On Adderall
This is a follow-up to On Stims, which despite being just a few paragraphs long and excerpted from Blind Spots, received an unusual amount of feedback. That is the signal that I should probably expound upon the topic for the benefit of my fellow man.
I usually like to give some broad takeaway in these posts—i.e. “be kind”—but I’m afraid I don’t have one for you here. The best I can offer is the following:
The brain will heal.
What I mean is that I was on this stuff for well over a decade. It has now been several years since I touched it. I can confirm that the brain will heal.
If you are reading this post, there is a good chance that you are taking Adderall.
If you are taking Adderall, there is a good chance you are contemplating getting off of it, because it is the devil.
If you’re contemplating getting off it, there is a very good chance you are being held back by dependency, by habit, and by fear of the unknown; i.e. what lurks on the other side.
The question you have to ask yourself: are you willing to give up what makes you sick?
I believe that Adderall is a much, much bigger problem than what is talked about in polite society. Wall Street runs on it, and having lived in San Francisco, the situation is no different out there. High-functioning and well-educated individuals want to win, winning means long hours doing what is mostly boring work, and there is no way to do long hours of boring work without stimulants. The brain just isn’t built for it. Adderall allows you to basically jam a square peg into a round hole, and convince yourself that spending 16 hours a day building linked three-statement models in Excel is normal. Like, it’s not. Most white-collar work is unapproachable without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. There are a few people for whom the work is normal and in my humble opinion, they are the freaks, not the people whose brain tells them “um, this shit is catastrophically boring and I want to go lay on the couch instead.”
But this is what makes Adderall such a pernicious drug to quit. It’s not like kicking booze or weed or something clearly deleterious to your health. By kicking stims, there is an 100% chance your performance at work will suffer. It represents the demise of enhanced productivity. This in itself is too much for many type-A, hypercompetitive and work-obsessed types to give up, and this is why in my experience these same people never come to a peaceful end. It always ends in burnout or a crash, a denouement where they are dragged out of the club by their bad habits rather than leaving on their own volition. It runs deeper than the stims, to be fair. It’s an attitude problem. But if you want to get off this ride, you have to accept that you’re going to fall behind by a few spots in the rat race.
To insert my own personal travails into the discussion, Adderall was present during pretty much all the bad decisions I made, but I believe that it is a grade-A loser move to blame things you say or do on alcohol or drugs. Like when someone says “oh, I didn’t mean what I said, I was drunk” — without exception, whenever you hear someone say that, recognize that you are dealing with a grade-A loser. Those words and actions were in your mind and the drugs only lowered your inhibitions to where you released them. Same goes for me. Staying up for days on Adderall impaired my judgment but I definitely had deeper issues that I needed to work out, like horrible habits, a toxic attitude, and judgment which had always been questionable at times; these were going to eventually cause me problems one way or the other, even if meth had never entered the picture.
Just to be clear, Adderall is meth. They call it white-collar meth, but like, it’s not a joke. It’s meth. It’s crank, it’s speed, it’s the same drug that those guys on the streets are addicted to. The meth heads, the speed freaks, the tweakers, they’re one and the same as lé coastal elites when it comes to drug of choice. Just because it comes from a doctor and is dispensed from a pharmacy doesn’t change the fact that these two drugs are close to pharmacologically-identical:
It takes me less time to type “meth” than it does “Adderall,” and I think it is more beneficial for you, the reader, in terms of how to accurately view those orange pills and the impact they have on your brain function. So the two terms will be used interchangeably for the duration of this meth monologue.
I think back to a girl I dated many moons ago who had her alarm go off at 6:30 AM, but that wasn’t when she would get up and start her day. It used to drive me crazy. 6:30 was her alarm to take her Adderall and then she’d roll over and go back to sleep until about 7:00, or whenever the meth hit her bloodstream. After taking it all day she would be too wired to go to sleep naturally, and so the psych had her on some sort of downer or depressant that would knock her out at night. And that was the life she lived, and the life that I’m pretty sure most Americans live. Never sober. On pills from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed. In Blind Spots I called this the magical merry-go-round of uppers and downers, around and around you go on the wheel of Ixion. The irony of it all is that the pills are originally prescribed to stabilize you, I think. Instead, the first pill has to be counteracted by a second or third pill, putting your emotions in a constant state of flux and having a massively long-term destabilizing effect—but a sacrifice that people are willing to make to get ahead in their career.
The best advice I can offer someone who is stuck at this fork in the road is to take a fifty-year view on this stuff. What I mean is that, like, unless you stop doing what you’re doing, you are going to do it until the day you die. That sounds awfully simple but I don’t know how else to put it. The course that you are on, you will stay on that same course until you burn out, crash, or summon up the willpower to make a drastic life change. The choice is yours and only yours, homeboy. Three random quotes to keep in mind:
“There is no consequence-free drug.”
