Hello my friends and welcome back to Dopamine Diaries, AKA all of my bouncing ball thoughts on ADHD, autism, eating disorders, and everything in between!

In Part 1 of this series I talked specifically about the connection between ADHD and anorexia, including how restriction creates a false sense of focus, how mental hunger is almost an addictive form of hyperfocus, and the role of exercise.

Then in Part 2 we talked a lot about masking. I shared how I masked my autism growing up, but also how I masked my ADHD for years, even after the autism diagnosis. I mentioned how eating disorders themselves are an escape from masking while forming all kinds of masks at the same time. I introduced the term twice-exceptional (2e), which is when giftedness intersects with neurodivergence, and how this can create many more layers of masking.

Today, I’m super excited to finally be sharing more about my ADHD diagnosis journey, including my rollercoaster ride of testing out different types and doses of ADHD medication, and specifically how this affected my autism and ultimately led to the worst burnout of my entire life.

As always, my soul is bursting at the seams with things to say, so let’s dive in!

My Worsening ADHD Symptoms

Sigh…where to start? Well as I said in the last episode, my ADHD has become a lot more prominent in the last year. Constant restlessness, not being able to focus, stimming SO much (especially with food), feeling like I can’t organize anything properly anymore due to being so distracted by my own thoughts, and, well, you get the gist.

Now, as I’m writing this, I really do think that a lot of this “worsening” of my ADHD traits is due to the constant state of fight-or-flight mode I’m in – especially in the past few years – and more and more I feel like my body is reaching an absolute breaking point. But then I’ll have a really good period and I’ll literally make insane progress on a new project and I’ll be like “Hey, I guess I’m not in burnout!”

But then weeks later I’ll be hit like a truck with, you guessed it, burnout. This constant up-and-down burnout experience has kinda led me to conclude that the concept of burnout – which, is of course, a label – is far too shallow to encompass the true energetic experience of the neurodivergent soul that’s contained within a human body costume on Earth.

Constantly in Burnout as a Neurodivergent Person

Something we talked about on a membership call a while back is that being neurodivergent in this world is just beyond fucking exhausting, so basically we’re permanently in burnout. But when we do have good periods, and we don’t appear to be in burnout, maybe it’s not that we’re not in burnout, but maybe it’s just that our life feels aligned so we have enough energy to cope. I don’t know, this is the thing with words again; they’re too freaking simple.

Anyways, my entire business and basically everything I’ve built my life around is dependent on my ability to focus and create. I mean even just the formulation of these words, this is nothing but a work of art. An expression of my soul and the coalescence of the souls I’ve encountered. So with all the moving and literally spending wayyy too much money on living in Airbnbs for years, I was like, I cannot afford to be in burnout. I literally can’t afford it! I need to fix my focus and I need to fix it fast because this floating along, this feeling dissociated half the time, I mean, I don’t have time for that!

Well, I hope you can feel the sarcasm here because damn, this was me falling victim to hustle culture. To a society that’s going way too fast, exponentially so with all the AI and yeah, I’m not even gonna go there because many of you reading already know my stance on AI. I’m so sick of people thinking they can fool us autistic people using generic AI responses. Like do people actually think we can’t tell when something is written with AI? 

And don’t even get me started on some of the horror stories I’ve heard about other ED recovery coaches literally replying to their clients with AI, like oh my god, that’s crossing every fucking line. But then of course, people are doing all sorts of no-no things because if you’ve been here for a while, you know that the recovery coach Flourish with Ciandra copied entire pages of my website a few years ago and there was a whole legal case to finally get her to take it down!

Anyways, here we go again with the rabbit holes, which maybe I should just lean into them because we are talking about autism and ADHD after all!

Trying ADHD Medication For The First Time

But for real, I’m going to come back to today’s topic right now. So I wanted to get an ADHD diagnosis because I wanted to try medication. If it weren’t for the meds, I honestly wouldn’t even have cared for an official diagnosis. I know that many people say the diagnosis – so also the official autism diagnosis – makes them more validated, which I get to a certain extent, but I think for me, as someone who is so painfully aware of how made-up everything is – and in fact I feels very separated from society in a way – well because of this, I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me whether or not what I experience is valid. This is why being free literally is being label free! Because if you still need other people with certain labels and qualifications and whatnot to give you permission to experience what you experience, well that is not freedom, my friend. But of course, when you live in a society where your ability to get help – so in this context, medication – is wholly dependent on pieces of paper, well, you just gotta flow with that societal stream sometimes.

