zenforyen

Okay, so to me as an armchair psychologist it sounds to me that you either have serious social anxiety issues and/or autism. You should really research that. If social interactions feel like a mine field you rather want to avoid at all costs and don't know how to navigate, it sounds like a serious issue and more than just "introversion".

You can check this quiz (and check the website):

https://embrace-autism.com/aspie-quiz/

For autism there is no "fix", if you have it - it's just something you learn to live with. You still could have ADHD and it's also not "fixable", but the medication does help a lot. If you have both, it's sometimes called AuDHD (many people on Mastodon write that about themselves).

I have no experience with Adderall (thought Adderall is some American thing). I could choose between Medikinet and Elvanse (the latter is called Vyvanse in the US, and the former is similar to Ritalin or Concerta).

They all are supposed to do roughly the same thing - they are stimulants which increase the amount of usable dopamine (which is absorbed too quickly by brains of people with ADHD so they have a deficit basically all of the time, causing most of the problems, according to the current theory).

There are two main categories - amphetamine-based medications and Methylphenidate-based medications. But that is only chemically different and does not matter to you.

What matters is that some people can handle one of these really well but others not at all. It's very individual. In rare cases , none of these work well or all cause more problems than they fix. But this is pretty rare. That is something a psychiatrist can help figuring out - the right medication and right dosage.

Another difference is how long they act (whole day vs a few hours) and whether it depends on having proper meals or it does not matter what you take it with. But all that are details.

Compared to typical psychiatric meds I'd say ADHD stimulant meds are pretty low risk. They don't fuck up your brain chemistry, you do not have to take them for weeks before you see any effect and don't have to be careful with stopping taking them etc as I've heard about people who tried various antidepressants or other serious meds. It's not like that at all.

Overall if you get the right amount of the right stimulant meds that work for you, in the beginning you might feel energized, maybe a bit euphoric. But that is only in the first weeks or months. Don't focus on that. This is not the goal. The goal is much more subtle.

When I take my meds, it's like I take my glasses to see clearly and not blurry all the time. I feel emotionally balanced. The big burden lifts. Suddenly, things are not so difficult anymore. Suddenly, you don't struggle with starting to so something that needs to be done, even if you don't really like doing it. You can just do it without hating every second. And it becomes calm in the mind. Sometimes I notice the meds start working (like 15-30 min after taking the pill) because I notice that my mind is empty and not circling with thoughts. I am just there and I feel positive-neutral. That is usually some brief moment when hitting the sweet spot. But what lasts for hours is overall a higher motivation and lower inner resistance to just start, do and complete things.

It's like someone finally gave you the brakes and steering wheel for the racing car that is your brain so you can finally properly drive it where you want it to go.

This is what you should be looking for.

To get diagnosed and get access to meds, you don't have to talk about your personal issues. The diagnosis is based on some formal quiz asking for severity of your struggles in various situations. Very similar to something like this

https://www.adhdme.care/indicator-baars

Regardless of any talking therapy or CBT, you should try to get diagnosed and if you do get "certified" ADHD, give stimulant meds a try. For me, getting the meds was all I needed to fix up myself, it changed everything.

I was very cautious in the beginning and I researched a LOT about all the meds and their ups and downs and safety. I would say if you use them as intended and have no condition making it problematic for you (and that is what also a neurologist needs to assess before giving them to you), the worst I have ever felt was like when drinking way too much coffee and getting jittery and somehow anxious. That only happened before we found the correct dosage for me and when I was still not used to it.

I would say it's pretty safe to try them out, but take it slow with increasing dosage, only increase after you tried a dosage for multiple days or a week, and be consistent. The brain needs to adjust.

I've started very slowly with 10mg a day in the morning and now I'm at 2x 15 = 30mg Medikinet / day, for adults it's considered pretty low. With Elvanse I think 30mg is even the lowest. Be careful, mg of one thing are not the same as another. Here is a table with a few meds and amounts considered equivalent.

https://www.adhspedia.de/wiki/Umrechnungstabelle_Medikamente

As a responsible person the only thing I can say is that you should not do it. Maybe on reddit the mods would remove my comment for helping you do such experiments "recklessly". But I just give you information, I think you're an adult and can take responsibility for your decisions. Either you could have found such information yourself, or you would not - which would be worse - because then you would just guess and possibly actually harm yourself.

