Thanks for sharing that. The guaf is helping me now, no side effects noted. It's pulling double duty for my BP as well. Only concern is that I think it was making me drowsy for the first month or so.

I found that putting them set exactly to the second to the atomic clock forces me to mentally create buffer time and get places on time.

Setting the clocks ahead gave me a mental assumption of “don’t worry you always have extra time !” And I imagine that setting them all behind would similarly lead me to disregard the reality of the clock.

But setting it precisely on time lets me know that this is real, there are no tricks going on, and I alone have to plan for enough time to do stuff or be places

Did we ever find out why cursive was recommended to be slanted? I'd mostly forgotten that was a thing and now it seems stupid. Probably one person thought it looked better that way and people did it to seem fancy. A lot of grammar "rules" started from one person's preferences so this might've been the same.

Instructions unclear, am high functioning alcoholic/stoner now

Makes it easier for right handed people to write legibly. At least that was the reason we were taught back in the late '80s when I was learning cursive. Doesn't help us lefties since we just smudge the damn writing.

(I don't know what "shake" means in this context.)

I know if I try to write cursive straight up and down it looks very jagged.

That’s great it’s working. None of the non stimulants worked for me unfortunately. Atomoxetine gave me some euphoria for a couple days and then some ED later on. Guanfacine had no effect that I noticed.
I’ve been on lisdexamfetamine for over a year now and it has been going great. I started on 25?mg, upped to 40mg, and then to 60mg which is where I’m at. It started with a couple days of euphoria, especially the first day. The dose kept getting upped because I wasn’t sure if it was working, but I think it was because being medicated became my new normal. It was noticeable that it was working when I didn’t take a dose :P. I think I’m more prone to binge eat when I miss a dose, more likely to be overwhelmed and become frantic. My wife asks me if I took my medicine when I don’t, she’s never asked on a day where I did take it, so it is pretty noticeable to her. My blood pressure is on the border of elevated, so I wonder if a lower mg would be fine, at some point I might try, but currently I have switched from regular coffee to decaf

I'm sorry.

"The hat man"? What in the sleep paralysis demon is that?

Perhaps it's a reference to "mad as a hatter".

Personally, I find that music can help out. Just as long as you don’t have to listen to something with audio, keeping music on keeps that dopamine flowing

I was able to switch to vaping, but there is a hard lower limit to the amount of nicotine I have to add. Everytime I reduce below 6mg/ml freebase my life starts to unravel and I can't put the vape away either. It's not classical withdrawal - I know how that feels all too well from the time I tried to get rid of cigarettes without the vape, and withdrawal itself is a done deal after a few days.

I might actually try a higher amount again, even the 6mg are pushing it on some days.

Only advice that has ever worked for me is to set micro-goals for the start of tasks.

Like, stupidly easy goals. Got a paper to write? The goal is to open a new document and type 3 words. Need to go work out? Do 1 push up. Need to clean your room? Put one shirt in the laundry hamper, or take 1 dish to the sink.

That's it. Stupidly easy. Not feeling it after that? Cool, you already hit your goal. But momentum is a hell of a thing. The majority of the time, I'll just keep going, precisely because the micro-goals was so easy.

3 words done? Ok that took no time at all. Might as well finish the sentence, maybe even a whole paragraph.

1 push up? I'm already down on the floor, why not do another? Or 10?

I could grab just 1 shirt, or just 1 dish; but I could carry more at the same time. Might as well.

You don't need to trick your brain into doing the whole task, you just need to trick your brain into starting the task. Momentum will take care of the rest. And on the times that it doesn't? Well, again, that's fine. You met your goal already. You don't HAVE to keep going. That can be enough for now.

Great advice, thanks!

Guaf took over a month to start working. It's a very even keel kind of thing. It was less an instant fix and more a realization that I seem to have shit together.

The guaf is also with Concerta XR, and it helps counterbalance the stimulant effect.

Obviously, the man you imagine pointing a gun at you to get work done.

They didn't teach you this motivational device in school? Clearly, you went to a public school.

The previous works because you're putting yourself in a state of anxiety and creating adrenaline as a result. Your brain can run on adrenaline instead of dopamine, so it does that. If you learn to cope this way you'll be fucked in old age like me though. In addition to adrenaline, you're filling your body with cortisol and that will destroy you from within. Don't do it. Just go get the damn ADHD medication.

The hat man is a common hallucination of a shadowy man with a wide brim hat experienced in psychosis. I know about it cause it's commonly reported by people who take too much dxm or people on multi-day no-sleep stimulant binges.

It's just a form of pareidolia, your brain just trying to make sense of dark shadows in your room in its forced twilight. It's pretty much a meme.

is knowing about the hatman required for you to see it during psychosis?

The "give yourself a treat after" type of advice is pretty shit. I know the guy who hands out the treats, and we're on pretty good terms. I'm pretty sure I can get him to give me a treat without doing the task. Heck I'll probably give myself two treats.

"Shake" is scraps of cannabis plants left behind after processing it for consumption (trimming). It's less pleasant to smoke and contains less THC than the main bud, so it gets sold off in bulk or reprocessed into concentrates.

Yeah. Take a snack, blink, ate through half a kilo of cookies.

Very rarely regulatory systems are fucked in one way only.

I think you end up seeing any vaguely humanoid figure and if you know about it you attribute it to being hat man.

Ah, yeah… I think I was on it at most for a month, could be why

Same for me, but I'm screwed if I don't have the next goal ready and planned before I finish the current one, because if it's not lined up and ready to go, it's over as soon as it's complete.

So true. I'm like Superman during a crisis, and a slug any other time. I sometimes fall in to the trap of subconsciously manufacturing a crisis just so I can get things done. It's not a great way to live.

