Does it have to be either/or?

[Mindfully Deluded]

Hi there everyone,

I've been checking out this website for a while now, and I wanted to know if anyone else has gone through this experience:

1.) First, had the revelation that Adderall is ruining their life (in however big or small a way).

2.) Then, spent a significant period of time off of the drug (say, enough time to weather the worst of the physical and psychological withdrawal).

3.) Finally, after spending a huge amount of time being unproductive, used the advice from this website in conjunction with Adderall to try and start forming positive life habits (that will eventually supplant Adderall use).

Just to be clear: I'm definitely not advocating that people do this. It's obviously easy to fall back into that terrible cycle of abuse and self delusion. And really, while I've personally had some measure of success with the process above, my final results are still pending.

I am curious however if people think it's possible to use Adderall mindfully. Qualitatively, I don't see it as being that different from coffee. For sure, it's more effective, and the potential for abuse is higher, but there's nothing inherently bad about it. Of course, you could make a similar argument for heroin, with the same attendant criticism: while on paper there's nothing wrong with "responsible" heroin use, few know of any actual people that could use heroin responsibly. So it's probably not that simple.

The reason I ask is because I, like most of you, have experienced firsthand the ugliness of this drug; yet, while on Adderall, I've also experienced some of the most profound and eye-opening moments of clarity in my entire life. Is it foolish to think that one could direct that Adderall-fueled clarity towards creating a life without Adderall?

It seems to me that the Adderall problem, or at least a big chunk of it, stems from a lack of self-awareness. On Adderall, people tend to have this hurry-hurry attitude: this mentality that screams, "I'm a freakin' shark man, if I stop moving I die!" While thus altered, we don't necessarily reflect on why we're pushing ourselves so hard, or on what we're pushing ourselves toward--we just crave the validation of being productive, so we happily pop a pill to fall into that tunnel-visioned work-fugue whenever the opportunity presents itself.

But let's say you know the major risks. And let's say you know that you have to create supportive life-habits to eventually replace your magic pill--habits like exercising, producing at less-than-perfect quality, or grinding out projects when you really, really don't feel like it. Is it possible that the best way to get off of Adderall is to create that kind of scaffolding while still on Adderall?

Those results don't suddenly evaporate when you stop taking your medication--if you create a workout habit, for example, your strength and stamina stay with you even once you're off the drug. And even on an hour-to-hour basis, the momentum Adderall gives you can carry through past the point of its felt effects.

While on my hiatus from Adderall, I tried to start doing yoga in the morning as a way to prep me for the day ahead. On the days that I could bear it, it worked wonderfully--but those days were few and far between. After getting back on Adderall, I started doing yoga a lot more consistently. More importantly, I found that as long as I got my morning yoga in, it didn't really matter if I continued taking Adderall the rest of the day. Sure, my productivity wasn't going to be at its peak level, but I no longer minded; I now found it deeply satisfying (and edifying) to push through my daily grind using just the post-yoga momentum, even if it did require a little chemical nudge to get started.

So what do you guys think? Am I being deluded here in thinking that a crutch can be good sometimes? Does anyone have any similar experiences to share, and perhaps some advice or words of caution?

Cheers,

MD

p.s. I love writing. It's one of my favorite activities, so writing this while coming down off Adderall was a frustrating yet incredibly rewarding experience. Admittedly it's a rambling mess, but part of my process right now involves trying to do as much frustrating "work" as possible off the drug--and to really not fuss about it. In that regard, Mike's most recent article helped a ton. I highly recommend it to anyone in the process of quitting.

[Greg]

Hi there!

Thanks for sharing, and welcome to the community! I have to say that your post made me chuckle to myself because it reminded me of myself a lot.

Before I quit for the final time, 13 months ago, I used to analyze and then justify my adderall use and ritalin use in many different ways, from infinitely various different angles and came up with incredibly convincing arguments about why it was perfectly fine to take it, whether it was just a little bit or a lot. You're argument was pretty convincing and it sounded like something I might have said back in the day.

In the final year of my addiction, which turned out to be worst year on adderall -- and this is no joke -- I was 100 percent convinced that I wasn't addicted and I didn't have a problem. I had completely rationalized this in my mind and I told everyone who knew about my adderall usage that I was not addicted. No joke. When a person is dependent on something, the mind plays tricks to justify using again and again.

In the past years, I was never able to just take a little bit and then just stop. My use always escalated back up to severe levels. I could keep up a lower dosage for a little while and then it would escalate.