“Taking drugs and thinking that you are happy is like taking a loan and thinking you have money.”
“You want to get high, be ready to come down.”
Is the juice worth the squeeze? From the other side, I would say yes. But you have to decide what your priorities are.
Adderall has always fucked with my diet, with my sleep, with my mood and with my exercise. Those were sacrifices I was willing to make in order to get ahead in my career. My priorities are different today. I care about consistently getting eight hours of sleep, working out hard seven days a week, eating clean, being razor-sharp physically and mentally and emotionally. Once you put those first, you quickly realize there is no place for drugs or booze or pills or anything mind-altering; the only thing I’ve allowed myself for years now is coffee, and I still go back and forth over whether I should peel that out.
A lot of these choices became clear when I took a fifty-year view. I didn’t want to take orange pills, or ANY pills, every single day for the rest of my life. It made me feel weak. I hate feeling weak. I hated feeling like I couldn’t accomplish something without the use of prescription meth. It made me feel like an addict, which was coincidentally why I committed to giving up nicotine; not being able to exist without a vape or a cigarette or pouch within arms reach has a way of making you feel completely pathetic.
I also had started to develop strongly-held views that all of this psychiatric stuff is bullshit, that ADHD is bullshit and that it was invented by big pharma to get America hooked on pills. Think back to every diagnosis you ever had. “Do you have a hard time paying attention in classes that you don’t care about? Do you get bored when you do boring things?” Great question doc, yes, I sure do, now put the fries in the bag and write the script already. You never stop though and think about how inane these questions are. But longer-term, like, look how the government lied to you about how all these vaccines had no side effects. You think that the pharmaceutical industry, driven by a profit motive, is going to be any more up-front about the long-term side effects of all the pills you take? Come on, dude. I would also point out that great men and women accomplished a shitload throughout the course of history without Adderall and Vyvanse; perhaps at an even greater rate than today. When’s the last time we built a world wonder? They threw up that hideous Vessel in Hudson Yards and all people do is huck themselves off it. But that’s neither here nor there.
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. If you are at a fork in the road and can’t decide which to take, ask yourself which of the two is the hard choice, and the answer will become clear. I’ve stuck by this method of making decisions for years now, it hasn’t steered me wrong and I will continue riding it until it does.
Getting off stims is a hard choice. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the first few months are brutal. Flooding your brain with orange daily dopamine pills has a huge impact on how your mind processes pleasure and rewards, and when the meth-induced dopamine intake disappears, your ability to experience pleasure will be crushed temporarily. You will be lethargic and unfocused, and at times, completely useless and unable to do your job. You will sleep too much. You will gain weight. You will have a difficult time summoning up the energy to do even the most basic of tasks, like answering a text message. You will have both increased anxiety and increased depression. You will have severe cravings and physical withdrawal symptoms, because meth is a highly addictive drug. This doesn’t mean you’re weak, it’s just as simple as “physically-addictive drugs are highly physically-addictive.” Withdrawal is a bitch, and this is why I would advise that if you’re going to quit one drug, just quit all the drugs at the same time, alcohol, nicotine, everything, you name it. Take the fifty-year view.
You will not receive very much support throughout this period, and should expect that it will be a battle that you will fight entirely alone. It is a battle against nobody but yourself. All the battles worth fighting are.
Everything will eventually normalize. Three months, six months, it depends how long you were on the train to begin with, but I promise, it will normalize. You will be rewarded with a healthier body and fuller muscles; I don’t know if this following claim is backed by science or not, nor do I particularly care, but Adderall saps the gains you were trying to make at the gym. You will be rewarded with a clear mind that isn’t always being either flooded or depleted with artificial chemicals. Your thoughts and your headspace will feel more like a walk-in closet, where you know how to locate everything, rather than a turbulent mess. You will find a level of emotional stability that you didn’t even know existed, and as time passes, you will find that you are in pretty much the same mood all the time.
I actually don’t have a problem sitting down for a few hours and building models in Excel without losing focus. Will I ever be able to do it for twelve hours straight like I used to, no, but I’m okay with someone else winning that game. I point this out specifically because those first few months without stims, I could not use Excel. I used to joke with a friend who was going through the same process that we both had PTSD (Post-Traumatic Spreadsheet Disorder). The thought of Excel nauseated me and sitting down to try to get shit done made my head hurt. It will normalize, I promise, and you will reach a new equilibrium where you can get things done albeit at a reduced rate. Do not panic and assume you are defective—I did this—you’re not, your brain just needs time to adjust after being flooded with drugs for many years.
The brain will heal.
This is as far as I can take you, friend. In the spirit of being a good dude, I would offer my support to anyone reading this but my support isn’t going to be what gets you over the finish line. Just know that you are not alone, that many, many people struggle with this and are afraid to speak up about it, and that glory awaits you on the other side. Hard choices, easy life.
Onwards and upwards,
GB
