In case you are still looking for help or advice: I can't really offer advice, but I can say how adderal affected me during the time I have been taking it.

I started on 20 mg (XR), and the thing I thought on the first day was that I wonder if I am having a placebo affect or if it is the medicine that is making me feel kind of happy. It was like I had a little jump to my step. It was like, "Huh, I actually feel good today. This is nice." That was just the first day for me. That feeling went away by the second day, and the difference was only subtle, very subtle. The interesting thing is that I was able to develop a technique to get my headaches to go away when needing to concentrate for lectures after a month of taking the 20 mg dose. This was extremely helpful for me, though any time that I was unable to get a ride to the doctor's office to get my prescription filled, I felt super groggy and a little depressed if it was for longer than 2 days, though there could have been other stressing factors complicating the situation during those times. After about 9 or 10 months on the same dose, my prescription was upped to 30 mg. This change made me feel very strange at first. The very first day on the 30 mg dose, I felt very sleepy, but in a good way. The second day, I still felt a bit sleepy, and a lot of my muscle tension in my neck, back, and legs started to feel like it was melting away (not entirely, but enough to make moving and relaxing possible). There were a lot of stressors in my life at the time since I was kind of bed ridden and unable to function well enough to not exhaust myself to the point of falling without limiting my activities. I will say that my emotions turned from sleepy to irritable really quickly after being yelled at by a family member about my sleeping in most days and how they can't stand to see me resting when they have to work every day. I don't know how much of it was situational and how much was due to the increased dosage. My emotions leveled out after about a week and a half of increasing the dosage, and since then, I have felt much more relaxed. It helped me so much that I was able to get a job and start working again.

I hope things work out for you soon! Non-medicine things that help me include listening to music and playing with a stress ball (squeezing it and tossing it between my hands) whenever I have to do really boring stuff at work (doing boring things makes me a bit irritable if I have to control the urge to move around; Indulging this urge in a non-disruptive manner helps me a majority of the time). I also find that stretching frequently helps me feel more energized and thus less irritable. Also, eating fish and rice for a meal helped me control extreme irritability one time. An additional thing that I noticed to have an effect is fish oil pills that my sister gave me to take for a couple of months (I took 3 each day and they made me feel less groggy and less irritable).

That's all I've got! I hope it helps.