I made a really bad mistake about five years ago. There was a time I got off ritalin for a few months successfully and then decided that it would be okay to get back on stimulants for a little while. It ended up in five more years of addiction before finally collapsing on the floor in tears and being hospitalized again.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, when you are out of the woods or close to being out of the woods, adderall shouldn't really have any kind of impact on your thinking anymore. You will no longer consider it having been "helpful" anymore. You'll start to realize that addiction was a bait and switch game because eventually, you needed adderall just to feel like you did before you became addicted. You needed it just to feel normal. You needed a "crutch" just to feel average.

Right now, I think it might be your physical addiction influencing your rational brain, and making you think it's okay to take it to help you get off of it. I would try to think of it this way - taking it again is a relapse. Don't allow yourself to relapse. If you relapse you could trigger the whole process all over again.

If you really think adderall is just like drinking coffee, then just drink coffee instead of taking adderall!

By the way, I thought your writing was really good! Definitely not a rambling mess!

[Mindfully Deluded]

InRecovery,

That was easily the worst response imaginable. I clearly do not want to stop taking Adderall.

So, it was probably also the best response I could've hoped for. I clearly do not want to stop taking Adderall. And I could not for the life of me admit that this was still a problem.

I guess... that by the time you find yourself posting on a site called quittingadderall.com, you already know what the answer to your question is--even if you still won't readily admit to asking that question in the first place. "Do I have to quit?" I didn't want to confront that, to draw a line in the sand and then honor that promise to myself. So I asked a question that was very much longer and more convoluted. But really, what it boils down to is the same.

Man. Half of me wants someone to just come out and say, "It's okay! Just take it for now. If you try really really really hard, you can make it work." The other half of me knows (and laments) that there is little truth in this. That half knows that the genuinely positive life changes I'm seeing are changes happening in spite of the Adderall.

The last time I quit, it was while writing my Master's thesis. I thought, "Hey, there's always gonna be some pressing matter in your life--if you keep waiting for a good time to stop, you'll never escape this." You can probably guess how that turned out. Three weeks before the deadline I was back on my prescription, flouting sleep and personal hygiene and pounding away at my keyboard like a man possessed.

Given the circumstances, I churned out a pretty good paper. I also gave myself a pretty unpleasant case of carpal tunnel.

When I had decided to quit halfway through writing my thesis, I thought that I was in pretty good shape thanks to this site. I was ready to take my small daily victories where I could get them--to rejoice at having cooked myself dinner or taken out the garbage, for instance. I was also ready to not see many of the wonderful people I had gotten accustomed to seeing, people who I felt validated me as worthwhile and special (obviously quite a problematic dynamic). I was even ready to be be a lot less engaged in my creative passions, as much as this killed me to concede.

What I was not ready for, however, was the intensely debilitating sense of guilt and self-loathing that came with staying in bed for weeks at a time. Especially when just a few months prior, I was juggling school/work/passions/socializing/working out 5 times a week/feeling damn-near invincible. The cracks were there, though, if only I had bothered to look.

Any tips, then, on not taking a complete nosedive in terms of personal commitments? What did you find helped or hindered you when you finally resolved to quit? And what does life look like for you now? I'm especially curious about your day-to-day. Mine became such a complete goddamned mess that I couldn't even begin pick out where to make improvements.

Incidentally, I'd gladly switch to coffee but it doesn't play nice with my digestive system. To put it mildly.

Cheers,

MD

[Greg]

I completely understand what that feels like when you say that debilitating sense of guilt and self loathing that comes with stopping the adderall and nosediving in personal committments. I knew it was coming and I hated that. It's probably the worst part about quitting. Think of it like a rite of passage for everyone who quits adderall. We ALL go from feeling in control of the world to out of our element...

It sounds like you understand though that quitting is a total investment into your future. Your life foundation cannot be built on a pill, on a band-aid remedy. Eventually it will collapse. You can't swallow a pill to get motivation, energy and confidence for the rest of your life. Think of the millions of people every day who don't need to do that but are still motivated, energetic and confidant.

When you quit for good, you start laying down the foundation for a more productive you. In hindsite, it's worth that short term unproductivity to build a solid foundation for a more productive future. Confidence and productivity cannot come in the form of a pill.

I think after you quit, it's a gradual process to regaining your productivity. Right now I've decided that the most important thing for me to do, in terms of getting me to my next step in life, is going to back to school, to business school specifically. So I try to spend each day preparing for my entrance exam. Technically, I should be going to the library from say 10-6pm each day, but it's tough to do this. And I get distracted with television or reading magazine articles, but that's life now. While I'd prefer other-wise, I've accepted that I'm going slack off more now, and that's fine with me. If I want to seriously recover, I cannot wish that I can be glued to projects and tasks with laser like focus and no desire for breaks anymore.

When I was abusing adderall, my main habit, was anytime I felt like doing something I didn't want to do, I would pop adderall and chug some coffee or energy drinks, take a deep breath and plough through the task. All day long, I was chugging energy drinks, popping adderall, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, more adderall, more coffee, cigarettes, adderall, adderall. The adderall made me feel like I could move forward on anything for infinite amounts of time.

