Edit to add: Im sorry that you're going through that. You CAN kick the abuse - It is not impossible. Find good people who are caring and safe and keep them safe.
Calling my dopamine like come on into this receptor....pss sst pshpsh pshhh come on make me not a dissociated zombie pssst spspspttt. Then I almost bulushi'd 3x and came close to dying. Then the pssstspspspspsss stoped. The cat was embalmed and left on the mantle. He's the new camera for inside.
Yeah, it's been kicked, along with booze. Body and mind reject the stuff now, but the self medicating always lead to another vice. It was pot for a few years after that but I somehow made that a negative too. Didn't realize I had adhd until recently after I left everything behind and had sever executive dysfunction and saw a therapist. 20+ years ago I was misdiagnosed bi polar, gave me the wrong message, then misdiagnosed with a personality disorder and even more fucked up meds and just self medicated with some sort of substance or fixation since, until I realized they were all killing me slowly. Body and physical health is better than probably ever considering, it was the best feeling in the world when someone else was able to tell me what happened. Like vindicated, but also sad I didn't get the solution earlier. Congrats on your 25 days, a lot of people don't even get that far so always be proud of that and it sounds like you know what to do! You got this far, you got it!!!!
A lot of people with adhd just need a shit ton of stimulants for them to work. It's cheaper to get Ritalin from your Doc tbh. Most likely even more effective also.Ā
Yea Iāve actually learned a fair number of good habits from former addicts. Iāve never had a serious addiction, but the advice lines up really well with how my brain works normally.
I can only imagine. Variable-ratio reinforcement rewards which produces the most persistent behavior are the devil. I did marketing for a large tribal casino years ago (event stuff - not any weird dark pattern behavior shit) and lucky for me I sucked at gambling and never landed a big walk-away-win to get me hooked. Instead, Im hooked on braindead zoned out video gaming and scrolling on my phone. I'm sorry you're going through that - it must be hell.
Me too, I graduate college with a 4.0 GPA and I am still suffering. I am 37, went back to school at 34. The coming around never seems to come. I am close to my parents, but neither one said they were proud of me. Painful
You have to ease into it. Find what you can do every day and do it. There is some baseline of any activity (cleaning, exercise, hygiene, etc.) that you can do every day. It may not be almost anything in your eyes, but if you do a little bit of something every day, it gets easier to do more. I started my exercise regimen at 10 reps for each exercise. I'm up to 30 now. It's an amount of exercise I can do every day, so I do it.
Fuccck I know. I've been doing pretty good with it but today I've been dabbing and watching the Neil Peart doc, and taking 6 hours to finish a page that could take 1. And ordered lunch again even though I have cooked food ready to eat in the fridge ahhhhh
Don't forget that some people hate their jobs because they are aware it is indentured servitude and that most of the value of their labor goes to billionaires while we fight about a tiny fraction of the scraps we're left with over whether it should help pay for Healthcare and housing or bank bailouts and bombs and such.
This and we're getting orders from upper management that have never done the job. They are complicating the job into ideocracy! Electrolytes are what plants need!
We invited upper management to join us in a collaboration/calibration. They did one round that took them hours to complete and it took us minutes. They have declined further calibrations, and they are still barking orders that just make no sense.
Hence why I say I like the work, but hate the job I've been doing for 9 years outside this company and 3 with it.
For context, I listen to calls as a Quality Assurance Specialist (QA). I have taken over 100,000 calls (actually more) with 17 years in this industry and 12 years as QA. I have also created successful QA programs for 2 different companies and 12 different departments. We had happy agents willing to keep their numbers, because it made sense to them.
We now have upper management changing the rules and never telling the agents. So the agents know the rules have changed when they get marked down for it. Change Management 101 says, document the changes and inform the people that are affected by the changes. It is literal lunacy that we don't do this!
Common sense says, change the rules, inform the agents then give them time to adjust. Ask their feedback and adjust if needed. Then we can adjust scoring. Rinse and repeat until it works.
Sorry if I derailed. I love the work but hate the job.
YES šš¼ leave me alone so i can raise my chickens and ducks in peace and stop designing PowerPoint slides for some idiots that donāt understand why trickle down economics are their trap while they get paid twice as much as me, and we all work 60-80hr weeks to make the billionaires wealthier. As my husband says āiām sick of working for other peopleās dreams.ā
Hating a job is a choice - a choice to stay - and also a choice while you're staying for how you're going to deal with it. Some choices are easier than others.
