Dropped a mammoth blog post about discovering I had ADHD last year. This one is a little personal, but I had a lot of fears about going on medication as a creative professional and scholar, so it felt worth sharing my experience.
cerebralarcade.com/2021/01/11/adh
Conversation
The way you describe the effects of medication on your attention/focus reminds me of how I felt about my depression meds. I was afraid it was a "fake" feeling, but in reality it just gave me space to determine what I was really feeling.
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Absolutely! When I first started anxiety meds way back, I fell down a philosophical rabbit hole around what "real feelings" even means if feelings are just determined by the amounts of chemicals in our brains. It's wild how we've come to moralize feelings and their "naturalness."
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How do you manage the stimulants vs the anxiety? Do you find they increase it? I tried stimulants before, but it was during a difficult time with high anxiety, and it was hard to know if they were effective or not.
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For me, a lot of the things that had been diagnosed as anxiety issues in the past, were in fact manifestations of ADHD. I'm on meds for both, & there was a bit of balancing to do there, but stimulants have reduced my anxiety symptoms and calmed me a lot. Everyone's different tho
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Yeah think that is similar to me - I think much of my anxiety might be a result of the self-blame about not living up to my own expectations, which could, in turn, be a result of seemingly ADHD-like symptoms. I'd definitely like to try again at some stage. Thanks!