The Chemistry of Motivation & The Illusion of Control

What the ADHD medication shortage taught me about dopamine, "laziness," and what is underneath of it all.

It is truly incredible, the amount of influence a few different chemicals can have over a person.

The average human being is under the illusion that they are completely—or almost completely—in control of their own impulses. They don’t worry about whether or not they’ll be able to follow a schedule they set for the week two days later; they don’t go to sleep wondering if they’ll wake up feeling like doing what they said they would, only to find themselves anchored to their bed by an exhaustion they cannot name or place.

Being diagnosed with ADHD when I was 26, while an agonizing and brutal process that made me re-evaluate everything that made me who I thought I was as a person, granted me an understanding that I think the average person probably doesn’t reach until they begin to notice the regular cognitive decline of age:

We are all at the mercy of the whims of our bodies and minds.

Some of the traits that we believe are inherent parts of who we are may be more fragile and less permanent than we believe; fully dependent upon chemical processes in our bodies that science has only just begun to understand in the last hundred years or so.

This Is My Brain On Drugs. (It Works Better.)

When I am taking Adderall—or most of its dopamine-assisting cousins—on a regular schedule of two days on, one day off, I am a completely normal (albeit a little goofy) person. I’m intelligent, I move through work quickly, and I have a very easy time understanding other people and intuiting their emotions—even if I do still talk a little fast for people to understand me a lot of the time.

However, for the past year and change, a national ADHD medication shortage— primarily affecting stimulants—has been absolutely decimating my ability to be a person. The shortage was originally caused by a combination of factors, including poor manufacturing standards leading to issues with supply. However, it persists into 2026 mainly because the DEA has continued to set national manufacturing quotas for stimulant medication irresponsibly low, in spite of knowledge of the recent increase in understanding and diagnosis of ADHD in adulthood, especially in women.

The reason that these rules and quotas are so inflexible is supposedly because they are in place to prevent abuse of the drug, but I personally am getting tired of being told that I have to suffer because other people are being irresponsible. This is not an elementary school classroom, and I am missing out on significantly more than recess when my brain is forced to run on fumes.

I’m not bedridden, of course—I can’t be. I can manage for a time, but the difference I feel in my ability to focus and move from task to task, even when I am operating on a rationed every-other-day routine rather than totally going without, is staggering.

When my brain does not maintain an adequate pool of dopamine, over time, my ability to care about my own work, and the energy I have to do work that I still do care about, plummets to the floor. My life begins to become about how quickly I can be finished with my obligatory tasks so that I can finally reach the oasis of relaxation with no outside demands on my attention.

And yet, even within that freedom, I seem to only be able to choose leisure activities that require little to no complex thought on my part; TV, movies, video games like The Sims that don’t require strategy decisions. I become trapped on the second rung of Maslow’s Heirearchy of Needs, consistently experiencing the physiological lack of dopamine as an intense need for the “Safety and Security” of being able to relax my constantly-online default mode network, unable to ever get there, because those things alone will never provide enough dopamine to allow it to.

What is also interesting about those periods is that my creative energy does not run out. Still, in my head, I am a writer constantly making up scenes, tracing plots together, building out characters and worlds; I just don't have the physical energy or motivation to write it down.

What Does a Dopamine Shortage FEEL Like?

Ever driven a car with an oil leak or a faulty transmission?

It is a difficult feeling to explain to someone who has never been familiar with it. It’s probably easy for those without ADHD to simply feel superior; to feel that their ability to find and utilize their own motivation is a personality trait that they were born with that others simply were not.

In truth, it’s not a trait; it’s a skill, a sort of metaphorical muscle in the brain that gets stronger whenever you use it.

People without ADHD would probably assume, based on observation, that their own “muscle” is stronger, but they couldn’t be more wrong; because while they’ve been training with a ten pound weight every day and barely struggling at all, the person with ADHD is waking up every day to a new set of weights—sometimes only ten pounds, but usually closer to 20, 30, even 50.

To put it another way: Try to remember that feeling you get when you’re sick. Not deathly ill—just sick with, say, a really bad cold. Think of that state of being—where you know what needs to get done, and there’s nothing really physically stopping you, but you feel like dragging yourself to do it is like trying to drag a toddler away from an iPad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRPZT8Ptcwg

You can do what you need to if you force yourself, but afterwards, your brain feels fried—but you probably then forget all about the feeling in a couple days when the cold goes away, the same way you’ll forget how glorious it is to be able to breathe through both nostrils until next time.

Having ADHD and not having access to enough medication to manage it is like living with one of those colds in your brain, constantly, getting progressively worse because you’re never given enough time or leisure to recover from that ‘fried’ feeling. It compounds and compounds until one day you look up and you realize, crap, I have a blog that I haven’t touched in three months.

The ADHD Medication Shortage: I Learned To Do Magic

As you may have guessed based on the fact that this is now posted in the world, I was able to finally attain the proper medication a few weeks ago, and now that I’ve been taking it steadily in the routine I found works for me, I’m feeling my motivation return. Writing this took me barely half an hour. (Editing and posting it, however, took two weeks. Go figure.)

However, in feeling it return, I believe that I need to somehow, for once, acknowledge the person who kept it together while that energy was missing. This version of myself already feels a little like a stranger to me—the ingrained voices in my brain are already starting the familiar chorus, telling me that I was being lazy, look at me now, this is easy, what on earth was I on about anyway—but I’ve gone through this process enough times by this point to know that mantra is exactly the opposite of the treatment I deserve.

