- Date posted
- 14h
Stimulants helpful for OCD?
This became long... some of the detail/story is intended to be informative for anyone who might also have ADHD. Read & reply if you're interested: I have ADHD, OCD, and high masking autism. I feel like Vyvanse helps me with literally everything. Is anyone else in the same boat? I'm grateful for the change, but I'm perplexed by the idea of a stimulant helping me with OCD. I think it's somewhat understandable given the presence of ADHD, but I can't help but wonder about how someone who only has OCD might respond to stimulants. Does anyone have thoughts on this they'd like to share? I'm very curious what other people think. I think Vyvanse helping me with OCD is related to executive function. When I come across the types of thoughts that would normally trigger OCD, I stay aware of time passing, and the present moment/context. It's like I check myself after every few sentences of obsessive thought, and it's significantly easier to realize I'm wasting time. From there I can do things like think about the importance of the thing I'm deliberating over. I'll consider the tasks and time at hand and decide to write it down, do something now, or forget about it. I do that process with less stress, and I opt out of doing something now way more often than without medication. It sometimes feels like RPMs happen automatically, and before I become distressed. Additionally, while I was diagnosed with ADHD first, I've frequently felt like it is very related to OCD. I'm not just distracted, I feel compelled to fix something. I feel compelled to over think something to achieve perfection or be impressive. Sometimes it seems like the thoughts involved in my procrastination process are me boiling down an OCD idea until it's something that's actually doable. With more straight forward prompts like homework, I would try to sit down and focus. But, I wouldn't be able to keep from thinking about things like "I only get to be a child once and I'm spending it doing things that aren't fun." To me that could come from fear of morality and/or fear of "doing life wrong". I also frequently thought about how native people used to occupy this land. I'd feel sad that I would never develop a body that could live that lifestyle, and even if I somehow did, where would I go to live like that? I don't fully understand how my OCD and ADHD work or interact. I guess it's expected to be confusing since I have both. I don't need to understand it 100%. I suppose I'm obsessing over it a bit, maybe a lot. I have both, and treating one helps with both things. Treating ADHD helps with everything in life. It makes sense that it would help with OCD too. Maybe what I'm experiencing could be summed up as "My ADHD feeds my OCD. Vyvanse reduces the ADHD." I can understand why some people with ADHD aren't willing to try stimulants, but I think it's often because of a lack of understanding and an assumption that stimulants feel like stronger caffeine. In my experience, caffeine and ADHD meds do not feel like each other at all. If you are a regular Caffeine user, switching to ADHD meds will not feel like a replacement, it will feel like a whole new experience. Caffeine makes your body shake and it gives you anxiety. Methylphenidate and amphetamine make you alert with a minimal impact on anxiety (in my experience, and at ADHD-treatment doses). You don't know where the alertness comes from, you're just alert. The only thing I notice in my body is a slightly elevated heart rate. The caffeine experience is more like feeling awake because of stimulation in your body. Also, I get crampy tight muscles from caffeine. I don't get that at all from amphetamine, though it does give me a bit more motivation and energy for exercising. My first experience was riding the bus to school. 18 mg Concerta hit me while I was wondering what it was going to feel like. Would I feel high? Would I be ultra impulsive and respond to things before I knew I was responding? Would this affect relationships and friendships? And then all of a sudden, I was just looking out the bus window. It was just the images in my mind. It was just here and now. I'm just riding the bus to school. I enjoy looking out the window, so I'm just gonna sit here and watch the landscapes as we drive by. The change felt both subtle and immense. It made me start laughing out loud, but I didn't know quite what I was laughing at. Besides sleep issues and stomach aches, I had a great time the rest of high school. Everything was just SO EASY. I abstained from stimulants after college for three reasons: 1. Sleep. 2. Stomach aches. 3. Fear it would "use my brain up" faster and I'd end up with early onset dementia or something. 1. I had sleep apnea 2. I had chronic appendicitis 3. A study following ~100k people, 730 of which had ADHD, found that people with ADHD had an elevated risk of dementia, and people with ADHD who used psychostimulants did not have increased risk of dementia. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.38088 I got diagnosed with 1 in late 2024 and 2 in early 2025. I recently made the realization that resolving these issues also fixes my problems with ADHD medication. Then I looked up research, found that article, and decided to talk to my PCP about going back on meds. She was willing to prescribe using my existing high school evaluation (I'm 32). I'm feeling so much better now, and wishing everyone could find something that helps them be a person as much as Vyvanse helps me. I wish anyone could go to a doctor and ask for it "just because life is hard", or "because I'm a parent now and it's hard". But, I haven't done research on the risks. If you've got thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Thank you! P. S. I guess you could argue that Vyvanse isn't helping me because I made a post like this lol. Posts, messages, and scripts like this are a frequent side effect of stimulants for me. Sometimes I "waste" the first hour or so on something that's just fun or feels thoughtful, maybe this one's a little obsessive. 🤷♂️ I'm not gonna be afraid of being obsessive. That'd be too much.