So in the spring of 2024 I told my PCP I wanted to get that ADHD diagnosis process started. Now I was living in the US at the time, and I’m very grateful to have had very good affordable health insurance, which might surprise anyone who’s heard about how terrible insurance is in the US. I lived in Massachusetts and am still a resident there, and MA is known to have better policies than some of the other states, but to be fair I do have to pay insane taxes so I guess that cancels out how little I have to pay for health insurance, lol! Moral of the story is: the US is very big and policies really do depend on where you live. But to be honest, this doesn’t take away from the fact that the US is a fucking terrifying, disgusting, horrible shitshow at the moment, which is part of the reason I left (again) and am now living with my family in the Netherlands.

But of course, policies in general are so drastically different everywhere, even within countries, because I have clients in the UK and Ireland who have had to wait for 5 years for autism and ADHD assessments! And even if you go private, so not through the NHS, you still have to wait years! This is why I’m such an advocate for self-diagnosis because personally I believe autistic and ADHD people are the best people to diagnose themselves because hello, we ARE the experts of our own experience! Besides, I think we all can agree that we don’t draw conclusions unless we’ve researched to the point where there’s no question about it, so yeah…

Waiting on an ADHD assessment…

Going back to the timeline, in the spring of 2024 I said I wanted an ADHD assessment and I had to wait until the late summer for there to be availability. So compared to those 5-year waitlists, this was super quick, so I was like yeah sure no problem. I mean I’ve survived 25 years without ADHD meds, what’s a few more months, right? And apparently the assessment was to be done in 2 parts, so I had to do this like focus test in August and the psychiatrist basically said that it was pretty obvious I had ADHD because I completely FAILED the test (or I guess I succeeded in passing for ADHD, which just goes to show how failure and success are so subjective!) but that according to the assessment protocol I did have to do the second half so I could get the official piece of paper.

Well because I went back to the Netherlands and then Spain and France in the fall and winter of 2024 because there was MOLD in my apartment, I had to wait until I was back in the States to continue the diagnostic process.

But then in February of 2025 I came BACK to the US and honestly, a huge part of this decision was because of the health insurance bit! And don’t worry, the irony isn’t lost on me that I literally went back to the US because I have health insurance there. Not to mention, I literally flew into Washington DC the week before Trump went into office, so yeah, like I said, the irony…

Anyways, because I was now officially back and had an apartment – which, if you listened to my life update episode in April 2025, you know I had moved to Northampton, MA – so I was like yay, finally I can schedule the next half of my ADHD assessment!

So I contacted the psychiatrist that I did that initial focus test with and was like “Yo, I’d like to schedule the final assessment.” And then he called me up and I was so pleasantly surprised because then he said “Well, we’ve discussed your initial test results with the team and you can just make an appointment with the other psychiatrist that handles medication.” And I was like WHAT?! Well, that was easy! But then here comes the kind of hilarious part because this psychiatrist, man do I have some stories for you about him. So we’ll get to those in a second, because we gotta go in chronological order, right?

My Strange Encounter With a Psychiatrist

So about a month later, I have my online telehealth appointment and we say hi, how are you, ya know, just the basic shallow things that neurotypicals do before getting into the actual conversation. And then he asks “So, you want medication for ADHD?” and I’m like “Yeah.” And then he asks, “So, why do you think you have ADHD?” and of course, I have all my notes ready so I start waffling on about how I’m always bored and I’m never satisfied with what I’m doing, and I’m like explaining to him all these things I explained in the previous episode, emphasizing the fact that I’m not the “typical” presentation of ADHD because I’m also autistic, so the autistic routines compensate for most of the ADHD traits. But basically, that I’m just sick and tired of having this constant internal battle.

And then he asks, as if he wasn’t even listening the entire time to what I’m saying “So, have you ever been treated for ADHD?”

