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ContactHow to Help a Friend Quit Adderall
June 10th, 2011 by MikeNote: I’m going to switch gender pronouns back an forth. Most of this applies to guys and girls, friends and spouses.
1. Be the one person who understands why they’re quitting
For your friend, one of the hardest parts of quitting Adderall will be that everybody else will think he’s crazy. If he were quitting cigarettes or alcohol, all of his good friends would pat him on the back and say “Good job, Jimmy! Congrats on getting sober! We’re so proud of you!”
But that’s not what happens with Adderall.
On the contrary, most of his peers will act concerned and disapproving when he quits, and say things like “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you getting your work done? Why are you sleeping all the time? Why are you so morose lately? Did you take your medicine today? You should take your medicine, because you’re pretty worthless without it. What do you mean you’re quitting?! It’s just a medicine. I mean, I take prozac. It’s not a big deal. Just take it.”
Think about what’s going on there. Think about how he hears those statements: He is trying to quit taking a drug, and all of his peers are directly or indirectly encouraging him to stay on the drugs. This makes quitting Adderall a very lonely struggle for your friend, who will constantly question his decision because it gets so little support from his peers.
He knows that to make everybody else happy, it would be easier just to stay on Adderall. But he’s at a point where he’s finally ready to start trying to make himself happy first. And for somebody like him, who cares very much about the approval of others, that’s a big step.
Now, what you can do as his friend is be on his side when nobody else is.
Even if you cannot become convinced that quitting is the right thing for your friend to do, for his sake it will help if you at least understand his motives and encourage him to see them through.
If you’ve never taken Adderall, it might be a bit hard to fully understand why somebody would want to quit, but I’ll try to explain anyway…
Why most people quit Adderall
In the movie Neverending Story II, there’s an evil witch who gives the main character (Sebastian) a device that will grant him any wish he desires, at the expense of one of his childhood memories (one memory per wish granted).
Wish by wish, young Sebastian gains a power and loses his memories. By the end of the movie Sebastian is very powerful, with all his wishes granted, but he has forgotten everything that makes him who he is. Adderall has a similar effect on many people. This is why the number one reason people decide to quit Adderall is “To get back of a piece of myself that feels lost.”
By quitting Adderall, your friend is hoping that he will eventually get back some of those special parts of himself that he feels like he’s lost. Maybe it’s a passion (acting, writing, painting, making short films, etc.) that he doesn’t prioritize enough when he’s on Adderall. Maybe it’s his sense of humor. Or maybe it’s his willpower and self-discipline that he misses.
Pain is an important part of life. Pain tells you when you’re doing something stupid and wrong that you should stop doing. Adderall, in a way, is like an anesthetic for work-related pain. On Adderall you will never think “this work sucks”. You will never think “I don’t like this job.” And you will never think “Gee I really wish I was doing something I enjoyed.” At least, not to the extent sober people feel those sentiments.
Part of finding your place in this world is going through lots of work you don’t like doing to find work that you do like doing. Adderall blocks that process. So part of what your friend is doing is turning his pain sensors back on so he can step back on that path that will lead him (through discomfort) to a calling that suits him.
Whatever he’s lost, he’s hoping that by quitting Adderall he will get it back. And he’s counting on being able to feel pain again to point him in the right direction. He knows he’s going to be worthless for a while. He knows it’s going to be very hard. But he hopes that eventually with enough work he’ll be a stronger, more genuine person than he ever was before. And here’s the secret: he will be.
In time, he will be noticeably better, and his decision to quit Adderall will be seen in a more positive light by his peers, who didn’t realize what he was doing until it was done.
Your role, as his angel and friend, will be to swallow an ounce of faith and support his reasons for quitting before anybody else does. It’s a very courageous thing your friend is doing, and you can be his hero by seeing it in that light when nobody else does.
2. Understand that she doesn’t like being an unproductive slug all day
Your friend/significant other turned to Adderall in the first place because she has a deep desire to contribute and excel in all areas of her life, especially work. When she quits Adderall and suddenly loses her ability to produce, it will be very hard for her.
She has pressured herself into a very high standard of productivity, which Adderall helps her maintain even to exess. When she quits Adderall, she still has this high standard, but suddenly she can’t bring herself to meet it anymore, and the pressure of her sudden helplessness compared against the mountain of work she has invited on herself will crush her at first.
She’s the type of person who will always feel like she could have done more even when she’s producing twice as much as everybody else, and now she’s completely stripping herself of her ability to produce at all (and for the first time less than everybody else). It’s agonizing. And the guilt is overwhelming.
If you want to make an ex Adderall user reach for her pills, make her feel like you’re disappointed in her for not getting any work done. She wants desparately to get the work done and to do it very well, and she wants to earn your respect and make you proud. But right now, for this little period of her life, she can’t.
3. Point out positive changes when you see them
There are plenty of negative side effects that crop up when a person quits Adderall, but there are also some good, pleasant side effects as well. It will help to point out these positive changes when you notice them, to help show your friend that he’s making progress even if he may not be aware of it.
