Tips on mananging ADHD without stims

Has anyone here managed to cure or manage their ADHD without stimulants? For the past two years, I've been writing down plans and goals, organizing/writing down where everything is, and prioritizing and forcing myself to follow my goals. I've been working out at least 3 times a week (haven't skipped a week), eating healthy, forcing myself to be focused 100% of the time while working, etc. But with anything I'm doing that I don't have an interest in, my body is always screaming I don't want to be here and is in a constant state of extreme restless agitation, I have strong impulses to do something else and I have to actively fight it. I feel like I'm going to have mental breakdown. If I don't have my planner, I have to keep all the tasks in my head, and they loop around and around chaotically (which is anxiety inducing), because if my thoughts go somewhere else, I will completely forget what I need to do. I was extremely interested in exercising for about a month, and I was excited and fulfilled by it, but that went away like most of my interests eventually do, and it was back to me forcing it. Will all this eventually become easy and fulfilling? It's been almost two years and nothing has changed. Even if I take 10mg of adderall, all of this is extremely easy and fulfilling, but I want to feel that way without drugs. Anyone here similar and found a solution that works?

Dopamine detox, google it

Try mindfulness meditation , it can help with that impulsive itch you get when you’re doing something you don’t inherently enjoy. Be careful not to burn yourself out though, can lead to a self-destructive impulsive spiral.

>>9838 You could try breathing methods? https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sob/index.htm or even self hypnosis? https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/22814

Speaking of ADHD, is there any way to cure that “out of mind, out of sight” thing people with it have? I jump from stimuli to stimuli and forget everything outside of what I’m focused on. Feels like I’m stuck in the now 24/7. Amphetamines don’t seem to help, I guess it’s more of a memory issue?

>>9842 Nope, if you have actual ADHD you're stuck with low empathy, high impulsivity, and always being in the moment, but rarely present. Cope with it.

>>9843 >but rarely present This is why mindfulness is good for ADHD. You gain self-control instead of being on autopilot. Just have cues and get in the habit of checking in with your mind. It works better than stimulants for reducing impulsivity.

>>9842 >Amphetamines don’t seem to help Try Ritalin or Strattera? Read about the drugs; I don't have any personal experience with them.

>>9841 >self hypnosis Have you tried that? I assume it would be like hyperfocus, except for uninteresting tasks.

>>9845 >Ritalin Ritalin and adderall are both effective for me, adderall has a lot more artificial motivation though.

>>9842 Look up working memory improvement challenges/games online and practice a lot.

friendly reminder that ADHD and psychopathy/ASPD is highly comorbid. They are not to be trusted.

Why don’t you want to take drugs?

https://youtu.be/lS9X19BAoJQ

I have a number of alarms set through out the day to remind me to pause and think about what needs to be done. For tasks I absolutely need to get done, I leave reminders on my keyboard or taped to my computer monitor. I work from home and keep a few things near my desk that I can distract myself with for short periods of time when my focus on work fades. This keeps me functional enough to excel at my job and complete any necessities. However I have not yet managed to figure out a good way to keep my focus on unimportant or procrastinatable tasks.

Just take your adderall like a responsible adult. The only effects you should notice is impulsive control, controlled attention and emotional regulation. If you feel stimulation or unnatural motivation then you’ve taken too much, or you haven’t adjusted to your threshold dose yet. If you don’t abuse it or take too much, it can take years for tolerance to build for the beneficial effects. You don’t have to get high to treat your ADHD

>>9849 You're mistaking the effects of clowns like you on people with adhd, which hampers social development and integration. they look antisocial because they've been abused. Then, insult to injury, little soykafs like you further fuarrrk them over by pathologizing the harm you caused. treat people with weird brains nicely lains, you'll actually make friends that way.

