Mike

I think it works!!

Hey guys. I've updated the CAPTCHA license keys and settings; apparently Google discontinued the CAPTCHA we were using; now we're set up to use their new version. Please let me know if you still have trouble!

@zk - I'd love to do a book! Maybe someday, if preparing for grad school ever slows down. @JustinW - Thanks for the feedback! I cleaned up the profanity. @TinyBuddah - Happy to hear it helped!

UPDATE: As promised, here's the new article: A Bunch of Random Tips for Quitting Adderall. Let me know what you think. Thank you again everybody for donating! I can't begin to express how much that helps.

Ok update: Thanks to a recent promotion at work (mixed blessing), my life has been more crazy than usual (at least I'm a workaholic for a good purpose now, which I'm happy about). I'm still working on that article I promised, and will get it up as soon as I can. Thank you all again for the wonderful donations.

Ah! Thank you guys so much! You are all permanently in my cool book. This thread inspired the biggest run of donations in the site's history. It really made my day; I think you guys covered like 1/5th of the year's costs in the last 48 hours. I will make this up to you with one huge new blog article in the next two weeks (I've been meaning to write it for a year or so, and finally started today in the wake of all the donations). Again, thank you guys (and gals!) so much.

@Zk - Noted about the supplements! There are some that have been covered in psychology studies, so I can start with those and try to cut through the BS a little. You were actually pretty accurate with your cost estimate. The site costs about $800/year to run. I don't think you'll ever see ads on this site. Once the site started getting popular I got offers from advertisers, and turned them all down. I'd rather run the site at a loss than junk it up.

Hey Everybody! I’m touched that you guys actually started a thread about donating. I really appreciate the gesture, and thank you so much for the donations that some of you have already sent. A single dollar donated by you here glitters and shines for me like it’s laced with magic and happiness, and it makes it easier to keep the lights on too, which is nice. 6 years! And this^. A hundred times this. I wrote about quitting Adderall the most fervently when it was a hard, daily struggle for me. Nowadays, I don't really struggle with it. Given the right task, I can concentrate for 12+ hours happily. It's not an issue of finding the will to work or finding the focus anymore. It's finding the hours. Time-wise, I’m basically living three lives: I’m a software developer, an aspiring PhD student in psychology, and a web-entrepreneur/writer guy. I'm studying Industrial-Organizational psychology in school, which is essentially "psychology of people at work." Figures, right? As you can imagine, a lot of what I’m learning is obscenely relevant to the process of quitting Adderall and climbing your way back up to superstar-producer status. I really want to come back to QuittingAdderall, write new articles, and be more present here on the forums, but right now it's a time issue. The good news is that later this year I’ll get some extra hours in my week, and I plan to dedicate some of those hours to QuittingAdderall.com. In addition to coming back to articles and the forums, I may write an eBook on quitting Adderall. It would include all new tips, plus relevant psychology for the quitting process. Does that interest you guys? Once I start grad school, there won’t be room in my meager PhD student stipend for server fees, so I have a year to make my sites pay for themselves somehow. I figure a $5-10 eBook might be a better at generating a little income from the site, versus depending on donations (which are wonderful, but too inconsistent to rely on). If you guys have ideas, I’m all ears. And let me know what you'd like to see in the book! Until I’m officially back I will continue to keep the forum software up-to-date, and respond to any issues that the admins notify me about. Thanks again for this thread. It really made my day to see it. Sorry for being so AWOL for so long. As Zerokewl suggested, it's because of my successful recovery that I'm so damned absent. Do you remember the analogy of the giant stone wheel in Dr. Jekyll's Hangover? Well, I spent so many years trying to get the wheel moving, and now it's spinning so fast that I'm getting friction burns. I kind of have 3 wheels: work, school, websites. My goal is to eliminate the "day job" wheel so that I can focus on making the school and website wheels spin way faster. But until I can do that, I have to keep running between wheels like a madman, keeping their momentum up. For Sebastian05... At year 1, I felt awkward and kind of formless. I think my depression peaked around year 2 or 3. So not to scare you: But it might even get worse. This is such an agonizingly long, slow journey. You're basically changing you're whole life's course, and that takes a ton of time and effort. It's kind of like how a cruise ship has a really large turning radius. Set your expectations for success farther into the future. That will help you cope with not being "right" yet, and will set your threshold for size-of-noticeable-change lower. When you expect the journey to be really long, it's easier to appreciate small uplifts that suggest you're headed in the right direction (versus expecting all the success and happiness to hit you at once). So do I, but they pass more quickly. My depression/anxiety episodes used to last weeks, now they're down to minutes. The best advice I can offer you here? Action breaks the cycle of worry. Modify the stressor. Always, always fight the stressor as fast and hard as you can. This is called active coping. Instead of just telling yourself that it's going to be alright, you effortfully modify the situation so that it is less painful (not pain-free, just less painful). If you make this a habit, it will do you a world of good. Also, mindfulness meditation helps with both anxiety and the ADD. Now when I encounter an anxiety trigger, I start doing a little mini-meditation, and it helps make me less reactive. It's like: 1. Huge stress. 2. QUICK GO ABSTRACT BEFORE YOU FREAK OUT. The idea is that if you practice active coping (modify the stressor) enough, it becomes compulsive. And that's wonderful. You'll find yourself fighting the situation before you've let your anxiety run away with itself. And 75% of the time, all it takes to make a situation less stressful is seeking out more information --- filling in knowledge potholes that you're currently pouring anxiety and pessimism into. ^That should be your only criteron for success. Growth, not attainment. Better, not perfect. This is not it. Not if you keep pushing and getting a little better one year at a time. Plateaus happen. And they suck. But if you keep pushing, you'll break them. Feeling like you've hit a plateau may mean that you just need a novel challenge to pull you up to that next level. At least, that's what keeps working for me. Does that help?

