Metablog

I took a methylphenadate pill this evening. I feel like I’ve been un-zombified. Night and day difference. I’ve been on Concerta in the past (that’s why I still had some) but it didn’t really seem to work for me. I wonder why it’s working now. Could be a combination of medications, or it could be I’m observing myself differently and so I see the difference now where before I was just blind to it. Or it could be something else. That’s the problem with these damn medications.

Well, it’s still not an ideal option, because of sleep and heart rate issues. But now that I know it makes such a huge difference, maybe I’ll see about getting something else that’ll work better, and maybe I’ll actually start blogging again.

I fixed the arrow keys and made some other minor improvements to my Tetris game. I’m not bothering with release notes. Bleah.

It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: Continue reading »

So, I’ve been thinking lately about apathy. I’ve been thinking that it’s probably not really just ADHD. It’s mainly depression. ADHD just helps reinforce it. ADHD is the short term, “I’m looking at a problem and can’t make myself focus on it” and depression is the longer-term “I’ve failed at making any progress on problems recently and I feel bad about it” that keeps me from trying again or shifting focus to a meta-problem. So I need to find some medication to help me with the larger aspect of it. Maybe Zoloft?

So, I’ve been doing pretty bad with the ADHD recently. I’ve recently started recording how much work I get done, which is a pretty good proxy for how bad my ADHD is acting up, and really easy to measure objectively, to boot. And just yesterday I started on a new sleep schedule. I now go to bed when I feel like it and get up when I feel like it. I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, so my sleep hours will rotate throughout the day over a period of about two weeks, I’m guessing. I don’t actually know exactly how much my circadian rhythm is elongated, but I guess I’m going to find out. I went to bed at 22:30 yesterday, and will probably go to bed at about 0:30 or 1:00 today. But it’ll take a while before I catch up on all my sleep and then before I see what my schedule settles out to being. (It’s great that my employers are OK with this arrangement. I’ll just come into the office during normal hours as much as possible, and work the rest of the time during off-hours.) So I’ll be tracking how much regular sleep helps my symptoms. (And we’ll see if I start blogging more regularly.)

Incidentally, I know that light therapy helps with my symptoms, but I don’t know exactly how much. Now that I’m able to follow my natural sleep phase, I’ll be able to measure it.