Over the last couple of years my diet has improved a lot: less meat, less sugar, almost no junk food, more nuts and fruits and vegetables, and at least a liter of water per day now. Before, it was a rare day that I drank even a glass of water -- I usually preferred chocolate milk or heavily sugared iced tea or something.

I also get a lot more exercise now and try to maintain a more regular sleep schedule.

At 33, I'm in the best shape of my life, and I've found that now when I do need to sit down and do work, I can do it for longer and with less frustration. When I get sick of sitting and focusing on a stupid little screen a couple of feet from my nose, I know it's time to get up and do something else.

So as I gradually develop more discipline in the rest of my life, I wonder if maybe that's all I really needed to begin with. People aren't that far removed from their hunter-gatherer days, and now we sit all day surrounded by walls, without sunshine, eating really poor diets -- maybe an inability to focus and concentrate all day is just our bodys' way of objecting to that rapid change.

"Eat better, get exercise, reduce distractions" isn't a very sexy answer though, when compared to, "take a pill and become awesome like that guy in Limitless."

Recently during one of the transitional periods I found that caffeine negatively impacts my ability to play chess. Which is to say that I have relatively well developed (for an amateur) intuition about what moves superficially look good, but at the level I play at, extended periods of concentration are required to actually play better.

Caffeine doesn't help me concentrate, it makes me more impatient, bored faster. So I'm more likely to jump at a move which at first blush looks good. Caffeine actually makes it harder to concentrate for extended periods of time. I know that isn't the conventional wisdom, but I am convinced that the conventional wisdom is pretty much exactly wrong in this regard.

In addition, I have read that caffeine take a long time to get out of the bloodstream (a 'half-life' of ~6 hours) so the effects of large amounts of caffeine during the day translate directly into poorer quality sleep or reduced quantities of sleep at night, which creates a vicious cycle, hence when I get back on the caffeine it quickly ramps up to the multiple cups per day levels.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

I've never understood these sorts of comments, although they appear reliably in almost every story on this subject. What in the world do diet, exercise, sleep, and clean living have to do with the subject of the story, which is the ethics and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of nootropic drug use?

If anything, having seen concrete beneficial effects from the dietary and lifestyle changes you've made to date, doesn't that make you even more curious about how far such effects can be pushed?

I'd be glad to be shown data that better diet and exercise are effective in the treatment of adults with ADD (which is the topic of this subthread). Of course, good diet and exercise are good for you, but that's not the point.

Here's one. It's anecdotal, but it won't hurt you to try, which can't really be said about the drugs. Then there's also the likelihood that it'll almost never be suggested, because there's little money in getting people to live better - who would fund the research? What studies could be done to show strong connections that wouldn't be easy to write off, when the very act of changing your lifestyle introduces countless variables?

More specifically, 'reduce distractions' is far more actionable than 'cheer up'. One advises a step to reduce the temptation to be distracted, the other advises you to achieve the goal with absolutely no directions.

The primary problem is, during any sort of transition I would be pretty useless, and I can't afford to take that long being useless with my current job.

I went cold turkey from 25mg of Adderall XR daily, and for about a week and a half I was absolutely dead. I'd have a splitting headache due to dehydration, but I couldn't summon the energy to get off the couch and walk 12 feet to where I had bottles of water. I'm glad I went cold turkey rather than just tapering the dose, though, because tapering the dose would have taken months of feeling miserable, rather than 1.5 weeks of feeling like a dead man.

If you hear anything interesting from people about biofeedback/etc, long-term non-medicinal adult ADD treatments, could you toss me a mail at taloen@gmail.com? I'd really like to see other peoples' opinions on those routes, and I don't lurk enough on HN to be likely to see a submission about it.

(Just to clarify; yes, I'm back on the Adderall XR again, although at 5mg rather than 25 this time.)

I've also had a similar feeling of deadness when I stopped eating meat, dairy and anything with additives for 6 weeks. The first week or so I was completely useless - this could have also been due to me trying to feel my way through to a balanced diet.