>>9872 You don't even have to treat them badly. Say little Timmy has ADHD and his parents wants him to do chores. He immediately goes oppositional and gets his stimulation fix. He continues this pattern and develops oppositional defiant disorder (50% of ADHD kids get this). Now HE is a n annoying piece of soykaf that no one likes and everyone avoids, so he starts misbehaving, vandalizing and being a general nuisance. Now ODD has progressed into conduct disorder (1/4 of people with ADHD). If he continues being a piece of soykaf until he is 18, then it can diagnosed as antisocial personality order, and he is fuarrrked. ADHD people either become criminals, drug addicts, losers addicted to the internet, psychopaths or miserable people masking their behavior to fit in to society. They live in another world. You don't have to patholgize or label them either, undiagnoised ADHD follows the same path. It's even worse for them because they have even less self-awareness.

>>9878 >kids grow up to become antisocial psychopaths because they dont want to do chores Most adhd diagnosed adults I know are nice and well-adjusted. They just have some more pronounced troubles with deadlines and forgetfulness. Your comorbidity stats are wildly incorrect: https://adhd-institute.com/burden-of-adhd/comorbidities/

>>9880 File didnt upload

>>9881 >Much of the evidence in this review shows that the comorbidity between ADHD and CD gives a much more complicated disorder that often leads to the development of ASPD and/or delinquency. >There is an increased risk for children with ADHD with or without comorbid CD to develop later onset of antisocial personality disorder. Many earlier reviews have stated that CD is a perquisite for later onset of ASPD in children with ADHD, but we found studies with data showing that also children with ADHD solely are at the risk of development of the later onset of ASPD

>>9880 >Most adhd diagnosed adults I know are nice and well-adjusted. They just have some more pronounced troubles with deadlines and forgetfulness. survivorship bias, anyone who works with ADHD professionally knows most are destined for failure.

>>9882 >>9883 This is less of a problem more and more. Since the age of internet, smart phones, social media and gaming, they just get addicted to that instead of going out in the real world and being delinquents.

>>9884 Undiagnosed ADHD is rampant in the black community and poor whites. Treating their impulsiveness with stimulants helps A LOT with behavioral issues, but these groups never seek treatment or get support. And these groups are more likely to be violent thieves. There is a reason that almost half of incarnated prisoners have undiagnosed ADHD.

>>9885 >There is a reason that almost half of incarnated prisoners have undiagnosed ADHD. It's 25%: https://adhd-institute.com/the-impact-of-adhd-in-criminal-law/ I would like to find stats on the type of crimes they're in prison for. ADHD and drug use are correlated, so I specifically wonder what the percentage of non-drug offenses are done by ADHD sufferers.

i didn't realize how sinister adhd was. why are so many kids these days proud to claim they have adhd in their twitter bios and tiktoks?

>>9887 idk, most don't know what it actually is or just self-diagnose themselves because they don't want to do their homework.

>>9886 I've seen widely variable statics on that, so it's hard to tell. Here is a study that points towards violence

Is it right to point out all the negatives that can happen with ADHD in casual discussion? It's not fair to high-functioning people with ADHD. It just stigmatizes them even more.

>>9890 Depends on the discussion. It could be rude or could be appropriate. This thread is about managing adhd without stimulants, so it's unambiguously off-topic to simply mention negatives (especially the misinfo itt) without any mention of management.

>>9887 >>9888 i think that's just an american/consumerist thing along the lines of being proud of who you are and it's not unique to adhd however insidius it may be it's detriments are largely attributable to a (dystopian) industrialized society that is completely normed and compartamentalized

>>9842 I am not ADHD but have autism and struggle with something similar where I will get fixated on certain subjects or stimulus and forget to do my routine stuff or other tasks I need to do. I use an app called loop habit tracker from fdroid to track all the stuff I'm supposed to do in the week along with a to do list and have alarms set for morning, lunchtime and evening to check both. It works pretty well most of the time and my brain likes checking things off. Getting rid of computer games and taking most of the non functional stuff off my phone was pretty worthwhile as well as they're hyper stimulating and draw me in way too easily.

