(This was supposed to be scheduled to publish on Monday, but I goofed, so here it is a couple days late. This is more personal than I usually get on here, but it’s something I’ve discovered there’s a lot of misunderstanding about, and I’ve learned a lot about it firsthand recently, so here goes. Buckle up.)

Well, it’s official: I’m a speed freak. For a couple months now, I’ve been taking amphetamines. It’s perfectly legal (although the price is so high that I’m thinking maybe I should figure out how to make the stuff in my barn from anhydrous ammonia, cold medicine, and dirty socks, or whatever the kids are doing these days), and I have a prescription.

So why am I taking speed like a 1970s pro baseball player? Well, it turns out I have ADD. Apparently they’ve officially renamed ADD to ADHD these days, but I’m ignoring the H, because I’m not Hyperactive. In fact, that’s the reason it took me so long to figure out it was my problem. I never considered it because part of the stereotype is that it means you bounce off the walls. Specifically, I’ve got “inattentive adult ADD,” which means the hyperactivity is all in my brain, and makes it hard to focus on a single thought for very long. I’m not bouncing off the walls physically, but thoughts are bouncing around in my mind, banging into each other and knocking each other out of line.

The best analogy I know of is to computer multitasking. In a multitasking system, it may look like a computer is doing many things at once, but the truth is that it’s switching between tasks (thoughts) so often that you can’t see the delay. Every few milliseconds, a clock chip interrupts the main processor and says, “Ok, stop what you’re doing, store that task and all the memory that goes with it over here in this storage area, and pick up this other task and all the stuff that goes with it and work on it instead.” Obviously there’s some overhead in this, since nothing is being done while the system is changing tasks. If you give the computer too many tasks, it’ll spend so much time switching between them that they all grind to a halt and nothing gets done.

An ADD brain (mine, anyway) feels kind of like that. My CPU (my conscious thinking) is constantly being interrupted by different thoughts cycling through one after another. It feels like I’m thinking about a bunch of things at once, but that’s not actually possible. In reality, I’m just switching thoughts very often, sometimes every second or two. Some more intense thoughts may stick around for longer, even minutes; while something like “I need to remember to start the laundry when I get home” may be fleeting, coming and going in less than a second. Each line of thought has memories and emotions that go with it, so those have to be brought to the foreground too.

The problem is that thinking — especially thinking about something hard like how to write a computer program or build a house — requires focus and momentum. Great programmers and artists tend to work long hours because the longer stretch gives them more time to get in the groove and get more of the program loaded into their mind’s eye. If you can’t really *think* about one thing for more than a few seconds or even a few minutes without getting distracted by another thought, it’s pretty hard to ever get in that most productive zone. A computer doesn’t need momentum — give it a different task to work on, and it plugs along at normal speed once the switch is made. The human mind isn’t that simple; getting focused on a task takes time, to get as much of the task as possible loaded into your mind’s eye where you can grasp it as fully as possible, and even to get into the right emotional state of mind for the kind of thought it is.

At this point, it probably sounds like I’m lucky if I can walk and talk at the same time. But it’s not that bad, because I’m used to it, and I’ve learned to compensate for it to a great extent. It’s even useful at times, because it means I notice more about what’s going on around me. I’m never too focused on what I’m doing to notice a kid asking for help or someone obviously having a bad day and needing to talk. If you don’t have anything important to do, being able to multitask on a lot of minor things and all the activities around you can be helpful.

Also, there are times when I’m able to focus. One time is when I’m having an important conversation with someone I care about. Unlike computers and machines, poeple are unpredictable, so it takes all my thinking power to listen to what the person says, think about what it really means, think about what I’m going to say in response, think about what I probably shouldn’t say, and so on. (Yes, I really do all that during a conversation.) In that case, I’m forced to bring all hands to bear on the task of listening intently and holding up my end of the conversation, so my mind doesn’t get much chance to wander.

Another exception is when I’m working on an emergency, like when someone calls at 3am and says their computer isn’t responding, so I have to get into it and fix a problem I’ve never seen before and have to figure out from scratch. In an emergency, my mind can bear down on one main thought and shut everything else out for a while. When I can get all my thinking power focused on one thing, and it’s both urgent and difficult enough to shut out other thoughts, I can get an awful lot done in a hurry.

Unfortunately, most of life isn’t important conversations and challenging emergencies. If it were, people with ADD would have a major advantage. But most days are filled with routine tasks that need to be done “soon,” even “sometime today,” but not “immediately.” In that case, there’s no outside pressure to keep distracting thoughts from cycling through endlessly and preventing any one task from getting enough attention to get finished. So everything takes longer than it should, and it’s hard to prioritize things, because every task seems the most critical for the few seconds it has my attention.

That’s the long-winded explanation of “inattentive adult ADD,” or at least my experience of it. So, how does that lead to taking amphetamines? Well, apparently they’ve figured out that when someone’s brain is wired in this particular way, a stimulant has the opposite effect that it has on normal people. (I think they even figured out that it worked before they figured out why, which isn’t completely understood yet.) Instead of speeding up my thoughts and making me edgy, it slows them down and takes the edge off. For mild cases, a common stimulant like caffeine can help, but that comes with its own issues. The nice thing about speed is that it’s very rarely addictive, has mild side effects, and starts working right away. I could tell the difference the first day I took it.

I was worried that it would just “numb” me, but that’s not the case. I still think about the same things and have the same feelings, but they’re a lot more under control. I can better choose what to think about. If something’s bothering me, it’s still there, but it’s not popping into my head every minute of the day whether I can do anything about it or not. If something bad happens, I’m still sad about it, but it’s a lot easier to put it aside when I need to work and know that I’ll think about it later. (Same thing when something good happens and I feel like celebrating.) As a result of all this, I don’t get nearly as mentally exhausted as the day goes on. The way I used to be, if I had a job I really had to focus on and get done, I’d start at 4am, because that’s when I still had the energy and hadn’t gotten too distracted yet. By the afternoon, it might be hopeless. Now I’m on a much more even keel from morning to evening.

It’s not a panacea, and I still have to learn better organization and work habits. But now I *can* do that. Before, I’d read books on organization and fighting procrastination, and it seemed like they’d just add to the list of distracting thoughts to deal with. Now, even though I’ve got more going on in my life than ever before, I’m getting a better handle on it.

I’m not thrilled by the idea of taking a drug for the rest of my life, or even temporarily. But I’d tried everything else: diet, extra sleep, meditation, acupressure techniques, making lists, sending myself automated reminders, and so on. Some of those things helped (especially eliminating sugar and grain), but none really fixed the problem, and as soon as life would get complicated again, the thoughts would start spinning as fast as ever. This isn’t just helping a little; it’s making a huge difference — the difference between just keeping up with the minimum and actually getting somewhere in my life.

In coming days, I’ll write about how this affects my opinion of the ADHD “epidemic” in schools, and other thoughts on this topic.

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