Yes, it can. It provides a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm for whatever you're doing, and can be channeled into working hard for long periods of time. Especially if your job already brings you some satisfaction, then doing your job on amphetamine will provide more. Pilots in the airforce (and possibly other warfighters) are given amphetamine to augment their performance.
I think of it as basically stealing energy or enthusiasm from the future, though. You might feel energized and focused now, but it comes at the expense of less energy and focus when the drug wears off. The withdrawal effect is pretty mild if you take prescription doses of it though, e.g. Adderall (which is amphetamine). At normal moderate doses, taken in the morning, almost all of that energy can be recouped during sleep (though not all). I wouldn't want to take it daily for a long period of time though, otherwise you'll build up an 'energy deficit' that could lead to a crash.
P.S. I know people who have essentially destroyed their lives by becoming addicted to amphetamine or meth. It's a dangerous drug.
As someone who basically requires dextroamphetamine to function, I’ve always found the notion of becoming addicted to it crazy, nonetheless. If I don’t set alarms to take it, I will forget, for days at a time until I suddenly realize why I haven’t gotten much done and my memory has been bad this week.
I wonder if there is something about the dopamine issues of the ADHD brain that prevents an addiction to substances that aid it.
If you don't, it's negatively impacting mental performance - but it's really good at helping you to deliver slightly subpar performance for grossly extended periods of time. (Common uses: Crisis situations where you cannot step away. Cramming for exams)
I suppose you could call this a different form of concentration, but AIUI it's more energy than concentration.
Yes, and sometimes people view it as a zero net drug, but it's not always a 1:1 relationship of borrowing from the future. It's significantly helped me, and there are some downsides, but the benefits have been far greater than the negatives (and having the extra motivation is...incredible since my brain does not really do that all that much naturally).
It depends. Raising those neurotransmitters (dopamine > norepinephrine > serotonin) is a matter of balance.
If a person already has good levels and healthy receptors, and they suddenly raise them too much, it just makes people obsessive and actually not focus well on the important task at hand.
It's a double-edged sword, always with warnings and side-effects.
When I first started taking stimulants for ADHD and was trying to get the right dose I was confused because nothing was happening at first but finally reached a tipping point where it was working, but it was like a more intense version of my normal hyper-focus I would get at 8pm after "warming up" for 12 hours, after a couple of days it settled in between where I get the easy ability to switch attention without getting annoyed, or not realizing.
Actually, the sort of obsessiveness it produces diminishes the ability to switch attention, so people get obsessed over a particular train of thought and are unable to evaluate other strategies.
Basically you end up obsessed over that one strategy, and motivated to do it, instead of taking a step back to re-assess.