>>10264 Forgot images I don't know if any of this is useful to you but what you're complaining about sounds similar to what I deal with

>>9838 I'm pretty much in the same boat, and I'm going to have a prescription for medication soon. It's a sad feeling to look back on the ruins of an interest I had and know that I can't return to it. I think the most important thing is to remove as many decisions from daily life as possible. Your socks should all be the same color. I'm thinking of using coffee bags instead of brewing from grounds, because that would remove some steps from the coffee making process. Remove steps, remove choices, remove decisions.

>>10269 crippling (diagnosed & medicated) ADHD here. not sure if it's much hope, but i've been able to return to old interests after a few years. just gotta wait for the novelty to return with time. unfortunately consistent stimulant (adderall ir) use might keep me functional in a professional/career sense, but it is like kicking dead whales down the beach away all joy & interest in hobbies that aren't cleaning. i need it to survive (caffeine is no substitute) but i'm about to run out at the end of the month and i'm terrified. the success i've had with adderall allowed me to institute coping and organizational methods like consistent to-do list creation, but one or another on 4heir own are not enough. the psychopathy thing though? adderall gave me an interest in socialisation for the first time. without adderall, i have no interest in people. why would i want to waste my time with others when i have interests and hobbies, after all? i don't think i'll ever be able to truly love anyone in a relationship sense -- i lose interest & will always prioritise my interests first, no matter how much i care about loved ones. i know this makes me a bad person, but i have no incentive to change. i know i lived more than 2 decades unmedicated before this, but i honestly don't know how i survived ... or how i'll survive in the future. seriously, i'd never seen my bedroom floor before adderall, and now on a half-dose probably only 1/4 of it is visible. i haven't washed dishes in a month. help. ...so. would snorting it help increase the efficacy of a smaller dose? i take it sublingually when i need that instant boost, and i avoid citrus & take it on an empty stomach w/ baking soda water for potentiation when necessary, but i need better ways to stretch my supply for longer. i take l-tyrosine & magnesium to reduce side effects btw >>9843 this precisely sums up my exact experiences. fuarrrk. i've never seen this so perfectly encapsulated before. thank you.

>>9838 Honestly, it's been getting less pronounced with age. I've quit the amphetamine stuff back in high school. I've been using post-it notes more and more. Especially for financial decisions. Stick post it notes on a surface immediately relevant so that I have a reminder I forget existed, so that I don't accidentally dismiss the reminder since I don't see it every day. My best trick has been to "show up" to things I want to build into habits. Every day, I make myself go through the motions of setting myself up for something I want to do, working on said projects when I want to instead of forgetting about them, just because the habit of opening the project becomes automatic, and all that's left is the decision of whether or not I want to work on it that day.

This is me >>10264 I have a meeting with a psychologist on Friday to finish up the ASD diagnostic process and I'm seriously considering asking him if there's any drugs or other medical help he could offer me for executive function (I wan prescription adderal if I can get it for focus) Is this is a bad idea or a terrible idea? I figure I would ask in this thread because this is full of other ND broken brain people. It takes me two weeks to change the sheets on my bed in stages and 5 days to text a girl back but I can sit and watch Battlestar galactica with perfect concentration for 8 hours I am still doing a lot better using the checklist stuff but once the hyperfixation on it wore off a month in my compliance about halfed

>>9878 You might as well be creating a permanent subclass with that attitude. For someone who has a problem with how apathetic people with ADHD can be, you lack empathy yourself. You have quite frankly shoved a lot of people into the mould of criminals, losers, psychopaths, and undesirables with little care for their humanity. It's really strange to find someone on a so-called "cyberpunk" imageboard that takes criminal delinquency at face-value. >>9885 Has it fuarrrking occurred to you that these people have limited access to the help they need?

>>10840 Responding to schizos and obsessive posters is almost always a losing prospect anon.

>>9885 >almost half of incarnated prisoners have undiagnosed ADHD This is impossible for you to prove even if it were true which I doubt in the first place. It's paradoxical even. How can any percentage of a population be said to have an undiagnosed condition if they haven't been diagnosed?