And the first thing I say is “Well, I don’t like the word ‘treated’ becauseI don’t think ADHD is a disorder.” But that totally went beyond his intellectual paygrade so then I just reverted to “No, I’ve never been treated for ADHD; that’s why I’m here.” Now, to be fair, I did tell him that last year I’d tried my sister’s ADHD meds that helped me SO much which is why I now wanted a prescription of my own and perhaps to try out some different medications to see which would work best for me. So he ended up explaining how all the different medications worked, how this was gonna be trial and error, the whole shebang. But of course, nothing I didn’t already know because I had done my research and also knew which medication I wanted to try first, and this was methylfenidate, sold under the brand name Concerta in the US. So now it’s time to talk about my experience with medication.

My Experience With ADHD Medication as an Autistic Person

Well, I took my first 10mg of Concerta the next morning and ho-ly-shit you guys. Within 45 minutes, I felt like I had tunnel vision for everything. Anything I wanted to focus on, suddenly I could do it without DREAD. Because the thing with me is that every single thing I do, before I do it, there’s dread. And now, there was actually motivation and excitement to do the thing. But more than that, I also felt SO happy. I remember literally saying out loud “I didn’t know task initiation could be this EASY!” And now don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t that all the bouncing balls in my brain had suddenly vanished… like they were there, but I was in this tunnel with transparent, soundproof walls. And I could see all the bouncing balls, but they couldn’t get to me.

The downside of this though, was that I was so “in the tunnel” that it became really difficult to pull myself away from the task at hand, which also ties to my natural restlessness…because a HUGE thing I noticed when taking this medication was that, for the first time like EVER, I was able to sit still. I mean, if you’ve read Rainbow Girl, you know I was literally born bicycle kicking my legs in the air! I have always been someone who requires a lot of movement to regulate myself, which is just another one of those neurodivergent traits that’s completely misinterpreted in ED treatment. Pacing, leg bouncing, and just any kind of movement is labeled as “compulsive exercise,” but for me, my whole body just cannot be still!! So that was quite significant for me to actually be able to sit and not feel like I had to rip my skin off.

But like I just said, being able to sit still and have this laser focus made it super difficult for me to take breaks, which led me to wayyy overwork and ultimately ended in a VERY severe burnout that I’ll talk about later. I think especially because of the combined autism and ADHD, the medication allowed me to almost activate my autistic inertia, but in an extreme way.

Negative Side Effects of ADHD Medication

Of course, I didn’t really start to notice the negative effects until I’d been on the meds for a few weeks, because on that first day, I was still riding an insane high. In fact, I mean, I’ve never done drugs, because ya know, “Don’t do drugs kids!” but it was on that day, that first day of Concerta, that I thought to myself, “Wow, this must be what it feels like to be high” because I was experiencing this euphoria, and what was most astounding to me was that it was exponentially more rewarding than the euphoria that I got from my eating disorder, which led me down a whole mental rabbit hole about how ADHD medication could potentially aid in the treatment of anorexia, due to anorexia serving as that dopamine hit, right? But that’s a theory for another day, because the negative side effects could definitely outweigh (no pun intended) the positives…which we’re going to get to in a second.

Now, back to my initial experience of the methylfenidate: I remember calling my mom and immediately saying “This medication is going to change my life.” And it did. I wrote so much of my current book about anorexia and autism, I felt I was way more on top of things, and my burnout was a thing of the past! But just like anything that seems too good to be true, the side effects of this medication were not so favorable. After about a week, the 10mg dose kinda stopped working, which was to be expected, because it was the lowest dose. My psychiatrist was actually surprised how significantly I had initially responded to just the 10mg, and I remember him saying “Well, you’re clearly very sensitive.” And that is definitely my autism. So now I do wonder if “purely ADHD” people respond that significantly on such a low dose.

Anyways, we then increased the dose to 20mg, which definitely didn’t give me that same initial high as the first day I took the medication, but it did feel like it better matched the help I needed. However, because it was just more stimulation to my nervous system – because most ADHD meds are stimulants – the side effects really affected me. I’ve never been a sound sleeper, but the insomnia on this medication was honestly gonna be the death of me. And I’m gonna come back to the insomnia in a bit because it was during my insomnia that I reached my rock-bottom burnout I just hinted at.

And then there was also the heart palpitations. They would start within the first 30mins after I’d taken it, and last on and off until the afternoon. While the medication itself reduced my anxiety because it quieted my brain, it physically was creating an anxiety response which kinda canceled out the mental benefits if you know what I mean.