As you observed your friend over the course of his time on Adderall, you probably noticed many of the positive affects of the drug: He was more energetic, more confident, he seemed to be much more productive, he lost weight, etc.
And you probably noticed some undesirable quirks in his behavior too: Maybe his sleep cycle was erratic (binge/crash), he spoke too fast, he spent too much time on trivial details and sometimes had trouble completing projects because he got so wrapped up in them and ran out of time.
If you’re in a relationship with the person, there’s a whole slew of additional negative behaviors you might notice when they’re on Adderall. Maybe they don’t pay as much attention to you, don’t seem to need you as much, their sex drive is lower than you’d like it to be, they can’t have silly fun like they used to, they can’t relax when you just want to chill out and have fun, they’re always thinking about work, or they obsesses over too many things. Maybe he’s a little full of himself.
Often when a person quits Adderall, all the positive and negative changes the Adderall brought are completely turned on their head (reversed). If their sex drive went down on Adderall, it will probably go up when they quit. If they were full of themselves on Adderall, they will probably feel insecure and inferior when they quit.
You can pretty much go down the list of what they were like on Adderall, and expect the direct opposite behavior when they quit. This is why quitting Adderall is one of the biggest changes you can make in your life: it turns your world around, quite literally.
Many of the behavior changes you notice after they quit Adderall will be unpleasant and negative, for you and for them. But there will be a few things that are noticeably positive improvements. It’s important that you point these positive changes out to your friend when you see them, because it’s very hard for him to feel the good parts of quitting despite the bad (at first).
Positive changes to watch for:
- Sense of humor coming back
- Sex drive pleasantly increasing
- Ability to chill out and relax more
- Talking about/renewed interest in artistic & creative things like writing, painting, acting.
- In general, watch for these: Humor, sex, silly fun, child-like creativity, love of being outdoors.
When you notice these positive changes, say something! It really helps.
4. Take any work off her plate that you can (at first)
When she first quits Adderall, it will be very hard for your friend to do anything besides lay in bed all day and deal with the withdrawals. When she does manage to crawl out of her dopamine-depleted coma, it will be a challenge for her just to make food, get dressed, and make it into work reasonably close to on-time.
Adderall is a drug that helps people work. So when it’s taken away, they’re left with what remains of their natural work muscles (willpower, self-discipline, etc.), which won’t amount to much after years depending on Adderall to get the job done. Think of it like somebody who’s been walking with bionic-assisted legs for years, and then the bionic attachments break and she has to try and walk on her shriveled, atrophied original muscles. It’s not pretty.
In the first months after she quits Adderall, your friend will be putting off and casting aside tasks as if she were the laziest person ever born. But it’s not laziness. She is acutely aware of every single task, and she wants to get them all done and make everyone proud, but she can’t figure out how to get through them without incurring so much stress and mental pain that she goes running back to her pill bottle. So she just shuts down.
To help, take whatever tasks you can off your friend’s plate. Reduce the stress of her workload. Take tasks in shear numbers, or leave her the easy tasks and you take the big, creative, heavy-lifting ones (note: here I mean mental heavy lifting). Give her time to be a slug and recover her chemicals for a month or two. The more you depressurize her to-do list, the less she will have to be anxious about, and ultimately the more she’ll be able to focus on her recovery.
Remember: She would do it for you.
5. Try not to throw big tasks at him, but do throw little tasks at him
Do you remember your last math class in school? Math is easy when you only have to worry about one variable, like “x”. It’s a little tricky when you start adding “y” and then it gets downright daunting when you have to worry about x, y, z, m, and lots of other factors…all of which have to be factored for and calculated with perfect arithmetic or the whole problem goes to hell.
This is why math teachers start out teaching single-variable problems. Then as the class moves through the chapters and the students get comfortable, the teacher starts increasing the number of variables and complications in each problem, until eventually you find yourself coasting easily through a problem at end of the semester that would have given you a panic attack if you’d seen it at the beginning.
Generally, this is the approach you should take with your friend the newly-sober Adderallic. Start him off on very simple problems with few variables, and work him up as he gets comfortable.
When he first quits Adderall, it will be the large, complex, multi-variable problems that are the most difficult for him (because his attention span, interest level, and patience will be 1/10th of what they were).
Trying to make your friend do a task that is too mentally demanding too early will be the equivalent of throwing a PhD-level math problem at a freshmen and telling him that he has to solve it right now or he will fail at life and everyone he cares about will hate him.
All that said, do throw tasks at him. He will need a little discomfort to keep his willpower and work ethic on the mend. Just don’t go too big too early, or it’ll break him.
Here are some tips:
- Physical tasks (e.g., “clean the basement”)Â are more manageable than mental and emotional tasks (e.g., “fill out this application”)
- In terms of your friend’s reactions to the work: Groaning and discomfort is fine, but watch for anxiety. You want to avoid causing him so much mental stress that he freaks out.
