The 6 Pros and Cons of Taking Adderall During Finals Week

Pros:

3. You get shit done

Scenario: It’s 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and you’ve got an exam at 9 tomorrow that you haven’t started studying for. Well you’re in luck! Adderall can take you from being completely screwed to having a decent chance at passing. Will you sleep tonight? No. But you’ll get a shitload of stuff done in the meantime.

2. It lasts a while

You don’t just focus for 30 minutes and crank out your work, this shit lasts hours if you take enough milligrams of it. You might even finish studying and do other productive things like clean your room and throw away all those empty handles that have been sitting on your desk for weeks taking up space because you were too lazy throw them out earlier. Probably not though. Let’s be honest, those things will be there forever.

1. You feel like a superhero

I’m not talking about turning into an enormous and ripped man-monster with anger issues. I’m talking more like Bradley Cooper in Limitless. And yes, like in Limitless, when you finally come down from it you might actually feel like you're going to die. Except in this case it will be more due to plain exhaustion. But in the meantime just appreciate it while it’s still in your system and enjoy your temporary ability to focus on work for more than 5 minutes.

Cons:

3. You’re essentially a zombie who’s taken speed

How does this happen? I don’t know. A zombie falls in with the wrong crowd of other zombies. They have a bad influence on him and tell him he’ll be “cool” if he does some drugs. The zombie is insecure about himself and wants to fit in so he obliges. And voila! There you have it, a zombie all hopped up on speed. And that's essentially what you are on Adderall. You haven’t slept in three days, you haven’t eaten a full meal in forever. Technically you should be close to death but somehow you're still kicking and managed to pull off an 86% on your last bio lab. Good for you.

2. You're slowly becoming dependant on it for studying

Adderall can be really helpful with doing your schoolwork, but once you take it often enough, you need it to focus. The shit gets expensive. But look, I get it. I know why we all take Adderall. It’s for the “rush.” But be careful because that “rush” can quickly be followed by side effects that include: nausea, vomiting, hallucinations, and possible death. Or is that meth? I get them confused sometimes.

Edit: Yep, those were definitely the side effects of meth. My bad.

1. You CAN still get distracted

Yes, you can still get distracted on Adderall. If you aren’t reminding yourself every 20 minutes or so that you need to do work you might just start focusing on other things. Like taking a Snapchat and spending an hour and a half using the drawing tools to make the most flawless Snapchat painting ever. This happened to me very recently. I'm not even ashamed of it. The shit looked like Picasso came back to life and drew on my Snapchat. I wish I could have shown it to you all, it was perfection. However nothing made me angrier than when I sent it to my friend and got no response back. I don’t think we’ve spoken since. And we were close.

Fuck you, Chris.

Follow Peter Sullivan on twitter @_ImSully

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