I'd love to avoid drugs. My very limited experience hints at meditation (just the simple calm, slow, breathing exercise, thoughtless relaxation nothing more) is very potent. Not enough though but more than enough to keep digging this trail.
Try taichi or qigong. They can teach you to meditate while standing up, which makes it a lot more practical in daily life. Just having something invisible you can do ('work on your standing') in place of fidgeting or getting stressed out when get stuck waiting for something is remarkably effective.
Anxiety and trauma tend to manifest in disassociating your mind from your body. Working to bridge that gap can help a lot in dealing with uncomfortable situations.
Also, just stoop to bribing yourself. If I finish doing my taxes today I'll get those headphones or the fancy chocolates or my favorite ice cream. Lots of small wins, even contrived ones, gives you confidence for bigger ones. I have done this small annoying thing ten times. I can do this moderately annoying thing twice.
I did taichi in college (part of a wushu class) and it was damn amazing.
i did the self bribing, it works but not a lot. Hard to be judge and party. For bureaucracy I'm often more proactive to use the system against itself, namely giving them willfully stupid forms so they curate the required data, fill half of it and give me clear directions for the remaining part.
I did start to think on sleeping, but nothing very precise. Just a regard toward the 90min cycle thing. Which means I try to jump into sleep cycle when they occur (instead of delaying by browsing) and try to get out of bed after a full cycle.
Try Glycine. Your body needs huge amounts of it anyway to make proteins, so little help before hard work will be handy. Or eat more meat or other proteins in easy to digest form.
Not drugs, but I would recommend Neil Fiore's "Power of Now" because it really helps understand and address some of the psychological underpinnings of procrastination.
I don't think it's so much the tolerance that leads one to abuse Adderall, but rather the confidence Adderall gives you. Can't speak for other amphetamine formulations though, just Adderall IR generic brand.
I think abuse can come in two forms; intentional abuse, which is what we think of as abuse, and unintentional abuse, where during the titration period, when you first get on the medication, you titrate it too high, but this feels like the right amount. I think the latter situation happened to me due to life circumstances. The Adderall I was taking was too much in combination with the lack of sleep, because I took too many credit hours and was staying up in the library or bar studying. Diet probably was less than stellar as well.
The too much level for me as 30mg / day split into 2x 15mg morning and later afternoon / early evening. If I ever go back on Adderall (assuming I can ever find a doctor that takes new patients on medicaid and doesn't make you wait months to see them), I would take 15mg / day split into 2x 7.5mg
On a side note, recently I read something about adderall and neurotoxicity caused by some oxidation reaction, which apparently has been exhibited in very high doses in experiments. Apparently Ritalin doesn't have such neurotoxic effects according to that article. I think there was also something in there about combining ritalin with adderall, which causes the ritalin to counteract the neurotoxic effects of the adderall or something. I think it said that Adderall causes more neurotransmitter to be produced, while ritalin limits uptake of said neurotransmitter.
Tolerance levels off pretty quick, and goes back down with short breaks.
I’m pretty sure addiction is very rare, and not comparable with other prescription narcotics.
I’m not sure what you consider abuse. I guess college kids use it to help them get homework done, which sounds like a congruent context to me; only without the doctor approval. Taking too much has direct and uncomfortable side effects, at least for me. Whenever a I took adderall, I was extra careful to never accidentally taking an extra dose after doing so once on accident.
