Practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
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52 practicesHow long you have
Who it is written for
Where you are right now · Coping, mostly
On your own, or with someone · On my own
Theme · Medication and how it works
More of the medicine is not automatically better. What you are looking for is a level that sits inside the working range, and going past it usually brings side effects rather than sharper thinking.
It is a natural thought that if some helps a little, double would help twice as much. In practice people describe the higher dose as flat, or wired,…
Do not compare your dose with anybody else's. Two milligrams of one medicine and a hundred milligrams of another can both be perfectly ordinary, because strength per milligram differs from molecule to molecule.
This comes up in waiting rooms and family group chats and it causes real alarm about being on a lot. The number on the box only means something…
If you open atomoxetine capsules to mix the contents into food, keep it away from your eyes and wash your hands afterwards. The powder stings badly.
The molecule is acidic and cannot be softened without falling apart, so the fix is in the handling rather than the chemistry. Take it with something…
Stand up slowly. Getting off the floor after an hour of gaming, or out of bed in the morning, is where the dizziness tends to catch people.
A drop in blood pressure on standing is common enough with these medicines and it frightens people, because a near faint feels like something serious…
If a question at the counter feels like judgement rather than care, you are allowed to ask which it is. Is this a medical question or a personal one?
Asked evenly it does not start a row, and it returns the conversation to where it belongs. Pharmacists have proper clinical questions to ask about…
The skin patch comes with two things worth knowing before you start. Take it off several hours before bedtime or it keeps delivering and sleep goes, and around one person in six gets a rash bad enough to stop.
The upside is real control over the length of the day. Because the medicine stops arriving soon after the patch comes off, the removal time is yours…
With a bedtime dose, the clock is the dose. Give it too early and the medicine switches on in the small hours, which buys you a child awake at half past four and no appetite at breakfast.
The ordinary effects still apply: appetite tends to dip around the middle of the day and sleep can be harder to come by. What changes is that one…
Notice which word somebody reaches for. Protection sounds like a shield against loss, while what the studies describe is closer to a little extra growth, and those are not the same promise.
The difference is small on the page and large in a consultation. A parent who hears protection may start treating the tablet as a wall they cannot…
The same question has not been asked of the non-stimulants. They reach much of the same circuitry, so you can see why people expect a similar effect over years, but expecting is all it is.
This is a good place to notice the shape of your own reasoning. Going from these drugs touch the same regions to therefore they do the same thing…
People expect to feel wired and often describe feeling settled instead. That surprise is common enough to be worth knowing about before you start.
What tends to quieten is the churn: the half started tasks, the jumping from one thing to another, the low hum of being behind. That can read as calm…
The line about not cutting, crushing or chewing a long acting medicine is a safety instruction with a real mechanism behind it. Break the coating and the whole day's dose arrives in one go.
People sometimes crush a capsule because swallowing is genuinely hard, not because they are misusing it, so ask before assuming. There are usually…
A short acting dose lasts around four to six hours in most people, and bodies vary a great deal around that. Some clear it quickly and feel almost nothing, some clear it slowly and feel every side effect at a small dose.
If a tablet seems to have worn off by mid morning, or a low dose feels overwhelming, report it as a pattern rather than as a failure. It usually…
Dry mouth, a later bedtime and a smaller appetite are the usual early complaints, and each has a workaround. Knowing about them in advance turns a nasty surprise into something you were already expecting.
Water and sugar free sweets for the mouth, an earlier dose for the sleep, food loaded into breakfast and dinner for the appetite. Most people who…
A prescribed dose swallowed as a tablet is set to bring you into the ordinary range, not to make you high. The rise it produces is too slow and too small to be the sort of thing anybody chases.
Misuse in the research is concentrated among people who do not have ADHD and who take the medicine in ways it was never designed for, by crushing it,…
The realistic difficulty with this medicine is not misuse. It is forgetting, since part of what is being treated is the very ability to remember to do something later.
So put the reminder outside your head. A weekly pill organiser sitting on top of whatever you pick up every morning, an alarm with the name of the…
Medication does not simply turn the brain up. On scans the regions that should be busy during a task get busier, and the ones that should stay quiet settle.
That detail matters more than it sounds. It says the trouble is one of aim rather than a shortage of effort, which is the opposite of what many…
Watch someone on a laboratory stop task and two things move together on medication: the fidgeting drops and the stopping gets more accurate.
Holding still and holding back turn out to run on the same machinery. That is why inhibition sits underneath so much else, from waiting your turn to…
Offered ten pounds now or twenty in an hour, plenty of people with attention difficulties take the ten and know while they are doing it that it makes no sense. The pull towards now is not a flaw of character.
It shows up in a laboratory and it shows up on a bank statement. Naming it helps, because a thing with a name can be planned around: money moved by…
None of the non-stimulants should be stopped suddenly. Guanfacine and clonidine began life as blood pressure medicines, and taking them away all at once can send blood pressure sharply back up.
Atomoxetine has its own unpleasant discontinuation effects, closer to those of an antidepressant. So a break because a prescription ran out, or…
When a dose wears off, things can feel worse than they ever did untreated. A good deal of that is contrast rather than the medicine leaving a debt behind.
You have spent the day at one level and then meet your own baseline without warning, late in the afternoon, usually with something still to do.…
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