SSRIs are notoriously NOT safe. In younger people, they often increase suicidal ideation. Even in adults, there is a very dangerous period when you first start taking them where suddenly you have more energy, but you are still massively depressed. People die because before they were so depressed they couldn't even take action to suicide, and the drugs give them just enough of a lift that they can.
Apart from that, there's the massive list of side-effects, many of them extremely common.
Complete loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, or worse, your libido is unchanged but you completely lose the ability to orgasm.
Insomnia, cause that's what a depressed person needs, even less sleep and more time for rumination in bed.
Akathisia, which is an uncontrollable need to move your body, think restless leg syndrome but it's your entire body. You literally cannot sit still.
Less life-destroying but still very obnoxious: increased sweating, dry mouth (which can ruin your teeth if you don't manage it with biotene or gum or something), blurred vision, headaches, the list goes on.
This is without even mentioning the risk of serotonin syndrome yet, which can straight up literally kill you if you don't make it to a hospital. It happens when your serotonin level is too high, and can cause seizures, fever, arrhythmia, or death.
I love this idea, but I think it needs a little work... maybe something that helps it avoid combining foods that are too similar into the same meal?
For breakfast, it keeps suggesting I eat a "high protein omelet" and 4 hard boiled eggs. That's a lot of egg in one meal. I don't want an omelet AND boiled eggs at the same time.
Do you have (or suspect you might have, but be undiagnosed) ADHD?
Nicotine is a stimulant. It improves concentration for individuals with ADHD, for much the same reasons that prescription stimulant drugs do. I picked up nicotine gum, and eventually switched to vaping myself, as a form of self-medication for my ADHD. If it really helps you block out distracting noises and sights from a busy office, that might be part of why.
If I could go back a few years and warn you against using nicotine to self-medicate ADHD, I would. I also have ADHD and kicked a 5 year vaping habit about a year ago. Nicotine might help you focus in the very short term, but if you can't re-up every half hour, it makes it a lot harder to focus in the long term! I spent 4 years as a developer, unable to vape in my shared office, being interrupted every hour by the need to consume more nicotine! Every time I'd come back in from a smoke break it felt like a race against the clock to get back into "the zone" before the nicotine cravings kicked me out again.
You know what has really helped my focus? BREAKING THAT ADDICTION. Please, if anyone else is reading the parent I'm replying to and thinking about starting to use nicotine to self-medicate ADHD trust me it is NOT worth it. It's not worth not being able to enjoy a whole movie or show because you need to intake nicotine. It's not worth being trapped in airplanes without being able to vape. It's not worth the chemical dependence, even if you "only" get addicted to the gum or patch. Please hear my appeal to what a terrible idea the parent comment is proposing! Nicotine is the absolute worst drug.
Oh geez, yeah, I'm definitely not endorsing self-medicating with nicotine, just saying, that I did, and that if nicotine helps you concentrate, you might wanna get evaluated for ADHD.
I was never a smoker, and I vape the lightest dose nicotine available (3mg/ml). I have definitely developed a light addiction over the years, but I can go all day without needing my vape. The worst my cravings get are a feeling of "Man, vaping would be really nice right now." I even went on a week-long vacation last year, left my vape at home, and didn't even think about the nicotine I was missing until I got home.
But please! Don't take my anecdotal evidence and think it means you should pick up vaping! I know it's not the best for my health, and you may become far more addicted than I am.
Huh.. your experience sounds similar to mine, although I was a heavy smoker for ~10 years. I currently vape 3mg and a) my vape never leaves the house (I never vape at work or around town) b) I often forget about vaping c) I left on a two week vacation, forgot my vape at home and nothing happened. I have the exact same craving sensation 'would have been nice to have a vape right now', usually when I'm bored. But I am a strong advocate against smoking (obviously) and vaping. Nobody should pick up vaping unless it's to attempt to give up smoking. It's still a nasty habit and super dangerous. When I say dangerous I mean the fact that in contrast to smoking, vaping has the risk of becoming a hobby.
It does. A very fun hobby, with lots of cool toys. I already mix my own juice. Originally that was just to save money, but now mixing is its own hobby. What do I feel like this week? My usual apple-flavored juice? Do I want to throw a little cranberry in this week just for fun? Or maybe I'm in the mood for something minty, my wife likes mints so we've always got an array to choose from.