Actually, I had the opposite experience. Writing was the one thing I couldn't do while on Adderall. On Adderall, my writing would be over-styled and full of lengthy tangents. Plus I'd get jammed-up overanalyizing everything. Good writing requires ruthless prioritization and fat-trimming, and my sober brain is way better at that than my Adderall brain. Also, after quitting Adderall I found I was less satisfied with writing something for its own sake. As in, I stopped writing things nobody read and started writing things in public. On Adderall, writing was always that thing I meant to make time for, but never did. Since quitting Adderall, I rarely go two days without writing something. I know you guys don't see much of it here anymore, but I created another website after this one that kind of blew up (even moreso than quittingadderall.com), so that's where a lot of my writing ends up these days. @PostAdderall - You need to get that flow started again. It's like your writing muscle has atrophied. It took me a while to get back into the swing of it, but once I did, well...I still haven't stopped pouring it out. I know it might be disheartening to feel like you suddenly can't articulate your ideas, but that actually might be a sign that your entering a new phase as a writer. To me, that's a sign that your brain has started to treat writing and communicating like a problem to solve. The problem is "How do I say this clearly?" And that's how you should be thinking. Great pieces of writing start with that frustrating problem. If I had any tips for getting over that, it would be this: Spit it out. As simply and stupidly as you can. Turn off the part of your brain that wants to be eloquent and stylistic, and just type out the jist of what you're trying to say in your own words. Then go from there. Also, The Artist's Way really, really helped me get back my writing ability. The whole book is full of exercises designed to help "blocked" artists get back in their groove. Anyhow, good luck. And if you want to test your skills by writing an article for the main blog, I'd be happy to put it up! Also, FWIW, I still have trouble writing about myself haha. I think that's just a personality thing more than a writing ability thing.

Hi Newboy, Again, I'm just a laymen. But I don't think you've done any permanent damage, especially at that low a dose for that short of a time. Usually, quitting Adderall leaves you slightly worse off than you were before you took Adderall. You have your pre-Adderall chemistry, but the work habits you relied on before Adderall have atrophied. It's like you've been walking with crutches for 5 months and now you're trying to run on your own without them. You're going to be a little sore and awkward at first, but if you keep at it you'll be back to your original strength. For somebody who has been on it for years, their muscles are much more atrophied, so their rebuilding period is much longer. Nearly all of the rebuilding is psychological. Based on your situation, it should only take you half a year or so and you'll be totally back to normal or better.... With one exception. You will still have the memory of what it was like to work on Adderall, and that may haunt you a little. I know it's a little scary right now, but I promise you it'll get better in time.

Yeah sorry about that, guys. Apparently the new trend is human spammers, which are much more difficult to prevent than automated bots. Speaking of which, either of you guys want to be Moderators? I could really use help keeping the spam down, and if you became a moderator, you'd be able to delete those posts and ban those bastards when you see them, instead of having to wait on me to do it.

Well done, babysteps! It's a hugely good sign that you feel that sense of excitement and joy about quitting. When you get that feeling, you know you've done something good for yourself, and that a new and happier phase of life has begun. Thanks for posting your story!