My Student Journey with ADHD Medication 4 – Too Tired to be Productive, Too Guilty to Rest

At 21 years old I’ve been put on ADHD medication just after my very rough third year of university has ended. Join me in this recurring column as I talk about the many highs, lows and unexpected twists that medication brings to my student life.

When you’ve struggled to be productive for so many years of your life, finally getting to be productive is a rush.

But you can’t always be productive; between burnout and life obligations, sometimes you just need to rest and be unproductive.

But resting now makes me feel awful. 

After chasing productivity for so long I feel guilty for not pursuing it when it is so close to my grasp. 

It’s a horrible feeling that my friends keep calling me out on, but I’m still struggling to process. 

Feeling guilty for feeling tired

Feeling guilty for not being productive is nothing new for anyone with ADHD; it’s a feeling we are all far too familiar with. 

But now it feels different because I’m not reaching out to a seemingly impossible goal; I’m failing to do something within my reach.

I still get a lot done, but it never feels like it’s enough.

When I tell other people about the things I’ve been doing in a day or in a week they are impressed and often remark that I’ve been super productive.

But in my mind all I can focus on is the amount of time I’ve spent just lying in bed tired. 

Or how long I spent gaming when there were dishes to be done.

Or how fatigued I was after work, meaning I didn’t go for a run.

I have so much still to do on my summer to-do lists, but I’m just tired all the time.

Even fun and enjoyable things are being pushed back because I am just so tired.

My clinician and my loved ones tell me I just need to rest but then I just feel like I’m wasting my time.

This has all been exacerbated by the fact that I was completely taken off the board for a few weeks after a surgery, making me feel an oppressive need to make up for lost time.

It’s a horrible cycle and there’s no special pill I can take to fix it.

This is something that will require a lot of conscious effort to work through and so far I’m doing a pretty bad job at it.

Crashing, again and again and again

Whenever I leave work I crash, but my brain is still wound extremely tight. 

Meaning I have no energy to do anything, but can’t sleep, even after a midnight finish.

Working, combined with the weather and the fact that I’m still partially recovering from surgery just leaves me wiped out. 

To try and deal with the crashes, my clinician has given me a new type of medication to give me a boost and fend off the crashes.

They are supposed to just be taken as and when I feel the need, but by the time I feel the need, I’ve usually crashed and burned already.

More importantly, putting more stimulants into my body can make getting to sleep even harder.

I think that these little pick-me-ups need a bit more testing before I give a proper opinion on them, hopefully they make a difference.

But as of now, they have provided little reprieve. 

Resting rarely feels restful

Like many people with ADHD, I often struggle to sleep.

The issue is made worse with medication and then even further exacerbated by the existence of the summer, with its constant dim and muggy nights.

Recently I’ve been getting to sleep around 2am on a good night or 4am on a bad night resulting in either sleep deprivation or a destroyed sleeping pattern.

Worst case scenario is jumping between both of them, which is where I’m at now depending on whether-or-not I’m working each day. 

These sleep issues are nothing new for me, but lately they’ve become so common that I’m facing an omnipresent feeling of fatigue.

Additionally, it means that even when I do take time off to properly rest, I’m still tired by the next day due to poor sleep. 

Which means I then fail to be productive even after resting, compounding the guilt I already feel.

I worked 13 days in a row recently and when I finally had two days off I genuinely had no idea what to do with myself.

I spent one day just resting and gaming while day two saw me spending four and a half hours cleaning my kitchen on an atomic level.

Yet still it took me three hours to get to sleep.

I’m off again now, for three days this time, and I’ve already spent a day doing a stock take of the freezer and doing a million washing while day two is being spent tackling my gargantuan to-write list that I have zero motivation to tackle. 

So I just float as the fatigue and the guilt compound over and over again. 

Is this the best I can hope for?

These feelings of guilt and tiredness really suck.

I’m not able to get anything I want to do done.

I constantly want to go to bed but once I’m there sleep eludes me. 

I’m about to enter my fourth year and I need my brain to actually function without completely wiping out by six pm. 

Hopefully as we move into the Autumn and I fully get over surgery, these crashes will get better.

The new booster meds may even be the key I’m looking for, and I’ve just not figured out the perfect time to take them yet. 

Regardless, this constant cycle of guilt and fatigue is incredibly demoralizing and at this point, I genuinely don’t know what to do to fix it.

I hope it gets better and, at this point, I think that’s all I really can do.

Hope that I can figure something out, that my body will adjust, that I won’t crash constantly.

Hope that this is just a blip.

Featured Image Credit: Harris Priest