Mental Hunger in Eating Disorder Recovery

But perhaps the most significant side effect was the appetite suppression, which is one of the side effects that could potentially cancel out using ADHD medications as part of treatment for anorexia. Because of course, one way meds could be abused is almost to increase ED behaviors. To create more eating disorder hyperfocus. Obviously these are just thoughts, but I figured I’d share them because, well, that’s what I do here, is share my thoughts! And now my thought is that we were discussing this topic on a membership call when there was a question from Elma about how to deal with having no appetite in ED recovery. So if you’re not already in the membership, do come join us! Anyways, this question of what to do in ED recovery when you have no appetite ties back to labels. Because the thing is, the self-doubt around what to do when you have no appetite stems from the belief that hunger is only “valid” when your inner hunger stars are forming this perfect constellation, that is to say, your physical and mental hunger are “perfectly” aligned. But I think we can all agree that this is rarely – if ever – the case when you're neurodivergent and in recovery from an eating disorder.

As I’ve explained before on this blog, my podcast, in my books, and in many more places, neurodivergent people struggle with hunger and fullness cues for two main reasons: (1) we lack interoceptive awareness, which is the sense responsible for helping us interpret inner cues including hunger, thirst, temperature, and the need to use the bathroom, and (2) we are operating in a constant state of fight-or-flight mode. When your body constantly believes you’re in danger, bodily processes that are not essential for survival (including digestion) are put on the back burner. If you’re in energy deficit on top of that, your body also doesn’t even have enough energy to digest. I mean, that energy would be better spent on keeping your heart beating!

Because physical hunger cues are such an energetically costly process, the body won’t waste energy on them while in energy deficit and instead, it will prompt you to seek out food in other ways. And what’s the most cost-effective way to signal you to seek out food? To think about food! This is why people who are severely malnourished are so obsessed with food – your body desperately wants you to eat, so it’s literally doing everything in its capacity to do just that!

But mental hunger science aside, what happens when we flip the script? What happens when we are physically hungry but mentally have no desire for anything? That’s what I experienced while taking ADHD medication and honestly it was super weird because it was the first time I’d ever experienced that. All throughout my eating disorder, it was the torturous mental hunger with maybe an occasional physical hunger cue. But I didn’t, and still don’t, experience hunger as a rumbling stomach. When I’m hungry, like seriously hungry, it’s not that empty feeling. It’s feeling magnetically pulled towards the kitchen, feeling extra sensitive, getting agitated a lot more quickly, and while this may seem ironic at first, increased restlessness is often a sign of hunger for me. But wait, but how does that work if food is supposed to give us energy?

Can Restlessness be a Sign of Hunger?

Well what’s happening when you’re hungry and you’re in a constant state of fight-or-flight is that the hunger can exacerbate the fight-or-flight response because, after all, a lack of adequate resources is one of the greatest threats to human survival! So imagine that your body wants to mobilize energy so that you can “migrate” to where there is food. This is of course the premise of the Adapted to Flee Famine Hypothesis that I’ve done multiple videos and podcasts on years ago. This migration response may sound silly in our current society, but remember that our nervous system is still primal! If you’re in energy deficit, even just for a few hours, your body is like “Oh shit, we’re in a scarce environment, we gotta migrate to the abundant lands!”

But the interesting thing for me on the ADHD medication – because the way it works is that it increases dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, which are two chemicals that play a role in motivation and reward – is that all of my usual hunger cues were being overridden. Which again was sooo weird because I personally love food. It gives me so much joy and a huge dopamine release. That’s biology because, well, the body wants us to derive pleasure from food because food increases our chances of survival! But because I was already getting dopamine from the medication, I no longer needed food to give me that dopamine. In fact, the idea of eating actually repulsed me, which again, I have never experienced, aside from the two times I got food poisoning or when I was sick of course. Like physically I felt fine – I felt great even, so great that I didn’t need food and it totally turned me off. So it was during these first few days where I thought to myself “Hmm, is this what it’s like to have lack of interest ARFID?” Because I genuinely just lacked interest in eating! And I finally had lived experience to understand why people on ADHD medication can so easily go an entire day without eating. Because if it weren’t for what I’m about to say, I think I definitely would have fallen into that restrict-binge cycle so many ADHD people on social media describe.

What Should I Eat If I Have No Appetite in ED Recovery?