Pretty soon, everything I did, no matter how trivial, required a burst of willpower and more adderall to get it done - even reading a novel. My habit started out with studying for exams, writing papers and by the end I was popping adderall to get through a session of hanging out with my friends or even just going to a movie! A great analogy was like I was train steamrolling forward through life and constantly shoveling coal into the fire to keep it moving, except the coal was adderall. Without it, the train that was me couldn't barrel forward.

After quitting, I felt really, really, really weird without anything in my system. My body was too used to feeling "revved up" all the time. I am still grappling with this relaxed feeling and how my brain works now. Mike's article offered a lot of clarity. I'm still trying to develop new healthy habits. I can tell you that on a day to day, I feel a lot less anxious, and I think cognitively I'm sharper, too. Feeling cognitively sharper off adderall is major motivation. In fact, that really threw me for a loop. To become cognitively sharper, is the reason I had originally taken stimulants twelve years ago.

In the beginning, definitely celebrate all your little successes that you accomplish off adderall (ie: taking out the trash)

Here are some suggestions on maintaining your feelings of productivity after the "nosedive"...(I didn't start doing these things until later into my recovery)

1) In terms of my day to day, I keep everything in a PDA. I have one of those new kindles which works great. I have lists of the errands I need to run (x-mas shopping, get car registered ), calls I need to make (bank, dentist appt), things I need to do (organize computer files, fixing an old gadget), list of things I try to do every day (keep a daily journal..) I have longer term projects (visiting sis overseas, preparing b-school application), long term goals (software to learn, toss old papers and magazines) I have lists of books I want to read and lists of personal affirmations. I also have a list of future options that i'm contemplating but I seem to have narrowed down on going back to school and finding a better job...Keeping all this in an organizational system helps me to feel more productive. Like I have some kind of life going. Anytime I think of something, I can add to these lists, I have a place for it..

2) I find myself needing to learn a lot of fundamental life skill sets that I had formally relied on adderall for. That would be motivation, productivity, and confidence. I have found motivational books have really helped on this front. A couple titles I recommend are "Eat That Frog" and "Getting Things Done".... These books somehow helped lessen the miserable withdrawals I was feeling from no adderall. They helped motivate me to move forward from here on my own without relying on a pill to do it for me.

3) I work on my recovery every single day... Whether it's reading an addiction/recovery book, writing in a journal, reading articles on this site, communicating with members on this forum, learning new supplements. I try to keep recovery at the top of my to do list, and maintain that urgency to stay off the pills, because I never want to go back to that place where I was in again.

I am still grappling with rebuilding myself everyday. But I think to myself that the time I spend rebuilding myself is really nothing in terms of time in the big scheme of life. Also, each month that passes gives me a psychological boost. I saw 'wow, it's been 13 months, and I've taken absoultely nothing'... Unfortuately, ugh, I still have days of feeling chemical withdrawal but it's much less now than ever before. I still feel weird but I'm much more used to it. I definitely don't feel I'm in the clear yet, but these are some of the tools that have helped me take big steps forward from that horrible "nosedive" position after quitting. I feel like I'm a plotting for my come back in life, and it will be more sustaining this time around. I know if you or rather I should say - we - keep working on our recovery, we will be back on our feet soon - adderall free.

[Mindfully Deluded]

InRecovery,

Thank you for your extremely thoughtful responses.

I've been using the GTD system for a while now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I first encountered it during an Adderall-fueled quest for greater productivity. I have since then found it immensely useful for managing my time both on and off the drug.

Recently, however, I've started reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I have to say, it's changed the way I see GTD. More specifically, it shed some light on the sort of mindset GTD inadvertently encourages. This mindset turned out to be one of the main reasons why quitting Adderall has been so difficult--GTD is very task centered, and tends to prioritize urgent short-term tasks (productivity) over important long-term growth (productive capacity, if you want to call it that). I realized that I measure my day by how productive I've been, and that I measure that productivity by how many next actions I can check off of my to do list and how many items I can clear out of my inbox.

Quitting Adderall obviously has an adverse effect on this productivity. This was unpleasant before, but now, the sharp decline in daily accomplishment is made quantifiable and concrete. And that inspires an even deeper sense of guilt and shame, because I now have a performance metric that tells me exactly how short of "perfect" I fall. Not inherently good or bad, but after quitting, there's still this residual Adderall-inspired mentality makes it hard for me to cope with the GTD paradigm. Does that make sense?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I associate GTD with many of the negative things I associate with Adderall. But at the end of the day it's just a tool, like Adderall is just a tool. How you decide apply it is as important as its prescribed function. I'm glad you've taken away positive things from it, and if it works for you I have no right to project my own experiences onto it. So for you, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People may only be a worthwhile read if you want an alternative perspective.