All I'm saying is, the meds are safe if you use them correctly. Just like a saw or a knife, it's a tool. Just make sure to know what you are doing, inform yourself properly, take it slow and be careful. And obviously, if you feel worse or bad, and it's not a one time thing, maybe it's wrong dosage or wrong med for you.

Ah I forgot one thing. The "comedown". Some people have it, some don't. Some meds seem to have it, some don't. I have it with my meds, but it's okay. For some people it's pretty unpleasant.

It's when the meds are almost used up, for me usually after work in the evening. There's like a 30 min period when I'm pretty irritable, more impulsive, annoyed, etc. I had it stronger in the beginning, but now it's acceptable. For some people it's so bad it's a deal breaker. Just a thing to know. An acceptable comedown for a day of motivation and productivity is a very good deal for me at least.

Woah. If all what you say is true (your account is just one day old and you might be an internet troll for all I know, but if you were, I should not reply further, so if I reply, I have to assume that you are serious, but maybe it's just me being paranoid), then I'm sorry to hear how life has been so far for you.

I don't know how old you are, I would guess between 15 and 20, as it's sounding like school is or was not too many years ago for you (and you are not a native English speaker, are you?)

"Not knowing the definition of a friend" sounds like a familiar thing to me from when I grew up. Teenage/very young adult times were the WORST times of my life. If I guessed your age roughly right, then - good news! Life only gets better from now on !

I had similar experience of not belonging properly to any group in my class back in school and being the weird one who is not avoided like the "outsiders", but also not fitting anywhere properly. This also seems to be a common ADHD experience.

Well, after school you are free to choose your own path - and on the path you tend to find more people like yourself, with similar interests, and more open minded people, with different quirks. Some of them might eventually become friends. People who peaked in school are the true boring losers!

Either you are someone pushed into being socially an introvert by circumstances, or you might also have some autistic traits. ADHD and some form of autism often come together. You might want to research into that. Just had to mention this as a possibility.

If that does not apply to you, then in general - social cues are learnable, if it was just due to missed opportunity. I think I learned to "read" people and behavior of others pretty well, but was very insecure and inadequate as a teenager. It's a matter of practice and self-confidence (which is also learnable, and it grows as you find your self-worth with increasing positive interactions with others and successes in life).

You should definitely not wait with therapy as long as you say you will, and do it once you have the opportunity. You seem to have a lot to unpack. And you SHOULD. You need to process all that crap and talk to other people. At the very least, the therapist can be like a paid friend. In the best case, they are actually good at their job and can do more than just listen and validate you and give you opinions, but also help you navigate your problems and difficulties better and try fixing them. Finding friends is a thing that just happens eventually and you can't force, but finding a therapist is in your hands. If you are in a civilized country where you don't have to pay it yourself - just go for it !

Also, you should check out /r/ADHD on Reddit, it's a huge community (I wish there was more here on Lemmy, well I'm trying my best to make this a good place too, e.g. by replying), there you can see so many people sharing similar struggles, and exchanging ideas and celebrating successes. It was nice to find my "flock" and feel validated and understood. And others could give much better advice than I could, or provide more perspectives. I'm just one random dude you opened up a little to (I might also give bad advice, who knows).

The ADHD community on Mastodon is also pretty friendly and active, so you can go and try hanging there with the people!

That sounds like a severe case of "ADHD paralysis". I never experienced it so strongly, but I know the feeling when you want to do something but can't force yourself to stand up and actually do it. If this is purely ADHD related, then it is what is called executive dysfunction, because of (most likely) a lack of dopamine available in the brain. That's where the right medication can help. Never had this "paralysis" again since I got them.

But you're also talking about sadness. I thought I had depressive episodes, but it turns out in my case it was all just secondary to living with ADHD. However some people develop serious depression and/or anxiety issues.

Did you get professionally evaluated and diagnosed? If not, you really, really should. It was the first step on my path of fixing these issues.

I said only you know yourself best, but depending on how bad it is, sometimes the best you can do for yourself is get some help to get you out of the "black hole" first. Your case does sound pretty serious, so you maybe should not try to fix it all on your own. At some point I accepted that I need some help, because I did not know what to do (and did not really know what was "broken" back then).

My diagnosis is now more than 2 years ago, I have been struggling in certain ways all my life, and some problems will never go away, but feeling inadequate, sad and paralyzed - I only remember this like a dim nightmare from the past. Don't give up, there is hope - it can get better!