>>10829 Anyone? I'm meeting this guy in less than 16 hours

>>10829 >>10843 That is a retarded idea. However considering: >It takes me two weeks to change the sheets on my bed in stages >5 days to text a girl back >watch Battlestar galactica with perfect concentration for 8 hours Well, dude, that means you only like to do things that are fun. You might not be as fuarrrked up as you think. You might just be a selfish, hedonistic person like everyone else, but to consider such a thing might be contrary to your character... So, if it is, you should probably consider asking.

>>10844 I mean I'm pretty hedonistic but taking two weeks to change the bed sheets and spending those weeks lying on a bare mattress thinking man I should probably change these sheets but not doing is not normal, neither is taking a week to answer messages even when you know what you want to say, know how to say it, know the other person wants to talk to you, and know you want to talk to the other person. There is something wrong with how I do things, most people can do stuff like this without needing a huge amount of time to do these things, and I don't think I'm depressed, I feel pretty good at the minute actually.

>>10845 >>10844 I ended up not asking him, probably not a good idea for me to have prescription meth in any case

Read up or watch some videos on Rudolf Steiner's theory of temperaments. There's four of those: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. You're a sanguine. And the idea isn't to try to be less so, but to "work with what you have". A sanguine child would benefit from a diverse and varied learning environment, and the sanguine adult benefits from a diverse workplace: a renaissance man. You may build up an impressively varied history: one week you made this awesome sculpture because you gave it your all, then you had this really good diet for some time, then you made this Battlestar Galactica podcast for a month, then you started playing the violin... nothing wrong with that. That said, I know such an attitude may be hard to fit into your life, your current context at the time. School, work and family would probably lack the necessary dynamism to accommodate such a vibrant temperament. It may involve going to live by yourself, or maybe going to live with someone else so they can help you out with the bed and the dishes, or any other weakness you may (as we all do) have in your character. Here's an idea: start the Sanguine Podcast, or whatever you want to call it. And tell people about whatever you're into that week. Episode 1: nutrition. Episode 2: Aristotle. Episode 3: Life and work of Danny DeVito. I'm half-joking, but I really think that such types of character are too quickly diagnosed with "disorders" and prescribed with "medications". What's gonna hurt more in the long run, to fight it, or to own it? Best wishes, lains.

>>10847 Mumsnet is down the hall love

>>10845 Sleeping on a bare mattress is the opposite of hedonism. Laziness? Maybe, but not hedonism.

>>10850 Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying, I might be hedonistic, but I don't think these things are hedonism, there is something wrong with my ability to do stuff

>>10847 while I appreciate the spirit of the post, attribuiting the humerous model to rudy steiner is wrong.

Stims aren't an option for me in the UK. Diagnosis is either £1-2k private or a 2 year wait for NHS - which could still say 'nope'. I'm not convinced they'd make a diagnosis as you need a personal reference to provide evidence of behaviour (e.g. teacher / parent), which I can't really get. In terms of what helps: Sometimes, I find getting caught up in an idea around efficiency helps; Atomic Habits set the hamster in motion last time. Reading Flowers for Algernon made me feel guilty for not using my capacity to learn, so that kick started me into being very driven for a while. Maybe I'm just cyclothymic with some ADHD thrown in. Lately I cant even bring myself to play the games I once enjoyed, only observe them. Moving home helps, when you change environment you can really 'define' your habits with the contexts you build for them. This ties in with some stuff from Atomic Habits, too. The longest streak I've had of productivity was maybe 4.5 months (this was after moving home). Unfortunately, that streak led to my dismissal because my ego inflated along with the increase in efficiency. Slowly but surely downhill since then. Do any of you who have ADHD struggle with working from home? I wake up 1 minute before work, do basically nothing all day, feel unemployed, and feel I have no use for the money. Socially this is the worst I've ever been, too.