It's late over here, and I'm wicked tired, so I cannot do your post justice by responding in kind just yet. But I really appreciate the time you took to write out that extensive response.

Cheers,

MD

[Greg]

Yes. I absolutely - absolutely - understand why the GTD mentality is terrible when you are taking adderall. I used to to the GTD system on adderall and was completely overwhelmed with tasks and my head was filled with so many ideas I needed to get out onto my lists!! I DO think GTD made me take even more adderall.

I don't recommend doing GTD while taking adderall. You are beginning the GTD system from a place where you are already hyper motivated when you are doing GTD and its just overwhelming.

That being said, GTD is totally different when you are not taking adderall. Self help books have a totally different impact when you are not on adderall. Life in general "feels" a lot different when you aren't doped up on adderall. You gotta try it to understand. I felt really unproductive when I stopped taking adderall. Trying the GTD system off of adderall, it actually started to fill a void within me.

When you read motivational books on adderall, you are reading from the mindset of someone who is ALREADY pumped up. You really have to try reading them off of adderall, which is how most people read them. I read them from a completely different perspective than before. They make a lot more sense!!

I really know where you are at right now. REALLY. I know exactly where you're at. You're not sure if you really "need" to stop. You may even genuinely think it's not such a big deal. You may think you need to accomplish something big and then you'll finallly stop. Trust me, from someone having been in the same exact spot - you are blinded by what it's ultimately doing to you - it's denial and fear of facing the uncomfortable facts about your relationship with adderall - quitting is the best decision you can make for your life right now.

By the way, I've tried several times to read "7 Habits"...I cannot seem to get into it. Even though I've heard great things. It's such a classic. I think I might give it another try.

[quit-once]

MindfullyDeluded:

In your original post you posed several very good questions and I would like to try and address your subject from the perspective of a ten year addict who has no intentions of re-experiencing this awful addiction.

First the question in your sub-title: Does it have to be either or? I try really hard to avoid the black and white, judgemental ways of thinking common to most alcoholics who have quit. I try to see the shades of gray or even the full color spectrum when considering anything that could be controversial. So my answer to your first question is: yes. When it comes to addiction, the answer is always catagoricly yes, it is all or none. From the book "unchain your brain" I found this (appproximate) quote:

"WHEN YOU HAVE CROSSED THE LINE FROM CASUAL USE TO ADDICTION, YOU CANNOT GO BACK TO CASUAL USE"

Sadly, this is the universal truth about addiction. It is like the law of gravity - there are no exceptions to this rule.

This brings up another one of your questions, "is it possible to use adderall mindfully....."

My answer is it depends on whether you have fallen into the black hole of addiction. I believe there are some (usually new) users of adderall who have the ability to use it mindfully and the ability to not use it for long periods of time and not fall into the addiction quicksand trap. In other words they can keep an open bottle of adderall on the shelf long past its expiration date and use it as the ultimate motivation or problem solving tool only when it was really, really needed. I was one of those who could do this and I kept some kind of recreational stimulant on the shelf for at least ten years before the addiction monster reared its ugly head with adderall.

I view drugs and addictions as life's cookies. If you like cookies this analagy works. We are all bestowed with certain cookies (or tools, toys or drugs) that we can nibble on throughout life. Some examples are the nicotine cookie, the stimulants, alcohol, painkillers, pot cookies, tranquilizers and gambling. I have cmpletely gobbled up my nicotine cookie and my stimulant cookie for this lifetime. But I can still mindfully nibble at all the other cookies if I break off really small pieces or even eat a whole chocolate chip once in a while.

[Mindfully Deluded]

Thank you quit-once, I think that's yet another great way to frame it. The cookie analogy really nails it for me since I do in fact love cookies, and the only way to prevent myself from inhaling a whole pack at once is to never buy them. It's been maybe 7 or 8 years since I've purchased them, now that I think about it. I'll enjoy one from time to time when people offer them to me, just like I'll have the occasional cigarette while drinking, but I'll never buy a pack of either because I'd just burn through them in a day. I am definitely *not* a person that nibbles on things, literally or metaphorically--it's all or nothing. At least when something is THAT available. I suspect that many other members also share this characteristic.

Videogames, love, booze, junk food--it's all the same. Anything that feels good I have to seriously monitor myself around, because I've become accustomed to over-indulgence. So Adderall should be no less dangerous, and if anything, it's worse.

Being honest with myself, I now know that my question was coming from a disingenuous place, and I thank you both for offering such poignant insights to help shed light on this.

Best Regards,

MD