Quitting Adderall? Work with Adam Sud (@PlantBasedAddict).
If you’re trying to come off high-dose Adderall – as I have been for the past two years – you quickly learn that “get a support system” is the default advice. Correct in theory, much harder in practice. My instagram feed is awash with dopamine-detox gurus in yellow glasses and a Google search will spew the sites of two-bit rehab centers in Jacksonville posting the same surface-level drivel as their peers in La Jolla and Cincinnati. So, it’s not obvious where you’re supposed to turn. Or, even what to expect from this process and for how long to expect it.
I tried.
Two naturopaths. An addiction specialist. A burnout coach. A therapist.
While most were valuable in specialized ways, each of them looked very confused when I described my post-Adderall experience: the extreme heaviness, the non-existent motivation, the inability to execute even basic tasks even 6–8 weeks off the drug after a 12+ month taper to 0mg.
Finding Adam – and actually working with him – has, therefore, been the most meaningful shift in my recovery so far.
Adam displays three traits that are conspicuously absent from other resources I have sought out:
Earnestness from having lived it himself (ten years ago he rebuilt himself from taking 450mg/day while weighing twice what he does now).
Calm from guiding hundreds of people through this exact neurochemical & behavioral gauntlet. He’s seen it all and it shows.
Clarity from translating and systematizing his lived experience and research into crisp and structured lessons, analogies or constructs.
Most people who’ve “been through it” still only offer vague truths: recovery isn’t linear, give it time, you’ll feel better in 6–24 months. All accurate, of course, but when you’re clawing through your day hour by hour, these lines feel as useful as telling someone mid–heart attack to visualize their next 5k.
So I won’t repeat the mistake:
Here are the most tangible, high-leverage things I’ve learned from Adam so far. These are tailored to me (I reached out after the first two months of acute withdrawal but was struggling to re-engage with the world). Thus, your mileage may vary.
1. The Reconnection Phase: Regulate → Re-engage → Reinforce
In our first session, Adam told me—very directly—that I had “aced” the retreat-and-recover stage. But he also made it clear that continuing to live in the protective shell (think nasal strips, supplement graveyards in every drawer, and the requisite meditation pad) was now acting as a rate limiter on my recovery. Whether I realized it or not, I had entered the strategic shift Adam calls the Reconnection Phase.
In this phase, your focus flips from removal to action: Regulate → Re-engage → Reinforce → Repeat.
The first stage was mostly about not ingesting Adderall and letting time pass. This second stage is active. While less acutely miserable, it is in some ways harder. A successful day is less about the dangers you avoided and more about the exposures you accumulated. Adam told me I needed to do “dangerous” things—dangerous as in going to a new coffee shop, exciting right?—in a “safe way.” Small doses that nudge the nervous system back toward recognizing that I do, in fact, enjoy being in the world.
2. Avoiding the Boom-and-Bust: Micro-Goals & Safety Nets
If the previous point is what to do, this is how to do it on a Tuesday when you feel dead inside. A big theme in my work with Adam has been searching for the bleeding edge of adaptive stress – that which stretches your system without snapping it. Adam calls the phase I am in now the "narrow window" phase. The system is so fragile and the adaptive zone is so small that it’s easy to either retreat into way-too-little or risk overextending and feeling extremely fragile.
To operate inside this narrow window, here is Adam’s tactical approach:
Create predictable exposure: Small, repeatable world-contact behaviors.
Set Micro-goals each day: One act of responsibility. One public outing. One skill touched.
Have safety-net (“fuck no”) days: A minimum viable version of the above for when everything collapses.
The result is no more "zero days" and no more heroic days followed by wipeouts. Recovery becomes a compounding process of increasingly larger exposure.
3. The Timeline: Six Months to Want To Live
It’s almost impossible to get anyone to speak concretely about when this ends without drowning in “everyone’s journey is different” qualifiers. Adam was quite clear from the jump which was refreshing and helpful.
Because I handled the first phase well—clean living, time, stability—he said that if I accumulate enough “exposure units” (a phrase I used first but he adopted in our conversations) during months 3–6, then by month 6 I should feel like I am living life again, just cautiously and with a growing sense of confidence. Not “back to normal.” Not “fully restored.” But in motion, functional, and re-entering the world with momentum.
4. The Map: A Four-Staged Framework This leads into my favorite construct. I came up with this outline to make the entire journey less abstract and more tangible. It helps to know exactly where you are in the territory.
Recovering Protectively – Acute phase, remove the drug and survive. For me, this took 10 weeks.
Recovering Expansively* – Carefully growing through exposure but still very much “recovery first.”
Living Protectively – Life mostly works, but the core habits remain non-negotiable.
Living Expansively – The new baseline is sturdy; you begin layering on complexity.
*this is where I am at the time of writing (day 92)
5. The Nervous System Rebuild: Physiology × Behavior
Finally, it helps to understand why the body feels like wet concrete. It’s less of a mood and more of a complex signal from a nervous system reorganizing after years of artificial stimulation.
Adam treats this as fundamentally physical, repairing the ANS with restorative practices:
Physiology: Zone-2 work and light resistance to generate myokines (“hope molecules”), circadian stability to improve HRV, and structured sleep-wake timing to normalize dopamine.
Behavior: He emphasizes the behavioral side even more: casting “votes” with your actions that the increasingly larger exposures to the world are safe.
If your system doesn’t send alarm bells, you’re not at the adaptive edge. So, unfortunately, to recover fully, you need to regularly trip your nervous system's alarm and calmly survive what follows so it can recalibrate.
The dance that ensues—finding the exposure that stretches your system without snapping it—is difficult. Or, as your friendly neighborhood wellness influencer would say: that is the work.
It’s scary, it’s lonely, and it’s confusing. This is because your system is learning from scratch but also because your “safe zone” is constantly moving. If you’re doing it right, what was “too much” a few weeks ago is just enough now. This makes routines and grooves quickly turn into ruts. So, at a time when you feel more helpless and exhausted than you have in your life, you need to constantly reassess if your behaviors are serving your goal of rebuilding yourself.
The Punchline: Work with Adam
Working with Adam replaced vague platitudes with a clarity.
It replaced fear with context.
It replaced random habits with a system.
You can pause your dopamine fast. Far more important is (re)learning how to walk/crawl on the wet concrete as it sets.
I hope this post provides some practical guidance for anyone in this brutal process and, also, an unequivocal endorsement. Adam didn’t ask for this. I’m writing it because, in a dark and isolating stretch of my life, he has been pound-for-pound the brightest light I’ve found.
If you’re trying to get off Adderall and you need more than generic advice, here is where I’d start.