I haven't even gotten into the world of rebuildables or anything like that. I use a basic Smok sub-ohm box (a T-priv), that I'm probably going to upgrade to the latest model in a few months, but I know there's an entire world of vape devices out there I've barely even glimpsed over the horizon, let alone explored. Luckily it's not too hard to talk myself out of fancy new hardware ($$) when my current mod gets the job done.
But flavors? I went and spent around $70 on flavors a couple weeks ago. Sounds crazy, but it's still cheaper than spending $100/month on commercial juices. And now I have a vast array of cool flavors to play with, and design my own recipes from.
Just chew nicotine gum, sheesh! These kids and their vapes..
Anyway, you're right, nicotine is a pain to quit and I wouldn't recommend it obviously. But vaping seems to be even more unhealthy and more distracting.
Nicotine gum is as expensive as cigarettes, if not more. I spend about $30/year for my vape supplies. I buy juice by the liter and the coils are the only other consumable and those are about $2 apiece every few months.
I mix my own juice. I did the math a few months ago, and I can make 60ml of juice (which lasts me about a week) for about $1.50. Coils usually last me about a month to a month and a half, and I usually pay $5ish a piece. So yeah... my monthly vaping costs are about $11/month at the most.
So, doing the math, as I use 3mg/ml juice, I vape about 720 mg of nicotine a month. If I bought the cheapest Wal-mart generic brand gum, in the 2mg pieces (because to replace my vape, I'd want a low dose per piece), 720 mg of nicotine in gum form would cost $81/month.
That is a huge difference. Even accounting for the fact that my vape device cost me originally $70, it's still cheaper, potentially as soon as the first month, to vape over chewing gum.
Coating regular gum would probably not work. The nicotine is embedded in the gum base itself. That's why the instructions for using nicotine gum say to chew just long enough for you to feel the tingle that nicotine creates against your oral mucosa, then tuck it between your gum and cheek for 30ish minutes or until the tingling stops. Then you give it another couple chews, just enough to expose more of the nicotine to the surface, and place it between gum and cheek again.
The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.
I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.
Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.
I know how to make gum and it would be a hassle and a half for this purpose. I'm fine with unflavored juice composed of compounds that have been used for inhalation purposes for decades.
Yeah, I make my own juice as well, though I do flavor mine, usually with fruit or mint flavors.
A 60ml bottle of commercial juice easily costs $15-20.
I buy my nic, PG, and VG from Liquid Barn and my flavors from a variety of sources (though mostly through Nicotine River). My materials cost for 60ml of homemade juice is only around $1.53 per bottle (not including the bottle itself, which you can recycle from commercial juice, or you can buy some, which only costs like $1/bottle). That's one hell of a cost savings!
That's made up of approx $0.33 of nicotine base, $0.09 of PG, $0.33 of VG, and $0.78 of flavoring. I buy PG/VG in 1000ml bottles and flavors I use a lot of in 2oz bottles, so I'm saving a bit by buying in bulk, but it still should only cost around $35 for the ingredients to get started in DIY ejuice - the cost of around 2 bottles of commercial juice. Grab yourself 500ml each of PG/VG, 125ml of nic base, and a handful of flavors and you have enough materials for at least 10 60ml bottles of ejuice (and you'll probably have PG, nic, and flavor leftover, the VG is by far the most used ingredient).
When I bought an Instant Pot from Amazon, the first one I got was obviously used (it smelled of food, and some of the accessories were missing). I had to exchange it for an actually new one.
Yes, I coasted through school until college. Never studied, never had to, even in the gifted, honors, and AP classes. I especially did well on tests. Graduated 3rd in my class, only .001 GPA points from 2nd, with a handful of 5s (and a couple 4s) on my AP tests. Had undiagnosed ADHD (inattentive type) the whole time. Always procrastinated heavily, usually wrote papers/did projects the night before they were due. The closest I got to "studying" was re-reading the chapter I was going to be tested on the morning before the test, and even that was only for social studies classes where you had to remember names and dates. I did not need to study at all for math, science, or English courses. I got very lucky with a handful of exceptional teachers in high school. Teachers that actually cared about me and my success. I wanted to do well in school, because I got praised for it - both by my mom and by teachers. I craved that praise like nothing else as a child so I always did just enough to make sure my grades stayed high.
Life fell apart in college. Huge class sizes with no personal connection to the teacher and being solely responsible for meeting deadlines and studying eventually ruined school for me. Your lecturer with over 3000 students doesn't give a shit about you or your performance in school. I lost the immediate feedback and praise that I used to get in grade/high school, and with it, my hyperfocus on doing well in school was gone.
