A tangential question. What exactly does it feel to be like in Adderall? I'm intimately familiar with the 15-minutes venture into Reddit/HN etc so if I were to, say, take Adderall, just what exactly inside me would change?
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Look at some code, hold your attention on it, think about the methods and types and interactions with other objects. Hold all of this in your working memory to the exclusion of anything else. See how long you can hold it for.
Now start loading more into your working memory, after you get N classes deep things will start to get fuzzier, you won’t be able to hold it all in your mind at once, you’ll get unfocused, and then go to hacker news.
Imagine if that fuzziness didn’t start, but you kept that sharpness of working memory easily. Imagine it was effortless to keep reading, and imagine other thoughts (biological needs or whatever) never distract your working memory.
That’s what it’s like for me, unfortunately I get terrible headaches after, and the amount of time it takes to recover causes a loss in productivity that is greater than the productivity I would have got working at a comfortable pace.
Much better is diet and exercise, with diet and exercise I have vastly increased my ability to focus and remember, much better than any artificial chemical enhancement.
There are no shortcuts
Those headaches can be hydration-related. A "life hack" (I guess addy/adhd hack) borrowed from the keto groups was to find a way to intake potassium a few hours in to it, in combination with your likely more than usual water intake. The suggestion I once found was low sodium V8s since they’re high in potassium to offset the sodium but keep a level of taste. Life changing to say the least for those days I would take adderall.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and was prescribed vyvanse. The first day I took it it was an extremely intense calm feeling. I had a design doc I had been mulling over for weeks but for some ungodly reason was unable to actually put onto paper. When the drug kicked in I was fully alert and all the uncomfortable feelings that had prevented me from actually doing what I needed to do went away. The doc was written in 3 hours.
I will say, it definitely brings you above baseline in ability to concentrate, even with adhd. I was basically unable to do any deep work because of random 30 minute meetings interspersed throughout the day. With vyvanse I can basically leave a meeting and within 5 minutes of it finishing be in the zone working on a different task.
I'm on week 3 now and the intense calmness has faded but my ability to do tasks and focus remains to a certain extent.
No ADHD diagnosis here, but to me amphetamine feels essentially the same as the feeling I get on a very productive day, only stronger and constant.