Paying Attention

Due to an influx of work, I was only able to sleep a couple hours a day the past few days. It brought me back to finals period in college, where the back-to-back all-nighter was commonplace for so many of my friends. I did it a few times - I always used to hear about people pulling ridiculous hours whenever they needed to - but more often than not I needed regular food and sleep, and just couldn't focus that long. My attention span is below average (I often lose focus on conference calls, etc.) and when I was in school I just assumed everyone had massively better attention span and focus with greater stamina for studying than I did.

So imagine my surprise when a couple months ago, I officially became the last 23 year old on the planet to learn that a LOT of people who don't have ADD take Ritalin (or some competing equivalent) to stay awake and super focused while they cram all night. I had literally NO idea this happened when I was in school. I only even knew this was possible because of a Desperate Housewives episode I saw back when I watched that show, where Felicity Huffman takes Ritalin and cleans her house all night until it's spotless and everyone loves her, but she ends up self-destructing and crying next to a soccer goal.

I guess it's a logical thought process - Ritalin helps ADD kids pay attention, if I take it, my focus will be incredible. My mind just somehow doesn't drift to those kinds of areas. Anyways after I found this out, I started asking people - every single person I asked told me of course they knew people did this, they knew people who did, or even tried themselves. I felt like a caveman or something..."so this is what you mean when you say 'a fork'...ohhhhhh".

My procedure when I had to pull an all-nighter cramming was to go to the Wa at midnight, buy a can of Pringles and a 2 liter bottle of Coke, and slowly drink the coke and eat the Pringles all night. By the time I was done, I had like 32 days of sodium intake and 3 cavities, but it worked well enough. Then I would buy a 20 oz. Coke on the way to the test, just to have a drink if I felt myself falling asleep during the test. After I went through all this, I felt like complete ass for about 15 hours. I can't even imagine what the after effects of Ritalin would feel like. I guess I could use Felicity Huffman as an example, but that is potentially not very accurate.

I'm not trying to bash the people who used/are using Ritalin - not really my place to judge/care - if you think that's an appropriate level of risk for what you are aiming to achieve, that's your choice and I'm not making it my business. I'm more alarmed, though, that I had no idea that this was even happening, even as it happened all around me. It's sad to realize you're not nearly as savvy as you think.