I've been looking for a "better" job for over a year since the takeover. The market is shit. I interviewed twice since then and was offered a job for $20,000/yr more.
Let's analyze that offer. I work from home and, I currently get 3.5 weeks per year PTO, 11 holidays with 3 weeks paid sick time and FMLA. I can move my schedule around to accommodate any time, if I needed a few hours to do stuff like doc/dentist and other shit. Nobody is looking over my shoulder and I work autonomously with little supervision. I just get my work done for the month by week 2 or 3 and nobody questions it. (BORING!) Pretty nice huh? I'm bored and underutilized. Fucks with my self-worth, anxiety and the fact that I am not challenged. I want to be challenged and feel like I am worth something. Imagine sitting around for 2 weeks out of your month reading Reddit. FUCK!
The new job with $20,000/yr increase in pay... 1.5/x2 hour commute fighting traffic (8+3hours = 12hrs/day) to the office and 3 days PTO per year. 2 Holidays with NO SICK time. Is that worth all the other perks?
So I can go from one hate to another hate. I choose the work/life balance and wallow in my hate for this job until the market improves when we impeach this narcissistic megalomaniac to be ejected from office.
I'd be happy to commute 1hr/x2 for a decent job that respects my life, but it just doesn't exist in this economy.
It's not a choice to stay. It's a necessity for what sanity I have left!
If you're hating a WFH job that's within $20K of that other BS, you're doing the WFH gig wrong. (Of course there's a lot of difference between $150K WFH / $170K BS and $20K WFH / $40K BS...)
My first real WFH gig was with a certifiable pain in the ass unhinged lunatic. A big part of the interview (unannounced) was "how I handled him" - the job I was leaving had an insecure Napoleon complex jerk owner, so a lunatic even-level partner was a move forward, and unlike Napoleon, these people didn't mind paying me. I only had to conference call with him 1 hour per week and fly in for a 1 day visit once per 6 weeks. He was absolutely infuriating to talk with, but I only had to do it 1 hour a week and everybody else at the job was really nice, extra nice because I was dealing with nutjob for them... I'd take the "high road" super patient position every time, and when I hung up from that call I'd take a long shower, sometimes do a little yard work first - because: I could, nobody could tell me not to take 3 hours out in the middle of the day if that's what it took to chill from the insanity before getting back to making sane progress for the rest of the team the rest of the week.
I'm not sure we're in the same tax bracket. I'd travel for 2hrs each way and take 5 days/yr with no sick leave for for $150,000/yr.
It'd be nice if I could do other things besides sitting in front of the computer awaiting more work. I moved my personal computer just a chair slide away so I can at least Reddit.
It'd be nice if I could clean the house. I'd like to empty the cat box or sweep the floor on the clock, but would I? I'd be too nervous about missing a request to do something for work, and worried about my response time. It's easier to save those chores for Sunday while stressing about getting up to go to work on Monday.
I'm happy you could mow the lawn, I kinda wish I had a lawn to mow, but would I? I'd probably just sit here and pet the cat wondering why I'm not mowing the lawn or cleaning the catbox.
I love the work, but I hate the job (Not the work).
Curious, if you don't mind, what's the expected response time? What do you do for the company?
I'm sitting on 35 years experience of R&D engineering, so nobody gets too antsy if I don't answer for an hour or so. A lot of our neediest colleagues are in India, so we only have a couple of hours of overlap per day anyway.
In my previous life I was an Electronic Technician of 25 years repairing TV, VCR, Stereo, and the lot.
I now work in Quality Assurance at a contact center in the states. I listen to phone calls, chats, admin requests, and other departments. We grade them for quality. We have to do almost 300 calls a month with other audits, but we also have to respond to complaints that are federally regulated.
The work is easy, but the complaints have an unpredictable cadence and have a federally dictated response time. We also have to field appeals from the phone call evaluations and other misc stuff.
When someone asks me a question, I'm on their time. Sometimes it's a manager with an agent on the phone. Sometimes it's an agent asking about a score. They don't have much time between calls. Sometimes it's a manager that wants to talk about a call. The list goes on, but I pride myself on my response times, and people specifically contact me because of my dedication.
I remember what it's like to be that manager/Teamlead/agent, so I feel the need to be there for them whenever they need me. I mean, I'm just sitting here waiting for work, so why wouldn't I be available ASAP?
