays. Career is a different story... Think seriously about avoiding any career that rents your brain for long periods of time without a break. Otherwise you will be crawling into a hole that will eventually swallow you whole...

4. If a doctor tells you to take Adderall every day, find a new doctor because they have absolutely no idea how it works.

5. If you can't sleep but are afraid of addictive sleep pills, ask your doctor about a drug called Trazodone. It's powerful, but builds tolerance slowly and is not addictive (in fact, exceeding one's dose can be very unpleasant). It makes you want to sleep REALLY badly, and that's about it. Technically speaking, it's a mild early generation anti-depressant (very mild), but it is prescribed off-label for sleep.

6. Two other supplements I have found mild to moderately effective for adderall anxiety are Inositol and l-theanine. Inositol supposedly also helps with OCD, though I haven't noticed it offsetting adderall-induced over-focus. But in larger doses it's really good at counteracting that heavy anxiety that settles in one's shoulders after taking adderall for too many days in a row. They are safe, but don't take my word for it. Try to find something scary about either one of them on Google. You will give up after a few hours.

7. A lot of the negative side effects for me have disappeared over the years. Or I should say most of them, regardless of the dose I'm on. The main focusing effect of course has been fading as well, but the bad side effects seem to be losing the war faster.

8. If you have to go on antidepressants, be VERY observant about whether and how fast your adderall tolerance increases, and address the issue with your doctor ASAP unless you want to find yourself with a tolerance that requires a dose no malpractice-weary medical professional is willing to match. I took Trintellix for a year and that was enough to make 60 mg/day meaningless. Funny story, Trintellix also got rid of withdrawal on days off as well (not sleepy, not exhausted, nothing). So much did it cancel out withdrawal, I have been trying to get up the guts to call their reporting hotline and suggest they consider testing it out as a way to treat meth addiction. Instead of sleeping through my days off I had energy to do normal things like a normal person...

9. Understand that when your tolerance builds up and you need a break, you absolutely must take that break even if it makes you look bad. Or one day your boss is going to expect you to perform like a normal human being and find out that you can't. You will have run out of drugs, or they won't do anything for you, and then you will remember the good old days before adderall, when five minutes of reading a science text was nothing short of brutal torture...

10. Again about doctors and the medical profession in general, it's really depressing how little some of them know about adderall (aka, speed, aka amphetamine). Unless you're lucky and find somebody who really knows their stuff, you will have to figure a lot out for yourself and at some point make some hard choices.

That said, here's my best piece of advice. Preventing tolerance and staying at a fixed dose or a slowly increasing one is achievable. Truly it is. But it will not be your self-discipline, or a supplement, or a supportive family that can make that happen. The critical element is to stay away from any career that requires sustained focus for long periods of time and doesn't offer ample opportunities to "hide in mediocrity" while you are taking the necessary drug holidays.

For example, you would not think engineering in a large factory or plant would be an ideal way to manage drug tolerance, but it's perfect. Engineering is hard, really hard. And its hard for managers to compare one engineer to another. You can go months without contributing anything of significance, then suddenly think of a process improvement that shaves a couple million off production costs for your facility. Ample time for drug holidays, infinite opportunity to prove your personal worth when the holidays are over.

The opposite example would be a person who thinks Adderall will make them successful in a law firm. No. No it won't. Saturday will roll around, and your boss will expect you to be there...thinking...all day long. And then around 5:00 PM he might say "Ok, time to call it an evening, I'll see you tomorrow..." Three weeks of that you will wake up to an empty bottle and a sinking feeling...
May 16, 2011
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starstarstarstarstar 		19 years old on Adderall. Weird Side Effects.
by: LinniLee

I started taking Adderall once I got to college and realized that I couldn't focus in a two hour class if my life depended on it. At first the results were amazing. I've been on it for about 8 months now, and I'm just now noticing a few things that I don't see on the common side effects list. Lately I've had random muscle twitches out of nowhere from time to time, probably about twice a day. I don't have Tourettes and I don't have a family history of it either. The muscles in my hands seem to get really stiff too. Its like they just stop working and I have trouble doing simple things like writing and opening pop bottles, and that usually occurs in the middle of the day and lasts for a few hours. Once that ends, I get very shaky and agitated. My whole body shakes uncontrollably for about an hour and sometimes my jaw shakes like it does when I'm cold. I haven't really heard of anyone on Adderall experience any of this so its kind of scary. My dilemma is that it helps me focus and its still working great for the purpose it was prescribed for, but I don't know if these are signs that a major problem could occur later, so I'm not sure what to do. Anyone have any suggestions?
May 06, 2011
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starstarstarstarstar 		This should help.
by: Anonymous

Hey man, are your pills extended release, beacuse even if you feel like your gettin a good sleep, really the pills are causing you to stay up ant night, which in turn are cauusing your depression. I just discovered i have adhd and i read that this was what happened to someone else.

Try changing to non extended release ones.

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