- You goal here is not to push him and give him “tough love”. Your goal his to help him convince him that he is still capable of doing work, by giving him things he can digest.
6. Be a pleasant distraction for her
The one thing your friend is going to crave like crazy when she first quits Adderall is distractions. Something, anything she can use as an excuse not to face the horrible reality that she is now excruciatingly incompetent at all things productivity and work.
In the beginning, she will often trap herself between her sense of obligation to work and her inability to meet that obligation. You can offer her escape from this by jumping in and wisking her away to fun distractions. See, it’s hard for her to distract herself without feeling guilty like she’s procrastinating. But if you pull her away for something pleasant, she allows it though her guilt filter. Because you are an obligation. She has to keep your approval. So if she has to go ride roller coasters with you to keep your approval…that’s permissible in her mind.
It is in this way that you can give your dear friend a much-needed sense of break and enjoyment in her quitting Adderall struggle. Don’t pull her away if you see her actually making progress on something, but if she’s slumped on the couch looking like she wants to die, give her something better to do.
Additionally, most Adderall uses report a significantly increased desire to exercise after quitting Adderall. That’s something you can do together, which can be fun and beneficial for both of you.
7. When in doubt, just leave him alone and let him recover.
If you’re too much in their face, you become an obligation that stresses them.  This is especially true of Introverts. Quitting Adderall is in every way a battle against the self. It is a very lonely war that few people are capable of fully understanding. Ultimately, you can help them in lots of ways, but they’re going to have to teach themselves how to live and work again without Adderall.
Most Adderall users are by nature approval addicts, who are hyper-sensitive to obligations that they feel are placed on them by others. This is why a largely hands-off approach can often work best (as a default approach) when dealing with a newly-sober Adderallic. Give them lots of time and space to feel free of others and obligations. Part of the quitting process will involve them creating, sometimes for the first time, a space in their life that is all their own. It is in that space that they will grow into the kind of person that doesn’t need Adderall anymore.
Watch for signs of anxiety related to you. If they freak out when you start talking to them, back off a little.
I guess Im naive but I never knew it was addictive until I was in bed for 10 days depressed and suicidal.
Thank you so much. My boyfriend has been cold turkey for the past almost 60 days and I cannot tell you how much peace and love this website has brought to our lives… It is so rare to find a place where real solace can be found… for a recovering person or their spouse… while we are lucky to already have had a sturdy foundation, your website has provided the necessary validation for him I could never dream of offering, and given me the sanctity of peace he cannot offer me right now. A HUGE claim, especially for a website… but we thank you. So much. For your honesty.
I’ve read some posts about people who’ve said their social life/relationships have suffered. As an adderall user (7years), that was one thing I could not relate to.
Above, in number 6, you said it perfectly. “You (a friend) are an obligation to her.” That explains my relationships perfectly. I have maintained a social life on adderall. I have many friendships and have “close” relationships with my family, but most are not fulfilling (or fulfilling only to an extent).
The problem: I treat my relationships with people in the same way I approach most everything on adderall: like a job, an obligation, a task to be completed. Rather than an experience to be enjoyed.
I can’t wait to be off. Haven’t gotten to that point yet. Have to finish a few things first, of course. But I will get there by the grace of God.
I would love some advice if someone can help. My boyfriend quit cold turkey almost 60 days ago. I’ve taken the approach of giving him space (but I made it known to him that I’m here to talk and be there for hik, but would give him space until he’s up for that) so I don’t crowd him.
Unfortunately, I’m getting to a confused breaking point! I rarely hear from him if ever. When I do his texting is off. He’ll start a convo then disappear for a day or two. I’ve tried sending a few fun, laid back texts to make him laugh and he ignores it! I feel like, now that he’s quit, he’s pulling away more so. I feel hurt and ignored when I haven’t done anything to deserve it.
I’m trying to be understanding and not be selfish… but it’s hard. I haven’t seen him since he quit and dont know if he even cares for me anymore. …
I feel like hes taking me for granted. Like he knows I care so much and will be there for him no matter how he treats me! That’s not fair to me either….
I dont know what to do… advice please.
Sarahfl, I’m really sorry to hear about your problem. I think you should be very frank with him about how and why he’s upsetting you, and ask him what’s up. Ask him if it’s the withdrawal from adderall or if he’s just losing interest with you.
Quitting adderall is difficult for a number of reasons. You constantly compare yourself without it to how great everything was when you were on it. You also have to deal with a decrease in confidence and you take less pleasure in things. You can’t do things you would enjoy doing as well (like playing guitar and piano, as a personal example). It’s possible that he’s having a hard time dealing with it, but it definitely doesn’t sound unreasonable that you would expect him to respond to your texts. I think you should tell him you’ve been very supportive of him and he owes it to you to make an effort to respond to your texts.
I hope everything works out. Good luck.
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