I'm just a random guy on the internet, but a doctor with experience in ADHD diagnosis and treatment can help you get access to the support you need.

For overthinking, a CBT self help book actually helped me to analyze that mess that is my brain and see lots of pointless worries and anxiety and emotions. Been a horrible overthinker most of my life.

Thoughts, emotions and behaviors form a kind of feedback loop and overthinking is often fueled by anxiety, at least in my experience. Thinking of all the ways things can go wrong or you can mess up. I guess there's some amount of this we can't get rid of with ADHD, because of being forgetful and inattentive etc., but there's lots of worries that are blown out of proportion, like what other people could think, and always elaborately thinking about the worst case etc. So that's stuff one can try to realize.

What helped me was realizing all the stupid stuff I think about and look at myself from a distance and then kind of realize how ridiculous it is. Thinking too much about what happened and whether what I did or said was ok, or worrying about something that can happen in the future. Other people have their own lives an worries and do not think as much about us as we do, and there are many things outside of our control, also no point worrying too much about those, etc.

You can try to create a mind map of what things you believe about yourself and others and why and follow thought spirals, and then looking at this crazy mess of a map shows a lot of garbage. Just have to be critical of your own reasoning and feelings, there's a saying "don't believe everything you think". Truly internalizing this really helped me getting out of it, I believe.

Concerning motivation... Well, I think getting meds was the most impactful thing, helps me a lot to do and complete stuff that I do not enjoy, and be more calm (less thoughts, less emotional swings). But changing the attitude to certain things does also help (like, I'm not doing chores just because, but e.g. because it makes my wife happy and reduces her work load, and I want to see my wife happy, etc.)

Nobody knows yourself better than you do, so nobody can cut through the bullshit or find tricks for your brain better.

Hope this helps a little bit.

Good luck on your own journey :)

That moment the meds are kicking in and the wave of calm arrives and takes over for a moment. The beautiful silence of just being. So called stimulants make me zen like a meditating monk at optimal dosage.

Sometimes I take a small dosage to fall asleep when I feel my brain is spinning in pointless circulating understimulated overdrive, it's not only keeping me balanced during the day, but also sometimes helps me fall asleep at night.

I feel you. Do you have access to meds? At least for me, they do help a LOT to actually put that whole "strategy" into action, more or less, and not feel completely drained... Without meds the inner emotional resistance is pretty high so I can see how this my suggestion can sound like useless "theory" :/

Haha absolutely, I'm also one of the people who always said all this rainbow and green washing is bullshit. As if they ever cared for anything.

Capitalism has no values, except for one: shareholder value. Yesterday they help sending people to concentration camps, today they help saving the world and increasing diversity, yeah, totally convincing.

There is one thing to rely on with capitalism - if you convince people you can make good money with it or it is good for the brand, they will jump onto it and squeeze the shit out of it. An abstract, amoral force, made from a large number of concrete shitty people.

"Learn to accept what you cannot change and do not waste emotional energy on it"

The CBT self-help book I once randomly bought turned out to be pretty useful, even though I just quickly binge-read it and did almost none of the exercises.

Personal development and growth (ADHD edition, with new exciting difficulty levels and challenges)

Nice metaphor that I have not heard before !

Yeah exactly, the upside is, at least for some of us, that we still feel we overall can somehow keep up and can do pretty well, sometimes exceptionally so, even though everything feels like a chaotic struggle or failure.

Yes, exactly. To make America great again, Americans first have to take their country back from the oligarchs that are destroying it and sucking it dry. Noone else can or will do it for them.

Haha nice observation, I'm pretty good with sorting the tickets for the weekly sprints at work, but I never connected the dots or consciously applied similar techniques in private life.

I guess I do kind of agile prints that are not measured in a fixed unit of time, but in natural hyperfocus waves...

Yeah can relate, it's always nice if I can reach some milestone when switching the project hyperfocus again. Celebrating any tangible progress helps staying motivated. Small steps are nice, and each big step is a gift.

I wanted to review all rooms and get rid of stuff that I don't need (like gadgets or old clothes or random household things). Well, I did a room and the basement. Some more to go. I planned this for this year, so I just wait for the motivation to come back to do the next room. Because reviewing a whole room and possibly rearranging half of the things and sorting stuff out takes at least half a day and is pretty exhausting.