My series on posts about methylphenidate (MPH) continues. This time, I will more broadly talk about my usage patterns, i.e. when and why and how often I take MPH. In addition, you get to read about the overall impact of this drug on my life and my general opinion of this drug. Overall, my impression so far has been highly positive. This is also due to me hardly experiencing any side effects, which I will also briefly go into.

When my psychiatrist first mentioned MPH, he added that this medication is potentially life-changing. He told me about university students among his patients who would not be able to make it through their degree program without it. In my case, I got my degrees because I found the topics interesting, and I tried to avoid tedium. This led me to not pursuing certain life paths. Had I been diagnosed earlier in my life, I could have been a doctor or a dentist now. This is not an exaggeration. I had excellent grades in school so I would quite certainly have gotten into medical school. I actually attended dental school for a year before deciding that it was not for me.

In my day to day work, I build and maintain fairly complex application software. Quite frankly, even though my work is supposedly very challenging, I use only a fraction of my mental powers for it. This is also a reason why I write fairly regularly and actively in my spare time, and read widely. Perhaps I crave intellectual stimulation a bit more than others. The flip side is that I get bored easily. Sometimes, I go down a rabbit hole at work because I find it more interesting to read a technical paper than do my actual job, which does not even take that long anyway.

You can probably imagine that there are certain challenges in making it through the day when there is boredom on one side and novelty on the other, but you are not supposed to engage too much with novelty-seeking. I should also add that I am in an environment where there is no reward for launching your own initiatives. Probably it is about time that I look for something else to do anyway, but that is a different topic. For the time being, though, my day job is not that interesting. Yet, I have to make it through the day somehow. I was fine doing that without MPH, but with it, my life has certainly improved.

My overall approach to MPH is to use it to maximize how much I can get out of any given day. This means that if there is some drudgery at work, like long technical meetings that primarily exist to make someone in senior management feel important, I pop an MPH pill so that I can keep my mind from wandering. Of course it is evolutionarily healthy that you get bored and your mind wanders. This is simply a physiological response to the environment you are in. Your body is telling you to seek out novel experiences. Time is short, so do not waste it with boring crap! Yet, corporate life is not designed around this principle.

Before I started taking MPH, I had the habit of splitting boring work over a few days. Let’s say there is a review I need to do, be it of an incompetently written document or code that was produced by someone who should not be allowed to go near a computer. I used to stretch this over a few days because my desire to shift my attention to something else simply became too strong. With MPH, I just sit down and do such tasks in one sitting, getting them off my plate. A very helpful side effect is that I find such boring tasks less draining. Before MPH I had days where I wanted to veg out on YouTube for an hour after a day at work. This is not an issue with MPH. I mostly work from home, so I just close my computer and do something else.

I want to avoid building up a tolerance towards MPH, which does not seem to be much of a problem in general anyway. However, I deliberately only take it when there is a good reason to, not due to habit, like apparently a lot of other people who take it. In case I have to do something boring at work, I pop a pill and just get that work out of the way. The same is true in my spare time. After I have carved out some time to write, I sometimes take MPH so that I am able to write more. Sometimes, I end up writing far more than I would have imagined. My productivity is certainly a lot higher with this drug than without.

The effects of MPH last for about four to five hours. You are also not supposed to take it before bedtime, for obvious reasons. (It would simply keep you up.) I take at most two pills a day. A pattern I like is taking one pill in the morning so that by lunchtime I am done with the boring parts of my work, and then I take another pill in the late afternoon, roughly between 5 and 6:30 p.m., which is not an issue for me as I tend to go to bed late. On weekends, I sometimes take two pills, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, whenever it makes sense. My psychiatrist suggested I abstain from MPH on the weekends and on vacations, instead only taking them for work. My usage pattern is a bit different. About 3/4 of my usage is tied to my life outside of work, which I find more rewarding and more meaningful.

On a week-by-week basis, if I take MPH on the weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday, I normally take a break on Monday and Tuesday, and from Wednesday onward, I take at most one pill for work (often zero) and one after work, but that one I skip a lot less often. With this approach I also get plenty of breaks. Infrequently I skip an entire week. In order to keep track of my consumption, I keep meticulous records. For every day, I could tell you if I have taken MPH and if so, at which times.

The side effects I experience are mild. I sometimes get a headache but only for a brief moment, not extending past maybe ten to fifteen seconds. This happens quite irregularly. When I am on MPH, most of the times I go through the entire four-to-five-hour window without any headaches and when they occur it happens only once. Then there is persistent tension in my masseter muscle while I am on MPH. This causes minor discomfort, but I do not have the urge to clench my jaws. Thus, I do not need to engage in chewing gum as a masking behavior. The main side effect is dry mouth. I have yet to see what my dentist says to that. Based on what I can see in the mirror, my gum is as good or bad as it was before. To limit the effect, I frequently take small sips of water. This is a minor inconvenience.

Speaking of a general assessment, I concur with my psychiatrist: MPH is life-changing. I am able to tolerate simply going through the motions. Probably this gives me some insight into how normies feel. I used to get antsy when I was stuck in a bullshit meeting and sometimes I even made some pointed remarks, just to spice things up a little bit. This did not really help me. On the other hand, with MPH I can endure such boredom easily. Overall, I am quite happy with my life. Looking back, though, I do wonder how my life could have turned out had I gotten a prescription for MPH in my late teens or early adolescence. Probably, it would have been a lot different. Most certainly, it would have been a lot less eventful, seeing that the main reason for leaving my hometown for Berlin was that I felt stuck, and this move changed the entire trajectory of my life, for better or worse. With MPH, I can live the life I have chosen more intensely. I can make it through troughs much more easily with it and I can get more out of the time I have for myself. It really is a great drug.