I'm pretty sure you can already guess what I'm about to say, and that is that especially with my eating disorder history, not having an appetite was not a reason to not eat. And this is like a live, current day example of how you can use autistic traits to your advantage to nourish yourself, because one of my autistic traits is routines. And I already have routines around food and mealtimes. So this is very significant because I think if I was an “official intuitive eater,” who just kind of ate whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, I think the lack of appetite would have really thrown me for a loop because my hunger and fullness cues literally would not be guiding me…but because I’m autistic and I already eat in a structured way, I was able to stick to that structure without necessarily wanting to eat. I mean, honestly, I do the same thing for writing and all the other stuff in my life. I definitely don’t feel like writing every morning. There’s always that dread I mentioned. But I identify as a writer, so I act in alignment with that identity. Similarly, I understand that to do the things I want to do in this life, I have to fuel myself. That is my identity. So whatever it takes, I make sure to eat!

So what I did while I was on the ADHD meds and didn’t have an appetite was I just made food a lot more condensed. So I was eating a lot less often and a lot less volume because I was really packing a fuck ton of calories into what I was eating! But even THAT turned out to not be enough because apparently ADHD medication can also increase your metabolism. I guess that’s because they stimulate the nervous system, and as someone who already has a naturally high metabolism, my metabolism apparently went through the roof when I was on ADHD medication! This is why that whole 2000 cal a day recommended daily intake is so harmful and is just way too much of a blanket statement because (and I’ve mentioned this on my podcast before) I ate 2000 calories all throughout my eating disorder because I was just trying to be healthy!

I was just trying to do the “recommended” thing, but for me, 2000 calories was way too little. So when I was going through extreme hunger, it only made sense that I was eating up to 15,000 calories a day! Although I did fear I was developing binge binge eating disorder. Say, you need 4000 calories a day. And I’m saying 4000 calories a day because that’s roughly what I eat per day and it makes the math easy. If you’re eating half of what you’re supposed to be eating (i.e., the “recommended” 2,000 calories) for years, and on top of that you’re engaging in exercise and on top of that you’re building up energy debt and your body is literally eating organs and your bones, well of course you’re gonna be eating 15,000 cal a day during extreme hunger because your body is just trying to repair!

So yeah, I did actually go through extreme hunger again, but that’s coming, that that isn’t yet right now. I’m still at the part of the story where I’m in the phase of trying medication, weighing whether or not the side effects are worth it, cause at this point, I’m having worsening insomnia. The palpitations aren’t going away because I’m on the higher 20mg dose and I’m having appetite suppression, so I was like, maybe I should try a different medication because this Concerta, it just feels, especially with the heart palpitations, it feels too like jittery for my nervous system.

Why I Switched From Concerta to Vyvanse

So I go back to the psychiatrist and I tell him everything that I just told you. I said “I’ve done some research and I wanna try Vyvanse.” (Vyvanse is the US term for Lisdexamfetamine, in Europe it’s called Elvanse.) And the reason I wanted to try this lisdexamfetamine is honestly because of Reddit! Reddit is amazing, because it’s all stories of lived experience and yeah, yeah, I know, “don’t take medical advice from Reddit,” but I just wanna know about other people’s experiences and see if that was the case for me, so I started on Vyvanse.

Specifically, I started on 20 mg of Vyvanse, and I definitely felt like it was pretty similar to the Concerta, but it was a lot smoother, like I had more sustained focus for the day rather than this immediate “SO focused” that would then suddenly crash in the afternoon. I would also get the worst headaches on Concerta, which was actually another one of the side effects that I forgot to mention lol. So with Vyvanse it was a lot better, and with Vyvanse I didn’t have insomnia anymore. I was actually sleeping a lot better than I was before, which was a huuuge win, because I’m someone who has had insomnia my entire life.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that the Vyvanse was still suppressing my appetite. I think the Vyvanse was actually suppressing my appetite more than the Concerta, but I was like I’ll deal with it. You know, I’m just gonna keep doing this calorically dense food thing that’s been working for me. I was literally making 1000 cal smoothies with heavy cream, I was eating butter like it was a banana (and shout out to you, Emilia, who is one of my previous clients for this idea!), I would make quadruple peanut butter sandwiches; so like four slices of bread and 100g of peanut butter because yes, I still use my food scale and the truth is, I just did not want to eat, so I was trying to make food as dense as possible! And I was obviously eating foods that I do really enjoy. Regarding the food scale, it was the same thing as in my ED recovery. Weighing food actually helped me eat more because I could see a tangible number, which can be super helpful when your inner cues aren’t there. And I do talk a lot about my food scale in my books, so go check those out if you haven’t already!