I fell into a deep depression, took a year off, took anti-depressants, tried school again but still just couldn't make myself go to classes anymore. Dropped out. Spent a few years working a dead-end call center tech support job. Wound up getting into software anyway (my failed degree was going to be in CISE) and I do well enough for myself now (especially after getting an ADHD diagnosis and getting medicated for it), but college/young adulthood was a disaster for me. I also had to declare bankruptcy in my mid-twenties - another consequence of depression and undiagnosed ADHD. Impulse purchases and the guilt/shame/avoidance spiral turned my credit into a mess.
Most of my peers actually did far better than me (like, they actually finished their bachelors (some went as far as PhDs) and went on to good jobs in the fields they studied for), but I don't think any of them had ADHD. That was the other thing that kept me focused in high school. I was part of a decently sized group of "smart kids" - we would compete with each other on grades, and that competition helped keep me on track. Lost that in college too.
Basically, yeah, giftedness and ADHD are a terrible combo. With ADHD, you need a lot of structure and work ethic to succeed in life, but if you're smart enough, you don't have to develop any of those skills to excel in grade/high school. Then you hit adulthood and everything falls apart.
I don't think that you can or should try to armchair-diagnose or armchair-undiagnose someone with from a single blog post. You can't know what the author has struggled with in their life.
Don't consider it an incurable mental illness. It's not a sickness, it's just a genetic variation in how the brain is wired. Having a certain percentage of the population with ADHD was probably an advantage in our evolutionary past. There are a lot of good things that come alongside it, like hyperfocus, greater creative thinking, and an increased ability to multitask. It's only really a big problem in our modern society, that values people's abilities to be super-productive cogs in a machine and values consistent output over anything else (like creative solutions), that ADHD becomes a huge problem.
I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it's not about what I think. It's about what the rest of society thinks, especially the legal system and people hiring programmers for jobs. I don't imagine judges look kindly on someone who is officially diagnosed with a mental illness deciding not to take any medication for said mental illness.
Well, true. I have not disclosed to my job that I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I don't particularly plan to (I wouldn't deny it if it came up, but I'm not going to volunteer the information either). There are more downsides than upsides to disclosure. It's generally recommended to not disclose, especially during the hiring process, unless you truly cannot cope in your job without some sort of ADA accommodation, in which case you must disclose for the ADA to kick in.
Plenty of people with ADHD choose not to take medication though, and I'm having trouble coming up with a situation in which a judge would order you to take it. As long as you're not blaming your ADHD as a reason you broke the law (which you shouldn't, ADHDers may have poor impulse control and bad executive function, but we still need to hold ourselves accountable for our actions), I don't see where it's the law's business if you have it or don't, or medicate it or don't. There are plenty of non-medication coping strategies, including therapy and coaching.
One of the ways that stimulants treat ADHD is by raising dopamine and norepinephrine levels. Also, one of the big problems with ADHD is time-blindness. Basically, to the ADHD person, there are only two times: Now and Not Now.
Video games are highly stimulating and full of immediate feedback when you do well or poorly. This gives you the dopamine hit that your brain is searching for. And the immediate feedback means that the results of your doing well or poorly are felt right away, instead of in a nebulous future.
So you can focus during the game because you're getting a constant stream of dopamine and you always know how well you're doing. Get to the blog post though and... where'd the dopamine go? If you don't write this blog post right now when will you feel the pain? If it's not for a while, then it's too far away for the ADHD brain to put it into perspective because of the time-blindness. It's one of the reasons ADHDers are famous for procrastinating til the last moment, then suddenly cranking out that paper the night before. Once you finally get that sense of urgency of the impending deadline, you can focus.
Apart from that, there's the massive list of side-effects, many of them extremely common.
Complete loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, or worse, your libido is unchanged but you completely lose the ability to orgasm.
Insomnia, cause that's what a depressed person needs, even less sleep and more time for rumination in bed.
Akathisia, which is an uncontrollable need to move your body, think restless leg syndrome but it's your entire body. You literally cannot sit still.
Less life-destroying but still very obnoxious: increased sweating, dry mouth (which can ruin your teeth if you don't manage it with biotene or gum or something), blurred vision, headaches, the list goes on.
This is without even mentioning the risk of serotonin syndrome yet, which can straight up literally kill you if you don't make it to a hospital. It happens when your serotonin level is too high, and can cause seizures, fever, arrhythmia, or death.