My brain has adapted to that level of threat now. I need more.

That's the roach from Mimic.

No, the important thing is that we never ask ourselves why we have to do all these things we don't want to do.

Thanks!

i feel like the hat man solution would work for me...

Well there problem for many ADHD as explained in the post is that we just don't have the dopamine to even consider starting a task, and a little treat gives us that boost to get going.

For me personally it's often a task that I want to accomplish, I just like can't because brain says no.

I understand this...a lot. Cookies/chips/snacks etc, they come in single serve containers, it doesn't matter how big the bag/box is.

Tip.

1. Buy bag of cookies
2. Split cookies into 10 small containers
3. Have two(ish) cookies as a reward for completing this task
4. Use "whole" containers as a reward for other tasks throughout the week.

I use this trick when I have projects in the garage I need to work on. Don't feel like working on it? Well I'll just go stand in the garage for a bit. Next thing I know I've been working on it for three hours and I need to force myself to take a break to go eat.

half a kilo of cookies caine

My problem is when I switch into "doing shit mode" my brain fucking pingpongs between doing all the shit, so I'll work one one thing for like 10 minutes, realize I need to do something else, switch to that, and so on. Which does mean I make progress... but still not a lot gets actually done unless I have some kind of huge breakthrough on something that gives me enough juice to focus on it because I can see the finish line.

Weird, my hallucinations always take the form of spiders.

Goals, lots and lots of goals

45 year Goals
20 year Goals
10 year Goals
5 year Goals
3 year Goals
1 year Goals
9 month Goals
6 months Goals
3 months Goals
1 months Goals
2 week Goals
1 week Goals
3 day Goals
1 day Goals
8 hour Goals

And not all Goals have to be achievable. My 20 year goal is to be so rich I'm able to pick what country I want to live there and pay someone else to figure out the paper work for me before I buy a mansion in that country and fly there on my private jet

Will that actually happen? Probably not. But whenever I don't feel like pushing through that extra task, I remind myself that it definitely won't happen if I don't try. As they say, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And yeah, I probably won't get that rich; but trying to get that rich has helped me climb the corporate ladder and honestly, I do pretty well

Shoot for Pluto and maybe you crash on Jupiter. Still, that's pretty good. Yeah, if your goal was the Moon you would have succeeded, but you might have also given up and never realized you could have gone further

Shoot beyond your means

at least for me it's also a matter of breaking it down so things actually feel achievable, so i know what to do right now.
Doing the dishes is for me always a matter of doing each individual dish at a time and praying to god my energy lasts through at least 5 items before i deflate like a balloon.

it's literally just standard operant conditioning, associate the thing with something positive like food until your brain just inherently likes doing the thing.
Which clearly works really effectively!

except for those of us who just get a panic attack from the adrenaline, yay!

That part also sucks

Hi, Aralakh!

I’m responding to you here, but really I wanted to talk about something you asked about in another thread. That other thread got shut down, but I learned that before I typed out my response.

You asked how to learn for understanding instead of for coverage. Here’s my response:

Sure. It helps to know what learning is: a change in long term memory. In particular, you’re structuring your memory so that you can think in a structured way.

So, how do you change your long term memory? First, start by paying attention to what you want to learn. If it’s a hard topic, pay attention to a small part of it. Read just a chapter, or just a page, or just a paragraph.

How much should you chew? Just a page? Just a paragraph? The whole book? Your experience will tell you. Try something and see how it goes.

Once you have read something small enough, put it aside and try to recall it. Write it out or talk out loud. Try to explain it. Try to interpret it. Try to get a sense of how much you understand of it.

Then go back to the text and compare what you said to it. See if you got the main ideas.

This is the basic understanding procedure.

Here are some ways of enhancing the procedure.

• Establish goals for yourself. This is very, very important. Do you want to understand the main ideas? What are those main ideas? Do you want to develop a skill? What is it? Without goals, it’s hard to self-regulate as a learner. Check out the research on this self-regulation: Metacognitive Judgments and
  Control of Study and * Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview*
  • A method that I like to establish goals is to have a constantly-changing, bottom-up list of Knowledge, Skills, Understandings, and Transfers I want to learn. Knowledge are just facts. Skills are basic things you learn to do. Understandings integrate and make sense of isolated facts. Understandings are developed over time. Your Understandings will probably change over time, which is why the list is bottom-up: you build is as you go. Transfers are authentic and complex applications of Skills, and they require Knowledge and Understandings. So before study session, I try to make a list of K, S, U, and T, to compare my actual recall to those. These ideas come from Understanding by Design for this, as well as Embedding Formative Assessment’s short section on Big Ideas.
• Learn about cognitive load theory. This will help you learn how much to chew. In particular, learning about the generation effect, element interactivity, the expertise reversal effect, and the spacing effect will help you loads. Going into learning without cognitive load theory is tough. Going into learning with cognitive load theory is powerful. There’s talks by Sweller, the originator of CLT, and there’s nice chapters on the implications of CLT for learning: Schmoker’s Just Tell Them and Rosenshine’s Principles In Action.
• Structure your recall sessions through Visible Thinking Routines. Practice the Core Thinking Routines. The books on VTR are good. Just know that VTR were developed in constructivist land, but constructivism is inefficient in learning, compared to Explicit Instruction (Archer and Schmoker) and Direct Instruction. In other words, if you want to learn efficiently then have clear goals, take small steps, generate evidence of where you are, and compare where you are to where you want to be so that you can know how to get there! VTR are amazing in both constructivist and direct instruction lands. They work for both (1) novices who are chewing very little and (2) experts who are innovating with entirely new thoughts.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have questions :)