So much of what we consume ends up having all sorts of unknown effects on us and the minute we stop consuming them we really feel it - it's easier to never stop.

One bonus of cutting certain stimulants out of my life has been that I've ended up feeling much better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon#Medicinal_value

It has insulin "mimicking" effects, which could be part of the "boost" I feel.

When I went off I was dead to the world for about 2 - 3 weeks. I had a splitting headache which no medicine seemed to fix, and felt laggy. But after those 3 weeks I started to feel better. I had more energy, I was a lot less irritated and was happier in general. I was able to contain angry outbursts and in general have changed entirely. I have more energy now than when I was binging caffeine. I can stay awake longer, fall asleep faster, and I feel refreshed when I do get at least 6 hours of sleep.

Not drinking any soda has also helped in other ways. I no longer have a real need for sugar throughout the day and don't have nearly the same headaches I used to get from not getting my sugar fix. Since I have also lost a major source of calorie intake I have started to lose weight.

I don't drink anything with HFCS in it, soda's with natural sugars every so often (maybe once or twice a month), but mostly I drink water. I drink a glass or two of milk a day as well. One thing I have noticed is that living in America is that soda is pushed with every single meal. It doesn't matter where you go, what soda would you like with that.

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Since you mentioned no longer eating meat ... I have recently started eating a lot less meat, and even in the past week have stopped eating meat altogether, and I have yet to feel a real difference. It does make it a lot harder to think of meals to make though as I have been eating meat my entire life and it is an integral part of any meal my family used to make. Will see what happens in a couple of weeks from now :-)

You may be misattributing. Caffeine withdrawal is a matter of days [1]. 5 tops and I'm usually done in 2 or 3. (I've dropped cold turkey three times now, and each time I've personally experienced a marked decrease in my ability to function, but I've got various other possibly mitigating circumstances. I'm planning on trying again with my latest set of circumstances to see if it helps any as soon as my infant is no longer an infant.) Dropping that much sugar out of your diet can definitely take substantial time to acclimate to. (But it's a great thing to acclimate to.) You sound a lot more like someone who has gone through adjustment to a much lower carb lifestyle than someone who has gone off caffeine.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Tolerance_and_withdraw...

It is possible that lower carb may have had something to do with it. One thing I did notice though is that in compensation I was eating a LOT more candy at first. I'd eat gummi worms and haribo gummi bears by the kilo. The local gas station started giving me discounts on swedish fish! Luckily I eased off that after about a month, and now I eat very little to almost no candy.

One thing I would note is that it has changed how I taste sugar. A lot of sugary drinks such as juice (even natural sugars) will quickly taste too sweet. I also find it harder to eat candy because it just has this disgustingly sweet taste to it. The other thing is that with drinking water with my meals instead of soda I am finding that a lot of foods are over salted, and could do with half the salt and still taste just as great. My personal believe is that people want taste even after making their taste buds taste something really sweet like soda.

One pattern I've noticed is that when I'm off it, I self-medicate with caffeine and energy drinks. It starts with an occasional Starbucks or Coke and before I know it I'm getting a venti latte with an extra shot every morning, then drinking 3-6 rockstars/redbulls/cokes throughout the day.

I just restarted on Adderall (generic, 5mg x2 a day) and the side-effects are definitely difficult to deal with. I am able to hyper-focus but I also get irritable, daily headaches and exhaustion when it starts wearing off. I tend to take it one in the morning as I start work and perhaps once in the afternoon if I find that I need it, but I don't take it on weekends at all.

There's definitely something to be said for behavioral adjustment rather than medication. That's how my mom deals with it, but even so she's pretty scatter-brained.

If you use the medication only once in a while, do you have ADHD or do you only think that you do?

I have stopped taking the medication in the past and I did not have any withdrawal symptoms or felt happier or anything of the sort. I've always used caffeine though.

I guess what I'm saying is that someone who thinks they may have ADHD shouldn't discount methylphedinates because some people have withdrawal symptoms, which mostly happen only when someone is abusing the medication, or is nervous about it in the first place.

