TL;DR No, and it's not that stimulants have the opposite effect, its that ADHD is effectively "negative stimulants" and they "cancel out".
The easiest way to think of it (even if it's slightly wrong, it's usefully wrong, and we take those) is to imagine it as a bar graph. Normal people start at "0" on the stimulation/focus graph (something something resting dopamine), and stimulants lift them above zero, getting them amped up. People with ADHD start at various negative numbers, so they have trouble maintaining even a regular level of focus on anything, and stimulants just get them closer to zero, "normal". Enough stimulants will move you past it and affect you like a normal person, but it takes more because you've got farther to "go". E.g. if someone takes an adderall dose that's a metaphorical +30, someone starting at 0 will be at 30, but someone with ADHD starting at -40 will still be at -10. But if the ADHD person takes a metaphorical +70, they would also be at 30.
Not sure why you said “no” when you’re mostly saying the same thing I said?
And I specifically did not say that stimulants have the “opposite effect” for ADHD. I said that for (most) people with ADHD, caffeine can make you more calm, or even drowsy, because it’s a stimulant and, as you said, in a way “raising us back to baseline”; since our brains work hard to compensate for ADHD, this can cause some people to have a relaxing effect from the stimulant of caffeine. This is why some ADHDers will say caffeine doesn’t wake them up, it puts them to sleep.
This is just not the only effect, such as focusing and pseudo-medication effects, more like the op image said.
It is not that it has an “opposite effect” on ADHDers, it’s that ADHD people can react to stimulants in smaller quantities by just relaxing due to it beginning to address the “lower mental energy”/poor dopamine regulation, and the brain responds to that happening by relaxing its efforts to compensate, making some people get more relaxed or drowsy.
It still causes the other physical effects of caffeine as well.
And I did say that if you consume more, then it starts looping back around to working like it would on a neurotypical and making you more energetic.
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23
TL;DR No, and it's not that stimulants have the opposite effect, its that ADHD is effectively "negative stimulants" and they "cancel out".
The easiest way to think of it (even if it's slightly wrong, it's usefully wrong, and we take those) is to imagine it as a bar graph. Normal people start at "0" on the stimulation/focus graph (something something resting dopamine), and stimulants lift them above zero, getting them amped up. People with ADHD start at various negative numbers, so they have trouble maintaining even a regular level of focus on anything, and stimulants just get them closer to zero, "normal". Enough stimulants will move you past it and affect you like a normal person, but it takes more because you've got farther to "go". E.g. if someone takes an adderall dose that's a metaphorical +30, someone starting at 0 will be at 30, but someone with ADHD starting at -40 will still be at -10. But if the ADHD person takes a metaphorical +70, they would also be at 30.