[Imabeliever225]

To start off let me make it clear that I do plan on talking to my dr about this next week when she's back in office.

So I was recently prescribed Adderall XR 30 mg, I've taken it for only 3 days so far and I don't like the way I feel. So far I don't think my focus had improved but it's hard to tell. I also am feeling irritable more often than usual and it seems to be over nothing which is frustrating. Without any medication I still struggle with irritability just not daily as I am with the Adderall. The biggest thing that's bothering me is I just feel really weird and I don't know how to describe it. It's like I'm in my own world or out of body I don't always feel like myself. I've been told to continue taking it because my body will adjust to it and the symptoms will go away (I was told about 4-6 weeks) and I was also told to just stop taking them. I plan on taking them for at least 2 more days (a total of 5 days) since I have the next two days off and I can see if it helps improve my level of focus or not. If these symptoms will take a while to go away I don't think I want to wait for that because I'm not able to be around people and I'm still unproductive since my medication makes my body feel weird and it makes me want to do nothing because I don't like how it feels. My ADHD is a problem but not to where I need medication every day. I want to be able to miss a couple days but don't want to feel weird while on it. I have learned to adjust my lifestyle to accommodate it for the most part and I can do well most days. I mostly struggle with school because that's the one thing I have to actually focus on. My job is fast pace and always changing so that is beneficial for me and works well, as with school I can't sit there any pay attention for longer than 5 minutes or even do homework it's to the point where I'm failing my classes when I know I'm smart.

Any help or advice? I would really appreciate it.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Imabeliever225]

I decided to stop taking it, whether or not it improves my focus, if it makes me feel the way I do then I don't want to continue with this. I can't live this way and I can't wait several days or weeks for these feelings to go away. I'll still talk to my dr next week though to make changes.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[kanasi]

Unfortunately, it seems like every med that directly affects the brain will have an adjustment period at the beginning. But maybe you can try something else that will be more agreeable to your system (even for the rough part at the beginning)? I'm planning on waiting it out regardless myself, but I guess in the end it does always depend at least partially on how bad the symptoms are...

[Imabeliever225]

I will see if there is something else I can try but for me these symptoms are too much. I can't wait it out I'm not myself and I'm constantly annoyed and irritated, while having a headache often now too. It's making me want to do nothing but stay in bed. I need to be able to get things done.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Miswimmy1]

Did you go straight to 30mg? That seems like a kind of big jump from nothing. That might have something to do with your weird feeling. I know that stimulants don't normally have to be built up but in my experience, my psychiatrists have usually done at least a day or two before upping the dosage.

[Imabeliever225]

For Adderall, yes. However I have tried other medications first and lower doses of those meds and they didn't do anything for me. So she prescribed that. For some reason my liver metabolizes medications (most if not all) very fast and some don't do anything for me.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[NoId]

I never got much done on Adderall. But it was a treat just the same. Visceral and depleting. It provides more emotional experiences. Kind of anyways. It is sort of rammy. It's like you when you were young. I could watch TV and movies on Adderall.

You should switch to dexedrine though. So that you can get your work done. At least 45mg if it is spanules.

[janiedough]

Originally Posted by Imabeliever225

For Adderall, yes. However I have tried other medications first and lower doses of those meds and they didn't do anything for me. So she prescribed that. For some reason my liver metabolizes medications (most if not all) very fast and some don't do anything for me.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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.

[Imabeliever225]

Thank you, that was helpful to know how it was for someone else. It didn't appear to improve my concentration, it only became worse. Many people have told me to just wait it out but if becoming a mindless, groggy, irritable zombie is what I have to be for a few weeks just to have it start working later, it's not worth it to me. It made things so much harder and worse for me and I couldn't live my life like that because I really wasn't doing anything while on that medication and it completely defeated the purpose of trying it out.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk