Exactly the kind of experience I need to hear from, thanks!

I see. Modafinil was decent at getting things started & done without the “high”, but it is certainly not shy of risks and side effects itself.

Interesting, thanks! What was the reason go get off?

lol, this advice is excellent, but the sheer number of options is completely overwhelming with ADHD.

This kept me from deciding for one option for a long time. I settled with a hot air fryer eventually, but it doesn’t really matter.

What helped me a lot to take the pressure off is engineered staple food: Something that’s always ready, and much more healthy than most takeout. This is Food, Huel, all good. With 0 appetite on meds, a This is Food drink is perfect.

With that fallback in place, the stress of “must cook” is gone so I can actually cook :-)

I used to be sceptical about these things long before the word “degoogle” was used, but I realised that in my case, it’s worth the loss of privacy. So I put everything into google calendar, and I use the assistant with speech-to-text to input every event, appointment and timespan as soon as I get it for the first time.

A classical wall calendar will never work for people like us. Best we can do is IMAGINE how we’ll just put everything in it.

Still somehow mess up hilariously, but less often now.

We don’t have the right to just quit the system entirely, and that’s a problem. That way, I pay the 1100 monthly premium and still nearly everything out of pocket.

The German system is far superior when you need immediate life-saving treatment AND are very very poor. Appendicitis, arm chopped off, cancer - they’ll save you, and it costs nothing.

Something that will probably kill you in the next 8 years, or a curable condition like depression that makes you unable to work for years? No chance for treatment with coverage, but got to keep paying the premium anyway. Well, if unable to work, it’s free, but you will not get your depression treated anytime soon.

Germany.

Well, the health system is great, as long as you don’t get sick. Or need life-saving emergency care immediately.

But not for many things in between.

Example ADHD: The GP can write a referral to get diagnosed, for free, but no psychiatrist or psychological therapist (the only ones allowed to do that) will take you. So best bet is to pay out of pocket in a practice that does it over video and is recognised in Germany. Can be done under 1k EUR that way, at least (~ 2k EUR with a private, out-of-network therapist). Recurring prescription and private doctor is about EUR 150 per month; a therapy session costs EUR 200. It is absolutely realistic to get the prescriptions and meds covered by a doctor in the insurance network, though. Therapy through insurance is also a possibility if it’s not urgent and you don’t ACTUALLY have ADHD or depression so you can do many phone calls, like 6 - 12 months, and you don’t care who treats you.

Glasses are also not covered, e. g. workplace glasses > EUR 500 out of pocket. But, randomly, a write-off. Treatment by a homeopathic practitioner - covered, just for the lulz.

But yes, about to die within 48 hours? As long as you can convince them that this is the case (got to self-diagnose and be a persistent ass if it’s not obvious), you’ll get help, it might be at a very decent level even compared to many other 1st world countries, and it’ll be completely covered by insurance.

Also, the monthly premium is EUR 1100 (includes nursing care insurance; there isn’t much nursing happening either way though). Employer pays half, freelancers pay full. It’s not legal to quit and be “uninsured”. Also, you can have it lowered if you can prove that you make under 66k per year (to 19 % of income).

Oh, and only the insurance premium is a tax write-off. What you have to pay out of pocket (talking about treatment that your GP deemed essential, not dental bleeching) is paid for by your net income.

Some other random things also work out within a month and are covered, such as a quick eye checkup, dental checkup / very basic dental filling (pay out of pocket for most filling materials, but not the time), anything a GP or family doctor can do in 10 minutes.

I was so happy when I started with meds, just for the 4 hours before I crashed. Got more done than in a whole day.

Then the doc explained that crashing is not a must: I just have to eat by clock and calorie count rather than relying on appetite, not exercise / cleaning-frenzy more than I usually could, and take rests.

Now, the benefits last for an entire day.

Definitely at that dose! I started with a 5 mg tolerance test at 80 kg, was at 15 mg for a while and slowly worked up to 50 mg over 9 months.

How it affected me is quite different, but just as stunning! Especially in the first 2 - 3 months, I was in a constant state of euphoria; it felt like a recreational stimulant drug you’d get at a rave. But the main ADHD symptom that was gone immediately was that I couldn’t get myself to start on a task.