So, instead, I took a week off coinciding with a long weekend, and just went off it completely. It sucked really bad, but I had some stuff in place to make sure I wouldn't be in as much danger as I could be. (I removed all potential weapons/poisons from the house, stocked up on "comfort food" so I wouldn't be tempted to get in a car, etc.)

I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, especially due to the suicide risk, but in my case (for various reasons) that risk was pretty much 0. (I'm aware that self-diagnosing suicide risk is really unreliable, but I have a few personal situations that make suicide impossible to seriously contemplate, so I'm pretty safe in that regard.)

High dosages are up in the 150+, more like people who binge on 3 pills, or crush and snort them. That would create withdrawal symptoms and be neurotoxic. Therapeutic dosages (like the ones the doctor will prescribe you) are supposed to be just that.

Concerta wouldn't come in a 56mg tablet if it was expected to be neurotoxic.

I really don't think burn-out is as common as people say, high-doses are more like in the 100+mgs, and that's not in anything that is considered therapeutic and extended release.

During the intake the therapist described Ritalin as "poison". I should have probably gotten up and left right there. If you have the opinion that Ritalin is overprescribed, or that it should not be given to small children, that's all fine with me. But "poison" has a pretty clear definition, you'll find that whenever someone refers to a drug as "poison", you're dealing with pseudo-scientific quackery.

What made me quit was mostly that I couldn't find any correlation between the signals received from the electrodes and my own state of consciousness, be it more relaxed or more concentrated or alpha/beta waved, whatever.

When I watched the graphs on the monitor, I noticed a few things. There is a LOT of noise. If I'd clench my jaw, move a muscle in my neck, my ears, whatever, it'd cause an avalanche of noise, completely drowning out any possible brain signal. Ok so you sit still, you're meant to focus or relax anyhow. Except that muscles just seem to generate a whole lot more electrical signal than your brain, and every time I even blinked my eye there was a burst of noise (probably also because the eye muscle is relatively close to the electrodes). The software did nothing to filter out these noise-bursts, even though it'd have been trivial to make at least a basic attempt that would throw away the data during a burst so the other filters wouldn't trigger.

Ah, the other filters. Well, it quickly became clear I knew a lot more about DSP than this guy. He had no idea how his device operated, at least not how the signals were transformed into whatever was displayed on the screen. There's not really an excuse for this. Sure enough a surgeon might not know about the algorithms used to convert an MRI scan into a picture, but the radiologist does (at least, on some level), which is why we have radiologists.

So you know about these alpha/beta/theta/gamma brain waves right? They're at 12/10/7/3 Hz frequencies or something like that. Now I always had the idea that by this they meant some fundamental Eigen-frequency of signals in the brain, so you'd think to apply some auto-correlation to determine the base frequency and its harmonics. But instead he had a bunch of bandpass filters running concurrently being graphed through some ancient MS-DOS program with obvious leakage from one band to another and we were looking at the raw filtered signal, not even its energy and as I said there was no noise suppression.

I'd have loved to take that device home, write some code for it and see what it could detect though. Hell, even detecting muscle movements is already way cool :)

Anyway, no correspondence between my state of focus or relaxation.

Staring at a computer screen (with a game, usually one frequency band was used to control a game of some sort) for 1-2 hours per week, actively trying to relax or focus would definitely have a result of course.

