| I’ll get to your question, but first… > racing thought and elevated heart rate This sounds an awful lot like either your dosage was too high or you’re one of the people with ADHD who doesn’t actually respond well to stimulants. Elevated heart rate/blood pressure is common and responsible doctors prescribing these drugs check it routinely, but racing thoughts is not a typical reaction at an appropriate dose. Regarding other methods, one common but less formal thing that has helped me, and which I’ve seen benefit a lot of friends and others diagnosed later in life: developing and nurturing an awareness of the kinds of coping mechanisms that are already present, with close attention to which are helpful but could be developed further and to which are counterproductive or just neutral so they might be put aside. For myself, I’ve realized that there’s a couple common threads through most of my helpful coping mechanisms. Foremost among them: keeping consistent routines is kind of a house of cards, but one which is much more resilient for me if I allow myself to be fairly rigid about them. Another: having a high degree of control over the sensory stimulation I’m exposed to, especially but not only sound, is one of my best defenses against cognitive overload. These coping mechanisms vary by person but they often cluster around the kinds of problem areas that ADHD patients notice rather than the external problem areas that tend to lead to childhood diagnosis (or internalized self judgment reflecting real or perceived external judgment regardless of diagnosis age). As in, “why does ____ cause me to struggle and what’s been most effective when I do struggle?” tends to be a better starting point than “why can’t I just do ____ like normal people seem to do?” If nothing else, it gives you a chance to have self empathy and recognize that there are reasons and that you may already have a framework for those reasons, even if you haven’t noticed it yet. |