Vyvanse

I have an announcement to make: for the first time in five years, I am once again taking medication for my ADHD.

That's right: I'm now taking Vyvanse, a newer time-release stimulant. It's going very well, but more on that in a minute.





My regular readers (both of you?) may recall the post I wrote a while back about medication and my general reticence where it's concerned. Upon deciding to go back to medication, I naturally checked back on this post to see just how much crow I have to eat at this point. Not too much, I think: I did say I had no intentions of ever going on medication again, but otherwise, my feelings about ADD meds haven't really changed.

I still believe that the greatest long-term benefit to ADD treatment comes when you work to get along as best you can without meds and the experience I'm having right now is, to my mind, a pretty good demonstration of why that is: as I've said to my husband and friends, suddenly taking medication after years of getting by without it is like switching your life from "Expert" mode to "Beginner," or like practicing for a marathon with weights on your ankles, but taking them off on the day of the event. Things are just easy.

It's an experience worth having, to be sure. Sampling what it's like for other people after living your life without a fully-functional pre-frontal cortex, it feels rather like magic. Tasks almost seem to complete themselves, by comparison, and life seems to organize itself.

Personally, however, what I'm finding the most remarkable is the change in my ability to regulate my emotions.  Emotional regulation is one ADD problem that often gets forgotten about in a wake of organizational and focus issues. Honestly, though, if you come down to it, all of our problems really have emotional self-regulation at their base: abilities to organize and self-motivate are essentially matters of emotion, or of the inability to set emotions aside and act upon pure intent.

The other thing that's improved significantly is my anxiety level. That's interesting, of course, because according to conventional wisdom, stimulants should increase anxiety, not reduce it. That, at least, was the opinion of the genius MD I tried to talk to about my ADD a few months ago.

Show of hands: anyone else here ever used coffee to cure a bout of insomnia? Brain chemistry is freakin' interesting stuff.

Ultimately, though, the biggest change is just how good I feel about life...how manageable it all seems and how much more seems possible than it did before.

Mind you, I'm still a big believer in all that neuroplasticity stuff. As time goes on, I want to learn how I can use medication as a tool to help my brain improve itself permanently rather than letting it be something I'll always need in order to get by.

Here's the interesting thing where that's concerned: this is the third time in my life I've decided to go on medication. The first two times, I took pills for about a year, then stopped taking them because, believe it or not, they didn't make a difference anymore. Oh, they were still affecting me - I could tell by the ol' nuisance side effects - but they no longer gave me an edge in managing my ADD. Now, I'm no expert, but I believe that my brain learned to adjust itself, learned to find its own ways of achieving the same effects, kept working with the same habits that I formed with chemical assistance.

The analogy I like to use is this: if you're trying to stumble around in a corridor filled with various objects, furniture, doorways, stairs, in pitch-black darkness, you're going to go slowly and bump your shins a lot. Turn on a light for a few minutes, study where everything is located, and you can learn to walk comfortably through the space whether the light's on or off.