Other advantages came slowly and more subtle at higher doses. It’s still mostly that I finally do what needs to be done. But I do that in a very confused, easily distracted way. I’m basically Joe Biden on speed.

Very much life changing, as the anxiety from missed deadlines and built-up problems is gone.

Most absurd thing with dentists: They do this thing where they check the depth of the little pockets in the gums. It seems to have 0 medical value. Just to be like: “Watch out, it’s 2.5 mm now! Two years ago, it was at 2.3 mm. Just so you know what’s up.”

Ironically, it takes a long time for the whole mouth and is very painful, worse than fixing actual problems, e. g. by drilling.

Mostly for that, I left my reputable high-tech dentist of two decades for a small practice with old equipment that specialises in anxiety.

It can be a nightmare. Without the extra stress of a child, we were very functional and undiagnosed, and things were going well. But the difference between Captain Picard and The Joker is 3 hours less sleep.

The only way this could ever have worked would have been with intensive individual counseling plus couple counseling.

Now I’m in a great place, as a single parent on peak treatment and with a good job. But the old person died in that struggle, broke completely and didn’t make it through. I’m something new, inhabiting the old body, someone who can do this.

Not sure if related, but I need to see everything I need for a task on the computer. alt+tab or virtual desktops don’t do it for me - I need 3 or more physical screens.

Just upped my productivity a lot by having a dedicated screen that always only shows the mindmap with the todos & plan.

Interesting insight! I travelled the same road in the other direction. As someone who loves science, I always saw my role as a patient to just report symptoms and let the doctors do their thing. And I’m sure this would be the ideal approach if everybody had the House M.D. team on their case.

But after decades of this failing, I realised that this method does not work with a real-world medical system where doctors have more bias than they should, work with methods from their studying days that assumed they had more time and resources per case, and wrong monetary incentives.

So Method 1: I say I have X, and make it clear that I’ll be a PITA if their test doesn’t confirm it. If there were no bias, there would be no harm to this, but if there is, it’s working to my advantage now.

Method 2: Just think of them as the idiot who is clueless but gatekeeper of the much wanted prescription.

Nobody wants to hear this, but a layman’s web research, LLM and 1000 hours of thinking often beats 10 years of medical training if the doctor interrupts the patient after 20 seconds and only thinks about the case for 5 minutes. (With 30 minutes, my money would be back on the trained professional, but nobody has 30 minutes.) A patient can also fixate on a premature assumption just like a doctor can, but my very subjective experience is that doctors are more prone to that.

What I do then is to observe myself making the list, or to observe the thoughts involved in making the list as they swim past me.

This could lead to an infinite chain, where I then observe myself observing and so on. But with practice and methods beyond normal thought and expression, that can fade into nothingness.

Sometimes I wonder if my “advanced” meditation skills from a decade of training is just what neurotypicals always experience when they meditate, even with just like 10 times of “practice”.

I know it’s not what you asked, but for when size does not matter (e. g. nap at home), I just use the big over-ear things for construction workers. Very cheap and very effective.

I recurring problem is that I keep thinking “It’s just 3 things, plus that other one that happens on the way to #2 anyway, no need to write a list”. Then I keep wondering why I fall behind.

Only when I make a list, I realise how much there is to do, and that my plan is entirely impossible for one day!

On the other hand, it’s surprising how even the biggest “backlog” melts away like snow when I really do one backlog thing per day. In addition to “the dailies”, of course.

Well, overall, I’m glad about the hoarding, because on treatment, I actually work through that 4 year stack of put off tasks, and it’s very satisfying.

Wow, so different for everybody! For me, it went from the feeling of giving myself a cigarette burn to “eager to start”.

Yes, essential. I like to do it in an electronic mindmap, so in order to have it always visible, I needed to attach an extra screen where it’s always visible.

“Mental effort” to get on the task that needs to be done is a different matter. I still needed to push through the pain to star. That got much better with treatment.

Like the whiteboard though; not as easy to shift things around and make changes, but advantages might outweigh that.