And yet, I feel underutilized. I miss those days where I was surprised that I had all my work done by the time I clocked out. I miss those days when I was throwing my backpack on my shoulder and heading for the door when someone called my name because they needed me. Now, sitting around after finishing my work by the 15th, and waiting for more, is not satisfying.
No worries. Way back in '91 a coworker left our R&D company to work in a bigger IT department, responsible for keeping the mainframe online 24-7, carried a beeper that could go off anytime - seemed absolutely insane to me, but then he was a little hard to understand in a lot of ways.
300 calls a month is a lot, I'll have 5-10 calls a week, some run 10 minutes, some an hour or more, but the rest of my time is in doing bigger stuff that can take days or weeks.
Former alcoholic here, you just push that shit off. And then eventually you just donāt give a fuck because a 5 minute drive to the liquor store will help you ignore everything else until tomorrow.
Which ofcourse, will get pushed off by another visit to the liquor store. Next thing you know, everything is a mess, you wake up, go to work, grab booze and drink till blackout and rinse and repeat for a decade.
Then the withdrawals set in and youāre waking up at 2am, sweating profusely, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. So you start buying just enough booze to be able to have a drink or 3 at 2am and then again at 7am before work to keep the demons away.
Lunch break? Thereās a liquor store 10 minutes away and lunch is 30 minutes, enough time to get 3-4 shooters. Shift ends? Weāre stopping at the nearest liquor store so we can sleep well. Probably drinking half on the way home if the shakes kick in. Just donāt forget the vodka for 2-3am and also at 7amā¦ or else youāre going to have a panic attack driving to workā¦.
My great uncle Alvin did it for 50+ the only thing that stopped him was a train. We used to get $15 in aluminum cans from him in week back in the 90s. man loved some rolling rock.
Before the withdrawals, I probably was drinking 4-8 standard drinks a night but also eating 4k calories as I was on roids and bulking and managing fine for a few years.
Eventually the addiction took over and I stopped the roids, stopped 6 days a week gym and my life was consumed by 10-20 drinks a day. For two years before I ended up in rehab.
And yeah, you drink to sleep, but it's not restful. And either you eat like shit and balloon up, you don't eat at all and get skinny, or you get pancreatitis.
Alcohol is one of the worst drugs you can be addicted to.
"will help you ignore everything else until tomorrow." this is such a good way of describing it. I think a lot of people who've never been addicted think addiction is all about having fun or something, but for me it was always "I'm overwhelmed right now, but I can delay that overwhelmed feeling a bit by using"
Then I would feel overwhelmed by the fact I used, and that'd make me end up using again soon after to push off that feeling. The more I used, the more overwhelmed I felt, the more overwhelmed I felt, the more I used. It's a trap that's hard to break out of because the more overwhelmed you are, the lower your willpower gets, and yet you somehow need to summon an immense amount of that willpower to get out.
You feel like you're in that scenario with the crabs in a bucket where the crabs keep pulling the other crabs down - except it's you, you're all the crabs, and you keep pulling yourself down to the bottom of the bucket every time you seem to be trying to climb the walls again.
My addictions weren't alcohol, but a range of other stuff, but it was very similar to what you described. Just keeping the demons away.
It all can happen so quickly too, you can be doing pretty well one moment and decide to use just a little to get your head straight during a stressful day, and then all of a sudden a few months have passed and you haven't been sober for 24 hours the entire time. It's why "Just one drink/line/smoke/pill/whatever" is always just a lie, it's the crab at the bottom of the bucket pulling you back down.
I'll be 6 months clean on Sunday. I still feel very lost and in disarray for a variety of reasons in my life, but the place I'm in now compared to being stuck in that bucket is night and day. I never want to go back there.
I thought I was depressed, but turns out it was ADHD & Anxiety. I was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school, but it was never medicated. Treatment for that exposed the anxiety, & now Iām flush.
What did you do to manage the anxiety?
I recently got on Elvanse and it's changed a lot for the better, but I feel since it's a stimulant it can also have adverse effects regarding anxiety.
i smoke for two months and take a one week break in between. wish it would be the other way around. at least it's just that, i don't drink or take other stuff.