So, in a move that I believe my therapist would be proud of me for, I am instead going to offer that unmedicated version of myself a typed affirmation that I can return to the next time the FDA screws me (and thousands of people like me) over:

You just managed nearly a full year of being a car running with a massive oil leak. You steered yourself through some of your worst personal hardships, the collapse of an entire industry you built a career in, and the general awfulness of 2025 America, without burning out or slipping further into a depression. (In fact, in spite of everything, you managed to cut the antidepressants you were taking in half.)

You made the decision to apply to psych school. You are actually signed up for prerequisite classes. They actually start next week. You planned and organized a bachelorette party at a fancy hotel, and it went off without a hitch.

You did all of this without enough available dopamine in your brain to constitute a proper reward. What that means is that there is something more inside of you—something that cares about all of that more than it cares what you want in the immediate moment; something that cares about more than what your neurobiology is simply demanding.

That is magic. You learned how to do magic.

It’s very easy to call yourself lazy when you’re sitting there, staring at the wall, with no good explanation for why you don’t feel like Just Getting Up and Doing The Thing. It’s even easier to call someone else lazy when you see them doing the same thing, especially when it’s not a feeling you’re used to experiencing.

But actually, it’s the opposite. People with ADHD are, most often, driven by passion. We know this because our brains, very early on in life, refuse to respond to much of anything else, which forces us to sit down and consider something that many people don’t even become aware of until they are older: What do we really enjoy? What do we feel driven to be better at?

What are we passionate about?

What is the magical thing that will bypass the preprogrammed biology of my brain, allowing me to break the cycle of staring at the wall waiting for my internal reward system to come online?

Magic is Just Science We Don’t Understand

(In this case, it's Neurochemistry.)

I’m not using the word ‘magical’ here lightly; if magic is science that we simply do not understand yet, then yes, I am confident in saying that people with ADHD are forced to practice and hone a very specific type of magic in order to get through life, and there are two things about this that I find both unfair and ironic:

1. Developing the ability to create this magic takes an enormous amount of time and internal energy, and often from the outside it does not look like the person is doing much of anything, especially if they’re a child—children’s internal struggles with thought and motivation, since they’re complex concepts that are not easy to verbalize with basic language, often go unnoticed.

2. Everyone could benefit from learning how this type of magic works for them—especially the closer they come to the open-world sandbox of retirement—but those who never experience a long-term shortage of dopamine in their brain might never understand how vital it is to develop that skill before it comes to that.

To be clear, this isn’t me saying something as simple and trite as “If you have ADHD, you need a hobby or a passion, not medication.” Absolutely not. There are far too many people out there today who are eager to dismiss the necessity of a drug that functions in a way that is essentially equivalent to putting motor oil in a car engine.

What I’m saying is that the ability to develop hobbies and skills—ones that require thought and energy—is a necessary survival technique for everyone, but people with ADHD are very often looked down upon and chided for “choosing” to prioritize those early in life, rather than later on when things are “stable.”

Things for a person with ADHD often never feel truly stable, and that ‘often’ becomes a practical guarantee of instability once medication access is denied or interrupted. However, grounding hobbies like those (for me it’s singing, writing, and learning more about how people work) can make things feel a little more steady, forcing our reluctant, exhausted brains to somehow produce just a little more fuel to keep us going. From the outside, people don’t see this; they see a person shirking work to goof off, or doing the bare minimum in everything they don’t consider “fun.”

What’s ironic about it is people who do not choose to indulge in hobbies or passions when they are younger often end up paying the debt in retirement, finding themselves lost, purposeless, and—mirroring that same feeling that drives us to “goof off” with a hyperfixation—understimulated; possessed of a feeling of boredom so supremely powerful it almost physically hurts. When that happens, they often need to turn to people who figured out the whole passion thing a while ago to help them learn how to develop it.

None of this is meant to be a read on the ignorance of neurotypical people—in fact, it’s the opposite. It is extremely easy to conclude that you have it all together when your planner is all checked off and your career and social life are going fine. However, if you begin to feel that impulse compare yourself to others, take a good look at the people you have the instinct to place in the rungs beneath you. Are they really not trying as hard as you? Or are they simply playing the game in a different order entirely?

We All Need Each Other: Rules Mean Nothing Without Exceptions

I believe people with ADHD exist for a similar reason that I believe queer people exist: To be the exception that proves the rule. We exist to show to everyone that the “typical” way we go though life isn’t the “only” way or even the “right” way; that despite all of the limitations our bodies and brains do impose on us, human beings are far more than just the biology they are born with.

When you accept that people like us exist, you are forced to also accept that intangible factors like love and passion have a greater purpose in life than simply allowing for the survival and continuation of the human race. There is more. We are more.

The composition of your DNA—of the hormones and neurotransmitters in your body and the way it produces them—may do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to determining who you are as a person, but there also is something more than that. The existence of people with ADHD who manage to excel at things in spite of the lack of a stable, predictable rewards system are proof that the chemicals in our brains, while more powerful than most people realize, still aren’t totally in charge.

Somewhere in all of that neurochemistry we don’t quite understand how to parse yet, there is also the ability to create magic.

We would see a lot more of that magic in the world if people would stop stigmatizing us, and the medication we need to be able to show it to them.