How long did you give yourself a pass?

[Speeder906]

How long after quitting did you let yourself be lazy? I have heard some people need some recovery time and others need to just go right back into their life. 

Few days clean and feel lazy and just wanna lay around all weekend eating.. but then another part of me knows I'm getting fatter by the day and I should go to the gym.  

Where do you guys land on this?

[SleepyStupid]

too long lol.

i don't think there's a right or wrong answer to this, but when you say "go right back into your life", it's not that easy. your life on adderall was probably way different than it will be going forward (hopefully!). everyone needs recovery time obviously, but when you see people here saying "be kind to yourself", it kinda means be as lazy as you want.. but it's more about how you cope with returning to "life" things. understand that your performance in many things will suck for a while, so don't beat yourself up over it- be kind to yourself. 

that being said, having a life / job to go back to has been so crucial in my recovery. if i didn't have to hold down a job, i wouldn't have made it through.. but the key thing was always to be kind to myself, don't push myself too hard, just do what is sufficient until you have the energy to do more (:

[EricP]

It’s a hard call... I can say there are days that it just seems physically impossible to do anything beyond the absolute minimum and others that once you motivate yourself and you end up doing a lot more than you though you could. 

I still feel like at this 8mo mark of mine that dopamine adjustment goes in waves. Have some pretty good productive days in a row and then some bad ones where you “show up” however the day is a big blur and you just basically did whatever was needed to survive it...

[Cheeri0]

I'm in the "as much time as you need" camp. Your number one priority should always be not doing speed, regardless of how much netflix it requires. Not using always comes first.

I get how this mentality can keep you from recovering as fast if you aren't pushing yourself to adopt healthy habits (eating well, exercise, working, etc.), but I feel like if I had swung to far in the "be productive" direction too early I would have gotten too hard on myself, freaked out, and sought out pills to help me cope. Balance is probably the key to your question, but I definitely swung more to the "lazy for too long" side.

[Frank B]

Great question one at this stage I still ponder. I say after the first month or two try to get back into working out maybe 3 times a week and start to watch your diet but overall take it easy. One thing about working out you can take a picture of your body and compare visually see results of your hard work. But u can’t take a snapshot of your brains before and after in recovery why it’s so damn frustrating even if u make progress u just don’t see it.

[Danquit]

I’d say 6 months solid for me until I finally decided to get out of the house and go for a walk around the park. It was not linear so anything in the first year I could attribute to recovery. 

[EricP]

I’d say take small steps toward healthy things when you feel the courage to try. Walking or even a short run, workout if you can find a way to get the energy. Just don’t over do it or you’ll likely crash harder the next day.  I still battle with crashing

[duffman]

On 2/9/2018 at 4:00 PM, Speeder906 said:

How long after quitting did you let yourself be lazy? I have heard some people need some recovery time and others need to just go right back into their life. 

Few days clean and feel lazy and just wanna lay around all weekend eating.. but then another part of me knows I'm getting fatter by the day and I should go to the gym.  

Where do you guys land on this?

Everyone will probably provide a different answer on this one because it all depends what our preferred "escape" method to push through the cravings and lethargy associated with withdrawal. I performed light exercise almost immediately. But exercise is my escape - my salvation - during withdrawal. The one thing that allowed me to feel anything when I could otherwise feel nothing. I will say that the long walks in the park while listened to audiobooks proved to be more helpful early on than gym exercise. However, at some point (probably around 3 months) I started taking weight lifting seriously. I ordered a book off Amazon and stuck to the program and have been at it ever since. I'm pathologically afraid of weight gain, so the lay around and eat whatever I want method would've further stressed me out and probably would've resulted in a relapse.

[Kimber]

I think whatever you need to set yourself up to not use Adderall...For me making sure I did what I could to help my body, ie only having healthy food in the house and not drinking, because I knew having a hangover was always a trigger for me...we’ll I can just pop an Adderall and get rid of the hangover.  Or a carb coma was another “reason” to pop one.

I think the less guilt trip you give yourself the better, soooo a pass as long as you need and you need as long as you need to not use again...

I just did something I would NEVER have imagined 6 months ago when i quit...did a 1000 mile road trip coincidentally on my anniversary date...anything is possible.