Hey all,
Been a while. Feel like over the last year I’ve noticed some positive things and had some good reflective moments as well. Figured I would share my current thoughts with you all in case anyone feels the same way I have over the last few months.
TL/DR: maybe an individuals dosage is a moving target and the effectiveness of medication will vary naturally over the course of months due to external contributing factors such as sleep, pain, mood conditions etc.
When I started Ritalin over a year ago, I had a lot of dosage questions and received some helpful guidance from this community. My initial dosage was 10mg, 3 times daily but I found this was making me sleepy and exhausted, and after some experimenting with both lower and higher doses I settled on 20mg, 3 times daily and that worked… for a while.
Over the last few months I started noticing that I wasn’t able to pick any difference between days I took my meds compared to those I skipped (weekends etc.). This left me questioning if they were even working at all (or if I had built up a tolerance).
I figured before I go back and see my doctor I would experiment with the dosage again. I have been taking the original 10mg dosage once more and while I feel “dulled” I don’t feel sleepy these days - more so I feel that I have more time to process thoughts and it isn’t all such a “rush” with everything competing all at once. From what I recall this is similar to the effects I had noticed of the higher dosage that I had settled on.
As some further background, I had been dealing with ongoing chronic pain at the time of ADHD diagnosis, and was generally quite fatigued and had been experiencing poor sleep for a number of months prior to starting medication for my ADHD.
My reflection on this now is that the initial dosage was probably pretty good for me, but due to the built up fatigue my initial experience of that dosage (drowsy/sleepy) was an observed effect of my pain condition. Given time those aspects resolved, and I’ve been able to settle back into a lower dosage and see the benefit I initially experienced again.
But yeah, that’s what’s been going through my head the last few days and figured I would share. Let me know if you’ve experienced something similar to this, or anything else - even over a year in, this all still feels new to me so I appreciate any insight you can share.