Autistic Inertia and Binge Eating

I think for us autistic and ADHD people also, the biggest challenge is starting anything. Like once we’re in the flow, we’re in the flow, which is called autistic inertia. I talked about this in my autism and binge eating series and earlier in this post about how the medication wayyy amplified my autistic inertia. For work and productivity tasks, but also for eating.

So although there was less of an initial desire to eat, once I started eating, I was in this flow and I could just eat. And honestly, it’s the same with my writing. There’s always that dread – one of my favorite author podcasters actually did an episode where she called it “circling the laptop” – but how when we finally get over the hump and finally get to writing, we get into this flow and we can transcend into our writing Universe! So in terms of food, I can easily eat an entire bar of chocolate, so that’s kind of what I was doing because the amount of productivity and focus that I was getting from these medications was truly unparalleled to anything I’d experienced in my entire life! But as is also the case with the anorexia high, unfortunately, every good thing must come to an end…so slowly, my body started telling me “yeah, this medication has run its course and you have to now finally start facing the thing that you have been covering up with this medication the whole time and that is your burnout.” Because as I said in the previous post of this Dopamine Diaries series, I was using the medication to give me focus because I was having trouble focusing before due to the increasing autistic burnout.

I Was Using ADHD Medication to Mask My Autistic Burnout

But, as I’m sure you can guess, I still wasn’t ready to face that because I still hadn’t hit rock bottom…I was still being productive to an extent, even though it was becoming less and less. And it’s worth mentioning that I was never taking the medication every single day because even since I had started the Concerta, my psychiatrist said to skip it on the weekends. But because I didn’t feel comfortable skipping it two days in a row, I would take it Monday and Tuesday, not take it on Wednesday, I’d take it Thursday and Friday, not take it on Saturday, etc.

But the thing about this was that on the days I wouldn’t take it, existing was becoming increasingly difficult. So what I mean by this is I would be super focused and super productive when I did take it, but when I didn’t take it, I was like an empty tank; like full-on exhaustion, no ability to focus on ANYTHING and as I’m sure you can guess, MASSIVE extreme hunger on these days. Why? Because all the things that I was doing to make me productive, along with the medication suppressing my appetite, well, on the off days, none of these effects were there anymore! So towards the end of my medication journey, aka the few weeks leading up to the day that I completely stopped taking medication cold turkey, the crashes were getting increasingly bad to the point that the Vyvanse would only work from like 9 AM to 12 PM. And the whole rest of the day I would feel dissociated, and pair this with the fact that I lived in the woods, I was all alone, the mosquitoes in the summer were horrible so I couldn’t go on my walks anymore, and the existential questioning stuff kept getting stronger, well this is really when all the trapped body stuff just escalated to unbearable levels. One night I was trying to fall asleep as I usually do and I was so exhausted – I mean I was so so so exhausted and I felt like a total failure because I had written, I had worked on my book from 9 AM to 12 PM but the whole rest of the day I was just trying trying to float along and just exist while being completely trapped in my own brain – confronted with consciousness – and that night, I was trying to fall asleep, so 11pm until 3am until 3:47am – and yes I remember the time on the dot cause I included it in the email I’m about to tell you about!

I literally started crying as I lay there all alone, and was like “I cannot do this anymore” and those were the same words that I said in May 2017 on my rock bottom moment in the middle of a panic attack during my eating disorder, after I had just shattered my mom’s teapot into the wall, I saw my sisters trembling in the corner. They were terrified of their older sister because their older sister was just like a possessed devil at this point, and I went up to my room, crying and screaming (and I’m literally quoting my book Rainbow Girl right now, no joke), I went up to my room, crying and screaming, wanting to be alone, wanting to not exist, wanting to disappear into nothingness… and at the same time, wanting nothing more than my mom to come up and tell me that she loved me and that everything was gonna be OK because hello codependency, right? When she finally did come up, I was so mad, and I was pushing her away and I was saying all these mean things to her, but I secretly wanted her to hug me and not go away, and after about 10 mins of that, I was just so goddamn tired and I said “I can’t fucking do this anymore.” That was the day that I started to fully recover, but that’s a whole different story which you can read more about in my memoir! Anyways, the reason I share it is because it was an eerily similar experience that I had on this “Vyvanse crash night” let’s call it; because it was 3:47am and I was like I need to write an email to my psychiatrist because I can’t. I just can’t do this anymore.