Which is why I'm doing a universal yoga meditation class. Dunno if it helps with the ADD, but it can't hurt and it definitely has some other advantages (notably: posture and stress/tension). One thing I do notice, yoga works best if I haven't taken meds that day. You'd think it improves focus, but this yoga class is mainly being able to really feel your whole body and muscles should not be tense for that, but on meds I find I get way more fidgety and subconsciously re-tense every muscle I relax as my focus shifts to the next part of my body. Fortunately, noticing and being aware of such subtle effects in your body is exactly what the class it about :-)

You might like playing around with Neuro-Programmer 3. You can get substantially similar or even stronger effects to EEG neurofeedback with simple audio brainwave entrainment. I actually question the value of EEG neurofeedback not combined with audio brainwave entrainment, which serves the purpose of teaching people what different brainwave states feel like. http://www.transparentcorp.com/products/np/index.php You can hook up an EEG to it to. Or build your own for a few hundred, http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/, but the signal processing is actually the hard part. Among the cheap commercial EEG products I've tried, only the NeuroSky Mindwave filters out facial movements well, but it's one sensor is not really useful for doing much of anything.

The kind of meditation that helps with ADD is concentration meditation, where starting Vipassana, when you focus intently on watching your breath, is a concentration meditation.

As I slowly recovered, I was more strict about my diet, got a lot more exercise, and started meditating. I found that vipassana-style meditation was a tremendous help.

This is speculation on my part, but I think that meditation really strengthens some of the areas that I'm weak in due to ADD. I think sitting still forces me to develop "inhibition" skills that are typically rather weak in people with ADD. Also, mindfulness develops memory skills that I've been having a lot of trouble with lately. Also, paying close attention to direct sensations and thoughts makes it a lot easier to relax, so I tend not to build up anywhere near as much stress through the day. The bottom line is that I have more energy and focus, and just seem to function a lot better when I meditate regularly.

I'd bet that you will get a lot of the same benefits from yoga, alone. But I'd like to suggest that you look into vipassana and see if it works well for you, too. I don't think you will have any trouble finding resources on the internet, but please let me know if you'd like some recommendations.

There's also the EPOC Emotiv.

I have a friend that says if I can't do my job without medication, I'm in the wrong profession. He may be right, but I love working with computers, and I don't have that passion for anything else, so I'll keep taking the meds. I'm no longer interested in debating the ethics, since for me it really is the difference between high performance and average performance, and there is no reward for average.

I hate that line of reasoning. I couldn't do my job without glasses. Does that mean I'm in the wrong profession?

I spent about six weeks doing a massive amount of research on nutrition. http://www.medicineispersonal.com/contest/home I designed a diet designed to maximize nutrient absorption, similar to diets used to great effect in people with various auto-immune diseases. I'll publish my research eventually but for now I'm happy to share it with people that email me (fair warning -- the paper is 9500 words with 125 references and not exactly easy reading).

I've been on this diet for about two months now, and was hoping that it would help me with ADD -- and I lost ten pounds to get to the lower end of the healthy BMI range and definitely gained physical energy, but I didn't get any smarter or less ADD from diet.

So I think nutritional interventions are unlikely to do much for ADD in people not suffering from marked nutritional deficiencies or on crazy sugar-loaded diets. Among therapeutic inteventions, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is pretty much the only technique with compelling evidence.

Keep in mind that adult ADD is mostly a condition of lowered productivity. Stimulant drugs increase productivity in basically all adults, ADD or not. Because of fears of neurotoxicity, I stick to Modafanil and use amphetamine sparingly when I need a stronger boost. This works with my rather charmed lifestyle, but I do plan on doing a venture funded startup eventually, and believe I'd be incapable of doing 50-60 hours a week as COO without stimulants.

I'm inattentive. About once a year I decide to try to go without medication for a month, but it's too hard. I've done mindfulness exercises, tried to focus on developing new habits, etc... but medication works best. A combination of concerta and wellbutrin works best for me, because I can take lower amounts of the stimulants and wellbutrin has less side effects for me. I was on adderall for a few years, but headaches + sleep stuff made it more annoying as time went by.

I got diagnosed when I was 20 by a family practitioner, when I decided I was having problems with focusing (physics major). after a few years of that I decided he was shit and I needed an official diagnosis and a psychiatrist to sort it all out, someone who knew about the disorder and medications. We tried Strattera, which worked awesome except for the "sexual side effects" which were too weird for me.

Friends can tell when I'm on or off of it. Colleagues can't, although I'm conscious of my decreased work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...