Adderall, I discovered during the courtship phase of what became our deeply tortured relationship, offers a kind of assistance to the brain that feels just right, at first, for the age of multitasking. The drug might as well have been invented by Microsoft and embedded in the Windows toolbar. It seemed to allow me to do three things at once and not completely fail at two of them. Far more important, however, it helped me do one thing at once and focus on it. If I was toiling at my computer, it sharpened the clicking sensations of the keyboard while lowering the volume of the phone whose ringing might have broken my work trance. It also, for me at least, suppressed emotion, freeing me from the claims of other people (my children primarily, because I work at home) who wanted a piece of my precious, deskbound time.

The ability to stay on task, even the dullest, most numbing task, was Adderall’s first gift to me. It was also its first curse, because it encouraged me to take on work of an increasingly stupefying nature and do it well enough that I got more of it, until I was doing almost no other kind. I can see, though, how harried students might covet this power and why, according to some estimates, a quarter of undergraduates at certain colleges are availing themselves of such stimulants. They’re well aware of the dire economic news — big law firms instituting hiring freezes; whole industries, like publishing, imploding — and it’s natural that they would welcome any advantage in their quests to get the grades that will get them the jobs that will get them the insurance that will get them the medications to do the jobs.

Image Credit... Bob London

A recent labor statistic suggests to me that this circular relationship between pressure and productivity is operating in full swing. In this year’s second quarter, the numbers tell us, the American work force squeezed from its tired body the largest increase in output in the last six years. What caused the jump is open to speculation, but I imagine it was partly because of nervousness. The tension produced by the fear of losing a job suggests an adrenalized state perhaps not unlike the one that Adderall unleashes. Anxiety is nature’s most plentiful stimulant. Under its influence, trembling fingers fly.

The flood of energy released by my pills was, like the recent surge in productivity, a bracing but also troubling development. How long would it last? What would happen when it slowed down? The writing I did on Adderall strikes me now, as I look back on it, as the work of a fellow trying to stay warm by burning semicolons. It was high on intensity, rather low on feeling and marked by a certain jazzy, hectic tone. The income it brought me got me over the hump, though, and I banked my savings, luckily. That’s because a new hump soon emerged, more massive and forbidding than the first. And this time it wasn’t financial, or merely financial. It was systemic, biological. It manifested as sores inside my mouth, a faint corona of gray hair and a case of hemorrhoids from nonstop sitting.