YouTube Addiction

My previous psychiatrist said he's had some luck with patients on stimulants lowering their stimulant doses and adding a non-stimulant treatment like Strattera, but his patients rarely had success stopping all stimulants and taking only Strattera. That's just one docs opinion, but having been treated for adhd for 15 years, it doesn't surprise me.

So, consider yourself lucky you don't already need stimulants to get by. Some of the newer non-stimulant options may be effective for you, and you won't have to deal with the "druggy" aspect of being on stimulants for work. Stimulants can seriously affect your life, both positively and negatively. You might be able to get things done that you never would have done before - I felt like I was finally able to compete at a normal level when I started - but you might retreat from society at the same time, be less interested in spending time with loved ones or building relationships, and then there's all the short-term side-effects like trouble sleeping or losing interest in eating.

Basically my experience has been a double-edged sword and it's bittersweet. For every way that it's benefited me, ADHD meds negatively affect me in some other way and it's hard to quantify the net balance.

You’re not wrong, this kind of thinking can actually be a diversion from solving problems. I mean, if you can blame things you don’t necessarily remember and perhaps even your parents, there might be some sense that you can pass the buck and therefor responsibility for getting better or doing better.

At the same time, I think the idea isn’t necessarily that some huge traumatic thing had to occur. In fact it could have been fairly innocuous or mild. What people do though, sometimes, is reiterate certain events to such a degree that their psychological response and the neurological pathways it follows become excessively worn in. Those pathways become easier to follow and more likely to be followed. Getting anxious about this, feeling stupid about that, feeling shame about that. The more it happens, the easier it is to feel it.

It isn’t so much that we blame a single event and move on, but that we try to understand the source of various developments. Try to understand what experiences informed certain behaviours.

At the end of the day, whether you were 6, 16, or 26, any event which shaped you is still your responsibility to address in this current moment. There’s no blame to pass or responsibility to offload. We can’t blame the universe for our nature because if we’re unhappy with the way we are, we’re still the only ones who can do something about it. Whether it was caused by childhood trauma or aliens. The end result is your personal accountability in every moment.

There does seem to be credibility to the idea of minor traumas being very influential during formative years. It doesn’t have to have happened to all of us of course, but as children we do internalize things like crazy. One major theme I see is when caregivers are present but emotionally unavailable. When kids are isolated in this way, it seems very benign on the outside yet also seems to be able to cause major issues in kids early on and late into their lives. It becomes much less common to be influenced by experiences in the same way by the time we hit puberty, for example. We internalize much less and confront things we’re uncomfortable with, if not with peers or family then with ourselves. In our formative years we simply lack that ability.

Blocking distracting page elements like I block ads (uBlock Origin), and occasionally blocking websites altogether (SelfControl.app) when needed makes a big difference.

Leaving the cellphone out of the bedroom was another important improvement.

I also added rules to remove pagination buttons from reddit and HN.

At some point you hit diminishing returns because you still seek out these websites. The hard part is closing the computer when you are done computing, and tackling boredom with other means. I have no solution for this, except working in one hour increments with timers.

OP has a problem with junk food. The person above mentioned fruits.