I quit adderall/vyvanse about a year and a half ago thanks in part to this forum. Sorry for the length of my story, but I've been wanting to share it for awhile:
I was introduced to adderall in college when a friend gave it to me. Overtime I started to request it from him because I felt it helped me to get work done. I managed to graduate without a prescription but after school I didn't get a job for several months. Eventually the pressure to get a job led me to seek out a prescription.
I used vyvanse for 6 years starting then. It was fine for awhile, and my career was improving. About 4 years in I started feeling like I needed more, and requested an increased prescription. From that moment on it was all downhill. I started to abuse it and felt like I needed more and more, to the point where I was beginning to buy meth off of the deep web. Things started getting really bad, and I was missing work and staying home to do things I found more interesting. Eventually I just stopped going, and wasn't worried at all, because I felt totally confident in everything I was doing. I was out of work for maybe 6 months (or maybe more) when I finally realized how bad things were.
I had been going on week long binges of working on random projects, playing video games, obsessively studying things, and doing other things I won't go into detail on but were extremely unhealthy and immoral. I could go 4 or 5 days without sleeping. Some of you know the mental state you can be in on when you go without sleep for that long, addled out of your mind. If you don't, please stop before you find out. I haven't looked into this yet because I haven't gotten my life together enough, but I think I permanently damaged my vision from the excessively long periods of time I would spend staring at computer screens.
Even though abuse of amphetamines had given me extreme tunnel-vision, I was very fortunate that I had the briefest moment of self awareness where I began to think that adderall and vyvanse was not helping me anymore. I started to look into this on the internet (addiction to vyvanse / adderall), and one of the things I found was this website. I read the forums and articles and some of the stories people shared here terrified me, because I could see the path I was already well along and where it lead. Things finally clicked and I realized how I was destroying myself and what a crisis I actually was in.
Since I didn't have a job (I was living off of my savings), I just decided to quit vyvanse cold turkey. One of my main concerns was having a sleep schedule that would allow me to hold a job, so I decided to look into an exercise program to tire myself out. I started doing intense weight lifting which gave me something to focus on as I began the healing process.
I took another several months off and just focused on not taking vyvanse, exercising, and pursuing things that interested me, which was a great period of healing and rediscovery of myself. During this time I was pursuing my interests in history and philosophy and I started to notice how often I admired writers who were Christian, so I started to read more and more about Jesus Christ. I was an athiest at the time and had been since I was a teenager, but I was just happily pursuing subjects that interested me at the time. However, a few more months had gone by, and it had now been a full year since I stopped going to my job (from which I was fired almost immediately).
I was running out of money and the pressure to get a job made me crack, and I decided to start doing vyvanse again. With the help of a therapist, I got a new doctor and coordinated closely with them. I told them that I had been abusing vyvanse and wanted to quit, but felt I needed to use it to get and hold a job. So I got much smaller prescription, and at my inisistence, I only got a weeks worth of pills at a time, and I had to request a prescription from the doctor every week.
Things were going okay for a little bit, but I would still take too much and then be shot for the rest of the week. Somehow, I managed to apply for and get an extremely good job, a job which I had actually been passed over for when I had been using vyvanse previously. While I consider this job highly desirable, its also the hardest job I've ever had (that's part of the reason why I wanted it).
I had been struggling at this job for a few months when my doctor messed up my prescription and gave me a whole month's supply (I had weened myself down to 5 mg instant adderalls at this point), which I took in the span of 2 days or so. I was so tweaked out I skipped work. Those two days were terrifying, I've never felt less like myself. After I had gathered myself I told my manager I needed the rest of the week off. I had a crisis during those days where I wondered if I would be able to do my job without the drugs. I felt a paralyzing amount of anxiety which prevented me from having a rational train of thought, which is something I'd never experienced before. These days were when I fully became a Christian and placed my faith solely in God after several powerful experiences.
Like I said, I was an athiest, but I felt totally powerless. In my mind, I had no idea how to be functional without the drugs. I knew doing the drugs was wrong, so I decided to totally quit them. It didn't matter if I lost my job or not, I just needed to do what was right, and God would take care of the rest. Placing my faith totally in God, I had several experiences where I felt physical relief as my worries were lifted off my soul.
A year and a half later, I still have my job and I'm getting better and better at it. I had never had a good sleep schedule my entire life, but now I get up at 5am every day (with the help of some coffee or a soda). I also restarted exercising and am in the best shape I've ever been in. My focus is also better than its ever been, I think. There are still struggles, and I still have many bad days where I don't get much done. Sometimes I have a bad week, or a bad couple of weeks. But I never consider going back to the drugs, and eventually the slump passes and I come out better. I'm still not where I could be, but I'm better than I ever have been.
So that's my long story, sorry about that. But I wanted to thank the people on this forum, because the stories I read on here really did help me turn the corner. And I also wanted to tell everyone how much God has helped me, because he will help you too if you ask. Thanks for reading.