started vyvanse a week ago and crashing out

sorry this might be a rant. i'm just stressed and don't really have anyone else i can talk to right now.

since starting vyvanse i've just had a lot pre-existing problems be amplified in a way that i can't tell if it's caused by the vyvanse or if it's just like,,, who i am and the way that i live my life. i've waited so long to start adhd meds that i really just like desperately needed them to make me feel better and functional but lately it's just been a lot harder than i wanted it to be with all these side effects. my psychiatrist doesn't really offer advice, she's just said for me to do what i feel is best. i've been waiting for literally over a year to start adhd medication and now that i'm on it, i just don't know what to do i feel incredibly lost and overwhelmed. though i'm able to focus for longer now, it really hasn't helped my executive dysfunction and i'm not really sure it's supposed to? it's like when i clock in, i can stay clocked in for hours at a time which i wasn't able to do before; but it hasn't gotten any easier to do that initial clocking in. classes are easier and my mood is generally a bit better than it was before but also i feel constantly anxious, especially about things like decision making or what tasks to start and when and i just don't really know what to do.

first for the sake of context, i have obsessive compulsive disorder and take sertraline for that. i also take propranolol with the vyvanse in the morning to help off-set some of my anxiety surrounding taking it. i already have a lot of medical anxiety, but it's always a lot worse when i'm starting new medication so i'm not sure if it's best to attribute my recent spike in anxiety to that or the vyvanse.

but first of all, i've always had quite a lot of anxiety surrounding food and vyvanse makes it quite a bit easier to skip meals while also spiking my anxiety meaning i've only really been eating like half a meal a day. because of the food anxiety, i've been resorting primarily to "safe" foods which are generally things like grilled cheeses, cucumbers, bell peppers, and occasionally grilled chicken or asparagus. i'm in college so it's heavily dependent upon what's available to me in the dining hall but if i look at the food for too long i start to feel sick and unable to eat. this has happened to me before and rather commonly but not as much for the last six months or so until i started the vyvanse.

potentially as a consequence, though i'm not certain, i've been having a lot of stomach problems lately. i tend to get pretty bad stomach issues alongside my anxiety so it's perhaps not all that surprising that with the anxiety there's an increase in gi issues but like >!i literally shart myself in the middle of class the other day and left the room in tears trying to make sure no one noticed. similar things happened when i started sertraline but it wasn't to this extent. on sunday, i literally had piss diarrhea every hour on the hour for like six hours straight. !<this might be as a consequence of the way that my eating has changed but i've also had similar things happen with my eating and not had this severe of gi problems as a result.

i also haven't been able to sleep for more than four hours at a time since starting. though it hasn't helped me falling asleep randomly in the middle of tasks (reading, etc), i still can't sleep all the way through the night. though i have a sleeping/anxiety medication for this purpose, it doesn't tend to do much after i've already woken up so then i'm up again for another hour just trying to sleep. i can't go back to sleep after 8:30 due to classes so i've been getting maybe six cumuliative hours--which is not bad, but also before i was getting eight consecutive hours and generally felt well rested.

i feel like there's already so much wrong with me and the vyvanse seems to be helping but i'm genuinely starting to wonder if it's really worth it or if it'll get better with time. i just really thought that it would help and i would be able to at least do my school work but there seems to only really be three hours that i have much of an attention span before it's back to either business as usual (no focus) or business as a year and a half ago before i started my anxiety meds. i'm on like four different mental health meds at this point, which is fine but also feels kind of ridiculous and even more ridiculous if the whole purpose of one of them is to offset the effects of another one. seriously gang, do these types of things get better with time or is it better to try something else?