What I was experiencing was worse than everything was before I even started the medication, and I said I’m literally typing this at 3:47am and I just started describing everything I wrote above, and I said we need to find another solution. I’m stopping the medication and I don’t know what to do, and so I started talking to my psychiatrist, and I started telling him some more stuff specifically about the existential claustrophobia that I was experiencing and have experienced my whole life, but exponentially started experiencing on the medication. But as I’m telling him that I feel like I’m an infinite creative soul and I’m just bursting at the seams with creativity and I’m so saddened by the fact that this body has constraints and that I wanna do so much and I wanna be so productive, but clearly my body has its limits, I was like, “I don’t know how to cope with that.” And then he goes, “So, you have too many thoughts.” Like that’s it, that’s all he said. And I was like “What? Is this a joke?” and then he asked me something and I was like OK we’re done. We are done here Mr. Psychiatrist because he then asked me “Have you ever considered getting assessed for borderline personality disorder?” and I was like “Yeah we’re done” cause I kept saying, I kept saying this is not pathological!

This is literally my divergent experience that clearly he didn’t understand in the slightest, because we basically ended the call with him saying “Well, I’ve never heard this before” and “Well, you’re very unique.” So that is kind of how my ADHD medication journey ended.

Extreme Hunger After I Stopped Taking Vyvanse

Stopping the ADHD medication was the start of a very very very intense two week burnout, the absolute worst burnout I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. I also had massive extreme hunger during this time, just every day, you know, so much food, like SO much food …and I thought I had been eating enough calorically dense food! But this was a whole new level.

This was like a massive rebound effect, and I didn’t even know it was physically possible for me to experience THAT MUCH extreme hunger ever again! Although the interesting thing was that my extreme hunger this time around was very different compared to my extreme hunger in eating disorder recovery. Back then (and if you’ve read my books or other blogs or heard me talk about it on my podcast) I was inhaling entire apple pies, boxes of donuts, jars of peanut butter and nutella and biscoff and whatever else I could get my hands on, if I’m being honest!

But this time around, I had extreme hunger not for “junk food,” but for really calorically-dense food. So yes, still peanut butter, because hello, PB is delicious and it’s one of the most calorically dense foods there is, so I was eating like a jar a day. But I wasn’t craving nutella or pastries or my “extreme hunger foods” as I called them back then, because I wasn’t craving sweets. I didn’t want sugar, I just wanted loads of calories. I was just hungry, like not mentally hungry, but full body hungry. I don’t even know if I’m making sense but I feel like you know what I mean! Like I was craving density, I wanted food to just land like a rock in my stomach. So basically I was eating very dense bread, potatoes, nuts, trail mix, I would literally drink heavy cream, and like I said, I was eating sticks of butter. So unlike in ED recovery, it wasn’t necessarily highly palatable food, just dense food.

So I found that really interesting and wanted to share it, because it made me think that these different “cravings” so to speak – although I hesitate to even call them cravings because like I said, I was just full-body hungry – I think this hunger was definitely correlated somehow to the length of the energy deficit. Because obviously when I had extreme hunger with all the apple pies and shit, I was making up for like a decade of energy deficit and energy debt…but now it was a few months maybe, so it wasn’t even that extreme…anyways, that was all happening during this 2-week burnout period after I stopped all my ADHD medication.

And well, as I’m sure you can imagine from how much I’ve already said in this post and the entire Dopamine Diaries series about ADHD and anorexia, how this intersects with autism and giftedness and masking, and finally my rollercoaster ride of ADHD medication all leading to the worst existential burnout of my life, I could literally do multiple more posts on everything I discovered during this burnout period! So imma stop for now, and I’m sure that we’ll cover all my current thoughts that are still bursting at the seams in future writing!

That being said, I do hope you loved this Dopamine Diaries series and if you did, consider subscribing to my free weekly newsletter where I share life updates, neurodivergent insights, and much more!