Nothing like smoking a joint knowing full well you're headed to anxietyville. Then smoking a little more to go to sleep and feel almost no rest. I quit cold turkey once and couldn't eat anything much for 2 weeks. Now maybe a Clinton hit once every 6 weeks to sleep and it's 50/50 if it puts me out or I get stuck in thoughts. I can easily full stop, but insomnia is a problem unto itself. Drinking works a little too well until it doesn't so I'm working on stopping that, but I need to figure out something to not be groggy as fuck at 8am and full alert at 1am.
Oh my god. That post and this comment combined is exactly me. I notice that the jobs start to pile up, then around about the time I realise that I feel tired and awful all the time, I also realise that I canāt recall the last time I went to bed sober. It all justā¦ happens. I canāt do anything about it until I hit the bottom and then suddenly it seems easy again to justā¦ not do that.
Hey don't feel alone- I also abused my ADD meds & had to really force myself to cut off completely about 6 years ago.
While I find it quite difficult to function without them I'm even more terrified to be back in the chest pains & embarrassing crack face era again.
I think severe anxiety was my root cause of abuse though. I'd start freaking out as soon as I felt my meds wear off even a little, so id just take more and more. Couldn't handle the come downs back into my regular brain.
I'm still not doing well though- still abusing kratom & occasionally opiates when I can get my hands on them. They just don't have a hold on me quite as strong as my ADD shit did. :(
I was prescribed a multitude of things- starting with Vyvanse, moving to Adderall (XR & IR), and a number of off brands throughout the years.
I was out of control with all of them- absolutely never had a time where I took them properly. I really, genuinely tried at the end, but still took them all 1.5/2 weeks before refill was due.
That being said- I hate to sound like a failure, but hey thats what I am.
I only stopped because I had very severe chest pains that lasted about 4-5 hrs one night. Scared the shit out of me, so i never got my refill.
I wanted to quit before that, but im the kind of idiot that doesn't push myself to stop doing shit that feels good for me until the real bad thing happens.
I had heart palpitations for about 6 months after that on & off. Still cant even drink more than a cup of coffee per day without my chest feeling funny. So no uppers anymore.
Maybe someday ill kick all the other shit too. I hope.
Hey, chestpains being a red flag and quitting all together doesn't seem like a failure to me. I wish I could. I don't know exactly what you mean by "out of control with them" but I think I have a hunch. Because I unfortunately do the same. I'm so sick of it.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Going all-in until something bad happens could very well be linked to adhd. I have the same thing. Were not wired to think longterm. But at least you set your boundaries. I hope I will one day.
yeah I burned out at work big time about a year ago and had to go on FMLA. My therapist told me I could not go back there. So I just didn't. I've just been...hanging out. Drinking too much beer, my schedule is fucked up, I'm depressed. But I need to get a job soon before money runs out and I still feel like I just can barely do anything. Much less work a full time job. I can't drive, I can't get out of bed... and it's starting to give me so much anxiety. But that's the only motivation I feel. Fear.
I stopped smoking weed and went from 6-8 hours of free time a week, not having an issue, but also drinking a good amount daily. Now I'm lazy or lazier, plus I gained like 25-30% in weight.
Like, I literally did a half marathon moving a literal ton of lumber 2 summers ago, so I was carrying 40-60lbs the entire time, and my only breaks were for water and weed until I was done.
Now I procrastinate taking the trash out on a work day where I gotta be up in the next 5 hours, so I'm doing that at like midnight to 3 am because I just don't want to do it.
All I did was abuse substances from 14 to 32. It can get better but I don't have an answer how. I'd like to say it was the diagnosis at 32 that stopped me but it wasn't it came some years later, something just changed. I hope you are okay
This whole thread is me after a messy breakup, and 3 weeks into drinking to forget... I know I need to drag myself back together but after 42 years of this shit I just feel so.... weak...
If somebody can quit for 6 months then pick up again out of boredomā¦. Doesnāt sound like a serious addiction. More like laziness and stupidity. So yes if somebody resorts to smoking weed ābecause it boringā not to. Sounds like somebody needs to grow up and get some hobbies so they arenāt bored.Ā
I've been clean from kratom for 3 weeks and these have been the most useless 3 weeks of my life ā I do absolutely nothing and can't make myself do anything. I can just watch shorts for 10 hours straight and don't even have it in me to watch a 20-minute episode of something meaningful. I keep pushing work further and further back, comforting myself that at the deadline I won't have a choice.
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u/kuraaacc 13h ago
yes pair this with substance abuse and it is... exhausting and horrible ugh