Blog like nobody's watching

[elfs]

I have recently noticed that many of my posts have been, shall we say, colorless. Well, there are some reasons for that, and I'm not going to list them not because they wouldn't add color, but because they're not the topic of this entry.

A person I trust for various reasons, and who has no financial or even personal interest in doing so, asked me if I'd ever been diagonsed as having ADHD. Not exactly. When I was diagnosed, it was 1977 and the "H" wasn't part of the diagnosis yet. Had I ever taken medication for it? No, not really. Did I drink a lot of caffiene?

Yeah, just a bit too much. On the worst day in the past couple of months, I had more than five cups of coffee-- and I have a very big coffee cup on my desk.

She suggested I try something else. Alderall or strattera. Strattera is freaking expensive; a month's supply would be $240 at least, and I don't know if or how much my insurer would cover it. Alderall is cheaper, but it's one of those ritalin-analogues, basically from the amphetamine family of drugs, and I don't know if I'd want to try something like that.

But my inablity to focus has gotten worse in the past couple of years, and Omaha has noticed it, and she thinks it might be something worth investigating. I just wish I believed my own rhetoric, that there are states of mind that can be achieved better through direct intervention, and that I should try them.

Comments

[marketeer]

I started having serious concentration and focus problems about two years ago, which were eventually confirmed by neuropsych testing. In my case, the root cause was anxiety and stress. I was having stress in numerous areas of my life. I've been taking Xanax for anxiety and working on other ways to de-stress (i.e., changing jobs to get away from a toxic boss), and it does seem to have helped. You've mentioned life stress a fair amount lately.