As a regular user of methylphendidate (MPH), a very serious and highly effective drug, I spend considerable time paying attention to my mind and body, trying to articulate how this drug impacts me. This also includes tracking biomarkers. There is one aspect that is sometimes pointed out as a potential risk, namely personality changes. Apparently, MPH can make you aggressive and impulsive, irritable, or even prone to crying. I came across one study on side effects that also had a very negative spin on the topic. However, personalty changes can also be of a positive nature. Yet, even this is often framed negatively by describing people on MPH as being “more intense” instead of being “highly focused”.
It is a good question what your personality actually is. To a significant degree, it is probably situational. You can put the most well-adjusted adult into a detrimental environment, and you can basically guarantee that this will affect him negatively, and perhaps even make him depressed. There is also your physical environment. I grew up in the countryside, spent many years as an adult living in big cities, and currently once again reside in the countryside. I am most certainly calmer when I am far away from a big city, in particular your typical Western, dystopian shithole, in which you constantly need to keep your guard up. Technically, speaking you cannot even take a leisurely stroll in a big city. Not even in the company office can I just leave a few items behind on my desk during my lunch break because there is theft. This was an issue in every company I ever worked at. At one place, the situation was so bad that they had to hire security. There was an incident where someone managed to sneak into the building and walk out with five or six laptops, and nobody of the people working there thought that there was anything wrong with that. This probably tells you a lot about how much people identify with their employer.
You can obviously change your personality, for better or worse, by changing your environment. The obvious objection is that this is just temporary, but at what point do temporary changes become permanent? If you live in an unsafe environment, it will probably take only a few months until you have adopted new behaviors that may take years to shake off after a move to a safer area. Meditation can also change your behavior, assuming you pursue it for the long-term and with significant dedication. As a consequence, you will be able to control your mind and even your emotions a lot better and this will also appear to others as being part of your personality.
MPH is a drug you may take for years or even your entire life, so any changes to your personality are probably of a more intermittent nature. However, the effects of the drug may lead to substantial changes even when you are not on it. I do not take MPH daily. However, I like taking it when there is some work to do I would otherwise easily find excuses to put off, and taking care of such tasks can impact me even when I am not on MPH. To give you a good example: you may have made the experience that a cluttered desk can be distracting. The positive spin is that it may inspire creativity. I used to sometimes not tidy up my desk for years, just stacking books and notes as I saw fit. Partly, I did so because I somehow liked a bit of chaos, but there is also the aspect of me not wanting to spend half a day tidying up my desk. Well, with MPH this is quite easy to do. My desk, and my entire study, is probably better organized than it ever was before. The consequence of this is that there is less visual distraction, and thus I am able to better focus on whatever task I want to work on. This is true no matter whether I am on MPH or not. Can this be perceived as a change in personality? I would argue that you could make a good argument that it does.
The personality changes I am experiencing on my very low dose of MPH are, thus far, only positive. This drug does not make me more aggressive or impulsive. You could say that it makes me more “intense”, if you want to use that word, and there are parts of the population that would consider this a negative trait. This is not how I see it. I do come across as a very serious person in real life, and on MPH this effect is probably even more exaggerated, compared to the average person. Being able to fully focus on what is in front of you is quite valuable, I would argue. Thus, you can say that MPH makes you more observant or more attentive. Let me take an interaction my wife as an example: Earlier this week she came to me to chat, as she sometimes does, and we ended up talking for 90 minutes. No, there was no serious topic to discuss. It was simply a good conversation. My wife is not only very good-looking, she also has a really pleasant voice, and if she wants to just chat idly, or learn what I have been thinking about or working on, she is of course welcome to do so. Even when I am not on MPH, I would not cut her off, but I probably would not spontaneously take 90 minutes out of my day, instead suggesting after half an hour or 45 minutes to continue our conversation later. One very positive side effect of MPH is that I get a lot more done, so if that was the only side effect, it would already lead to me needing to be a bit less protective of my time. On top, if you are able to fully focus on anything you want, you do not get distracted either. I wonder if my wife thinks that I am a partly different person, now that I am a bit less “intense” about how to spend my time.
