I’ve been doing pretty well on 150xl but it’s been 7 weeks and I’m struggling a little more with feeling tired. Motivation has dipped a little bit but pretty solid overall.
Not sure I need 300xl but wondering what others experiences were with going up?
(This is just my experience and may not be helpful to everyone but I thought it might be valuable to share.)
Background (feel free to skip):
As I understand, a lot of people experience a “honeymoon phase” on bupripion around the start. Anecdotally it seems like it usually last a week or two. I thought I wasn’t having one because I had been on it for a few weeks, with improvement, but not the elation that some people describe. A few weeks in though I started to notice a huge increase in motivation, energy, confidence and contentment. I think I‘ve had some mild depression most of my life (not what I was prescribed bupropion for) and never really realized it until this point, and I also suspect I may have ADHD that was never diagnosed.
I went from being someone who spent all of my 20s unable to get myself to exercise, to eagerly going to the gym 5-6 days per week. Granted I had been working on this for months beforehand, but only ever managed to got 1-2 times per week mostly because of the support of my partner and his healthy habits. When I started to feel motivated, I started going to the gym on my own. I made my own workout routines and goals and an 8 week plan to follow.
Becoming more active changed my perspective a lot on my health. It has started helping my sleep quality and ability to fall asleep with less anxiety. Sleep has always been a core issue, and I thought I had to fix it before anything else could fall in line, but I generally felt pretty hopeless to do so. Now I realize I was looking at it backwards, I needed increased activity to support my sleep.
I started looking at my diet and eating with a lot more intention. And it’s helped me feel more confident I can actually make the lifestyle changes needed to recover from some health issues.
This was a couple weeks ago. Following this period, I started to struggle with my motivation and energy and feelings of depression. But having established this structure and habits I felt like I could manage everything better through the off days.
I had some slips in my sleep and eating habits, but I still made it to the gym everyday. And even though it didn’t feel great to go on those days, I still felt a little better after every time I went. I credit my ability to follow through on those hard days because I had been able to make structured, intentional goals during the “honeymoon” and start to build some new habits. Following through with them while feeling a lot less motivated was much easier having all the planning and starting and mental load already down.
If you had told me at any point in the past decade or so of my life that I would be enjoying going to the gym 6 times a week I would have been very shocked and amazed. It honestly feels weird to me, and I’m extremely grateful to have decided to give medication a chance.
So my word of advice is:
Take advantage of the honeymoon by establishing some habits and lifestyle changes that weren’t accessible to you before. Use this time of drive to set a foundation, because it could end up being brief (although of course the goal is to find a dose that is supportive and sustainable). It doesn’t have to be huge changes, but ones that you can do consistently.
Also curious what others’ experiences have been at the start of taking buproprion vs now. What changes did it help you make? What ended up sticking for you?