ADHD medication experience Day 4. This morning's dose taken a little late for mundane reasons. While waiting for it to kick in, did a few tasks and found it difficult going. Continued those after brain switched on, and found though I was in a fine working state, I couldn't retrieve memories I should have had from this morning. Fleeting ones after dose were still immediately findable though.
Mmm, state-dependent memory. That's a tricky one. I remember once I made a friend at a late-night function, then I had an accident on the way back that was severe enough to knock me out of commission for about a week.
I had no memory of that guy until I met him another night.
I'll have to keep that in mind if I find my self on the stims later.
@NanoRaptor I have days where I forget to take my meds (usually because I'm distracted - go figure). Those days can be rough. If you're that way inclined, and while you have the capacity to organise, it wouldn't be a bad idea to give yourself options to deal with that when needed. I keep spare meds at work but if they run out (because I get distracted and forget to top them up) I have "tasks that I can be more or less comfortably productive with while in a highly distractible state".
It's weird being off meds not being as productive as you could be and not only be acutely aware why but being entirely unable to do anything about it other than watch it all unfold (or not as the case may be). It's like sitting in an idling car but someone removed the gear stick except now you know that most peoples cars come with gear sticks or use automatic transmission and now yours is missing because you have to remember to install it every morning. Frustrating but also validating that you're on the right stuff.
@bartreardon That is such a perfect description of what it's like now it's faded away for the day. So clear what's going wrong, and so frustrating you can't just... decide not to.
And I'm definitely inclined to distraction, it's the exact reason I took mine late this morning - of all things I was trying to find someone else's keys :).
this links well with my thoughgt that all this time distractions inside and outside my head fucked me up so much, they cleared short term working memory. As my bestie just put it "distractions are like an EMP for short term memory".
And on medication, they're not! Where the distraction has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
@NanoRaptor that's exactly what I suspected was happening with me - we're forced to pay attention to so many extraneous stimuli that we struggle to commit basic things to memory.
You might see if they can combine your stim with a Selective Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor. The effect isn't as strong as the stims, but it's a gentle uplift that lasts.
@RL_Dane Yeah! you could call mine the ultraberko version of brain zaps, with effexor the worst. I'd just have to look to the side and it felt like I'd been slapped in the head on the inside. I'd get it if I looked in a direction, moved any of my body too quickly, or even be surprised by a noise or someone quiet suddenly start talking. Lasted six months after I'd eased off too - I probably lost a year of the early 2000s to that.
then my doc insisted I try it again and I listened didn't I?
@NanoRaptor this 100% reminds me when I installed an addon that limited the number of browser tabs I could open.
My short term memory absolutely could not cope.
Can't tell ya how many times I need to type something down asap, like within 5s or the thought is gone. Guess I could've trained myself to type it elsewhere instead of trying to open a tab but it was wreckin me. Addon deleted and my extreme anger from forgetting things subsided.
@colinstu Ha. I'm one of the five tabs tops kids. Once I hit more than that I have NO idea.
I can understand that folk with 50, 100, 500 tabs are dealing how they need to, but if I see more than ten I just command-shift-W out of habit, no matter what's in them. I wouldn't be able to remember why they were open even if I went through them all!
@NanoRaptor also I tried cmd+shift+w'ing right after reading that (blindly, didn't know what it did, thought it was some magic trick for productivity) and then had a lil panic attack when my browser just poof'd (no fear, right? ctrl+shift+t to reopen... that didn't do anything. but thankfully History > Recently Closed Windows did work).
@colinstu Oh ha! I got the wrong keypress. Damned muscle memory differing from memory-memory. command-option-W. It closes all tabs except the current one.
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