I wrote this on 1/31/2020.

Day 1 on Adderall

I took the capsule at about 6:30 this morning.  I was pretty anxious about it… I am always worried about taking medications.  Like, I’m afraid I’m going to experience the worst side effects and maybe die.  Fortunately that didn’t happen.

I had been lying around in bed waiting until the last possible minute to get up to catch the last possible bus because I just didn’t want to do it.  All the effort I put into getting a diagnosis and taking meds, and then I don’t want to DO it.  WTF is wrong with me?

But I did, and didn’t really notice anything different for a while.

The first thing I noticed was feeling calm.  Noise from other cubicles wasn’t driving me crazy, like it usually does.  I noticed the underlying feeling of frantic-ness that permeates everything seemed to be subdued.

I was able to focus pretty well.  I didn’t have any meetings this morning, so I worked on getting my miscellaneous email tasks cleaned up and organized.  I actually did it too… my normal method of dealing with emails that are reasonably important but not urgent is to just put them aside and plan to deal with them later.  And then I don’t, and then they pile up.

I do have a system of keeping the email in my inbox until I finally deal with it, so that I don’t TOTALLY lose track of things, but I have so much trouble acting on the thought that I can just spend ten or fifteen minutes on this thing and get it done once and for all.  And then I have like 30 undone emails in my inbox.  Eventually I get to them, but often super late, and that looks shitty.  It also is a huge driver of my anxiety that I suck at my job and I’m going to get fired any second.

I cleared out a LOT of stuff today.

I was definitely less irritable.

When I did get to an afternoon meeting, I was able to focus and pay attention better.  Not perfectly, but it seemed like less of an effort.  It was also less of an effort to sit still and be quiet.  It’s funny to put it like that because it sounds like something you’d say about a little kid.  And it’s funny to realize, but I DO spend a lot of energy on keeping myself sitting still and being quiet.  Being quiet is not natural for me even though I think of myself as a quiet person.  I’m quiet because I used to get in trouble for being loud. And also, I was a school outcast so anything I said was ridiculed so I learned to be quiet because of that. But truly quiet and shy people are not like me.

Things that Adderall did NOT help:  Forgetting things, losing things, and knocking things over.  I did all three today, ending just a few minutes ago when I knocked over my glass and broke it.

Also it did not help with time blindness.  I still had to watch the clock to know (a) what time it was and (b) how much time was going by.

I did not seem to have any bad side effects.  I also was not jittery or wired at all.  The main effect seemed to be a sense of calm.

I had been worried that coffee would interact badly with it, so I only had one half-caff Americano this morning.  I ended up this evening with what feels like a caffeine withdrawal headache.  Which is why I’m having a little cold brew now.

I am feeling pretty wiped out now.  It was a big day.