Looking Back on Day One

It looks as if Vyvanse seems to work. There are several things I noticed:

1. Focus; Between coming off of the generic methylphenidate and starting on the Vyvanse - a span of approximately 4 months - I could not focus and it showed. It showed at work (where I would waste most of my day playing card games on the computer), it showed at school (where I delayed everything), and it showed at home.

Yesterday, Day One on Vyvanse? I had a major - and I mean major - project thrown at me first thing in the morning, and it needed to be done before the end of the day. If this had happened before, I'd've either procrastinated on it big time or cobbled together something that was not have fit the bill.

What I ended up doing is staying completely focused on it, not only getting it done well within my time constraint, but also far exceeding the expectations of my boss regarding the quality of the final piece.

2. Duration; this was my big problem with methylphenidate. None of it lasted more than 3-4 hours. Hell, I even took Ritalin SR - which has an expected life span of 6-8 hours - and even that never made it past the four hour mark on a good day.

3. Fidgeting; there's a story here - that day I first met with the psychiatrist, he told me that one of the things I need to do is learn control. "Think before you speak; think before you act." Right there is the only positive thing I took away from that session.

So I decided that I would work on my self-control, one thing at a time. But where to start, right?

I started with my knuckles.

I've been cracking my knuckles since I was in the sixth grade, which makes that about, oh, 29 years that I've been cracking my knuckles.

Obviously, this was the thing I decided to start with.

And it was tough; always is when you're working on a habit you've had that long. To me, this was the equivalent of a long-term smoker suddenly giving up cigarettes. But for a while, I was able to do it.

However, once I moved off the methylphenidate, I found myself slipping. And even once I was back on the methylphendiate (as Concerta), I found it difficult to stop.

Yesterday? I think I cracked my knuckles twice - three times at best. So that's another good one.

As I mentioned previously, I had taken the dose 5:33 am; we'll call that x1. If I'm right, the dosage probably wore off around 2:30-3:00 pm. Let's say, for the sake of argument, it wore off at 2:30 pm; we'll call that x2.

Using that information, we'll plug it all into this equation: d = x2 - x1, where x1 is the time the dose was taken, x2 is the assumed time the dose wore off, and d is the difference between the two (sorry; I've been taking statistics courses lately).

So, d = x2 - x1
d = 2:30 pm - 5:33 am
d = 8 hours, 57 minutes

That's actually pretty good.

I'll be keeping up on this, and, if I can figure out how to do it, I'll incorporate a graph of the duration over time. It's something I had done when I was tracking progress in a physical notebook, and while I know I could do the same thing in Excel, I still need to figure out how to port it into Blogger.

But for now, a good start.