#weenie-kun

So just remember that I'm not a doctor, I'm a stranger on the internet, so I don't know quite how it works, and not all medication will work the same for everyone. Executive function is huge for folks with ADHD, but it might be something else! ADHD often shakes hands with other conditions.

BUT - in my experience, I was diagnosed with combined ADHD (both the hyperactive bouncy kind and the laser focus, sit still for 12 hours doing one thing kind). A lot of my own executive function problems stemmed from not being able to choose what I hyper focused on, for how long, or if I even could. :')

There's a few different medications available to choose from once you get a diagnosis, including a fast-acting stimulant and a slow-release stimulant. The one that helps me is a slow-release - I take it in the morning, and it'll start to kick in after an hour and gives me a steady stream over the course of the day, wearing off about 8 hours later.

People with ADHD don't make as much dopamine on their own, and stimulants help your brain produce more of it. If you find yourself feeling calm and more able to focus or task-switch after drinking coffee, or soda, or other uppers, you might be self-medicating, and a diagnosis and meds may be helpful (but definitely talk that out with a doctor).

It took a while for my "storage" of dopamine to build up, and it wasn't pretty the whole journey there. There were multiple days in a row that I had to force myself to eat because the meds suppress appetite, so it was easy to skip meals I shouldn't have. (I embraced snacking over the whole day as a solution until my humors were balanced and I'd built up the habit of prepping a lunch hours beforehand lol)

But the benefits were immediate. Some things are normal, and habits are something every human has to figure out how to build regardless of whether you make enough dopamine - but I was immediately calmer. I would think 'i need to take out the garbage. I will do that now' and I would, in fact, take out the garbage? I'd just get up? And do it??? It was that easy. I find it much easier to stop in the middle of what I'm doing without getting annoyed, and to task switch without it completely breaking my flow. I'm CAPABLE of task switching at all. It's easier to remember that mug I left in the microwave. I can sit or work in silence and it's fine, I don't need music to be playing in the background to focus.

I still have to convince myself sometimes to do things when my executives don't want to function - a big coping skill I like is giving myself a crossroads moment. If I'm reading, the crossroads moment is at the end of a chapter, or a scene break. If I'm playing a game the crossroads moment is when I lost or won a round, or when I completed the task I was in the middle of, or reached a safe area.

At a crossroads moment, you can either choose to keep doing whatever you're doing, or do something else. It's why being on Tumblr and other social media is difficult to get away from, because there is no natural stopping point if you haven't turned off infinite scrolling. If that's hard for you, see if you can change your dash settings to only load a page/set number of posts at a time. You'll get a crossroads moment every time you reach the bottom of that page.

This is all my own experience with ADHD and stimulants, so again, I encourage you to think about whether this sounds like you and bring it up to a doctor if it's having a really big impact on your life.