There is one potentially negative aspect of my non-drugged personality that I have completely under control with MPH, however: When I get bored, which happens quite easily because my supposedly oh-so challenging work that requires an advanced degree is not really all that intellectually stimulating, I tend to go off script in order to create more exciting situations. For instance, I may make some very pointed comments in a discussion, sometimes even deliberately putting someone on the spot. By doing so, I may even manage to take over a meeting, which is quite fun, and certainly a lot more engaging than listening to someone drone on. Sometimes, I also like to see what my interlocutors are made of, so I put them on the spot by asking questions they did not at all expect. I recall a meeting with a “stakeholder” that told me that she was really looking forward to learn about a particular topic I was working on, so I could not help but ask her what had kept her from just looking it up as all my work was openly accessible. She did not last long, and neither did a guy whom I was interviewing for a project leadership role. DEI was probably the reason this non-white person’s CV ended up on my desk. My first question was whether he had any leadership experience, including hobbies or even extracurriculars, as I could not see any evidence on this CV. He had none. Then I asked him why, after almost twenty years of (unremarkable) work, he wanted to now step up and lead projects, and even that he could not answer. Well, it seems I saved him and myself a lot of time this way. HR was not happy about this. The white guy I liked and wanted to take on they were not happy with either, so they decided that someone else should also interview him, and they found a junior female DEI hire who diagnosed that this person was not a good culture fit. It is probably not an exaggeration that I am somewhat polarizing, but I do not care much about this. However, if I decided to care more about fitting in, then MPH will take care of it. I think that this drug makes me less aggressive, not more, and I was in situations where I deliberately did not take it because I knew I was about to get into a situation in which I had no interest in being diplomatic.
There are of course aspects of your personality that are quite unchangeable. Still, a significant part depends on your environment, good or bad. Similarly, you can experience personality changes due to the drugs you consume. Compared to alcohol, I would argue that the side effects of MPH, if you do not take an excessive amount, are very positive. I think this drug changes my personality to a noticeable extent when I am on it. I notice it myself clearly, for instance when I patiently sit through a boring meeting or do some mundane chores I otherwise may have put off indefinitely. On top, the side effects of MPH lead to me changing my environment, which has a further impact on my personality.
As someone who has been following you for more than a decade, and admittedly was quite young, and naive before, I’m now able to see things from an aerial perspective.
I recall buying your book on meditation some years ago and wholeheartedly enjoyed it. Most apparent was the non-dogmatic approach to the subject, with the intent of clearing the mind instead of gaining some occult insight or power.
In lieu of this, the post above takes a diagonal shift where the person who was prior interested in gaining insight into the self through the scientific inquiry is falling victim to non-evidence-based, speaking of its grandiosity and surely dabbling with high risk.
I’m not going to school you on the medical literature but I’m pretty sure that MPH has a shattering effect on cognitive ability — several medical and cultural documentaries extrapolate the direction such drugs take on the mind, and their vernacular, “long-term” effects of sudden degradation which can either explain something completely non-local, or the drugs themselves, which are often the closer matching hypothesis.
Of course, if there’s a dynamic relationship, it has to have a precis that indicates something rather than something else.
What’s surprising to me is your sentiment surrounding personality. To me it’s logical that drastic changes in your brain don’t come from nothing. It isn’t merely speculation that psychoactive substances such as the above damages your brain; it’s something that’s seen again and again empirically in medical imaging both in vivo imaging and post Morten of structural changes in the mind.
In fact, the disclaimer should read: this is not medical advice, which I neither see in your intro post nor in the footer of your post.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, which I really appreciate. I am obviously not a medical professional, so I am not giving medical advice. Besides, you cannot get MPH without a prescription legally, so I surely hope that anybody who takes it receives proper medical attention from their psychiatrist. Regarding your perspective on me supposedly damaging my brain: I have read a lot about MPH and how it works before taking it, so I am not a naive consumer. Basically, MPH regulates dopamine. For instance, the physiological explanation for me messing with my environment in order to keep me more engaged is that I have a higher stimulation threshold, apparently due to a somewhat subdued level of dopamine in my brain. My very high IQ, which I do not state to boast but mention matter-of-factly, does not help in this regard either. I probably have a decently high baseline level of dopamine, but one that is not high enough for my level of intelligence. This is good or bad. Evolutionarily speaking, my body tells me to seek out more novel and more challenging experiences. In reality, I work in a high-IQ field, have bills to pay, and have pretty much maxed out the level of intellectual stimulation I can get, given my circumstances. I even write millions of words in my spare time in order to create mental stimulation in my life. Writing makes me feel better, i.e. it raises my dopamine.
My impulse to create additional mental stimulation, for instance by putting someone on the spot in a meeting, just to see how he or she would react, completely goes away on MPH. Also, my impulse to yawn because I am so fucking bored half of my day goes away. I think that this is a clear benefit for myself, and my environment. Whether there is any long-term negative consequence on my very deliberate and controlled consumption of MPH has to be seen, but I can assure you that the distance between a recreational drug user and me is incredibly vast. The personality changes I mention are furthermore quite minor. The non-MPH version of myself is a bit abrasive at times and can get impatient easily. MPH basically temporarily removes some rough edges, and also helps me become a lot more productive. Alcohol has a much more deleterious effect on people. If you take MPH responsibly, I think it is quite obvious that you will be fine, even in the long run. In contrast, if you frequently drink alcohol you will end up in a worse and worse situation as time progresses.
I think the working title for this series of articles has always been “MPH: experimenting on myself”. If this was a space that had a widespread access to normies, I would understand your concerns, but the assumption is that we’re all above average intelligence here.
Besides, as I mentioned in another one of these artciles, I live in a 3rd wolrd shithole and still got told that I could only get Ritalin with a prescription, so… Recreational use for this drug is low to nonexistent, so there mustn’t be a black market for it here. In the US, sure, but it should be very small.
Karl left a very relevant comment to my post on the topic of MPH being a controlled substance that is very relevant here. He is absolutely correct that I do not take the position of the average person into account, so it probably is not a bad idea to keep MPH out of reach for them as you cannot plausibly assume that they would generally be able to restrain themselves. Thus, having psychiatrists as gatekeepers is sensible. I should also add, or repeat, that I do meet the criteria for an ADHD diagnosis. To be more correct, I clearly fulfill five out of ten diagnostic criteria for ADHD. As a consequence, I am classified as having “mild ADHD”. I am not a subclinical case, which probably applies to a lot of people, normally women, who talk a lot about supposedly having ADHD yet somehow do not manage to muster the courage to get a proper diagnosis. There is a clear medical justification for me to take MPH. On a related note, I wonder if reports of side effects are due to people self-medicating, i.e. consuming a higher dose than recommended or procuring this medication via questionable means, even though there is no medical indication that they should take it.
Specifically regarding your point of procurement, in the West a very common way of getting access to MPH and related medication is via family members such as a cousin or nephew who may have a prescription. Then this person just so happens to lose a bottle of MPH pills, and gets another prescription from the doctor. I also know of cases where I am quite certain that they got it via a doctor in the family. One guy I knew, who boasted about cramming all night before an exam, remarked that his father helps him getting his hands on Ritalin whenever he needs it. For him, it was some kind of status symbol that he had access to it.
quick comment – your writing style is totally different compared to what i remember
i recall quitting following the blog because of “know-it-all” attitude
but its something that is attractive at first, just too dogmatic and lacking nuance.
“I know that I know nothing”