The Test Point I Never Built
Three days camping, a 4:30am email, and every system I built to watch myself reading green while I feel like I am scraping by in every direction at once.
// THE BRAIN
I have ADHD. I've never medicated it.Here's the system that runs instead.
// THE DEAL
I strive for every line on this page. I don't hit them all, every day.
I'm not a machine and I don't pretend to be one. But I know these work for me, because life gets measurably worse when I drop them. The weeks I fall off are in the posts below, not hidden.
// THE DIAGNOSIS
A prescription I never filled
Short version: I was diagnosed with ADHD soon after I got clean. The psychiatrist explained how my brain worked, and it was the first time my whole life made mechanical sense. Then he handed me a prescription.
I never filled it. I had just spent four and a half years outsourcing how I feel to substances, and I wasn't going to open the new life by doing it again with a co-signature. That was my line, not advice, plenty of people do well on medication. The long version of that decision, and everything around it, is on the story page.
What I did instead was build a system. What's below is the version I'm running now, not a finished cure, and not frozen in place. It keeps evolving. So do I.
// THE PROTOCOL
Last updated: July 2026The system, as currently run
This is a living document, not a manifesto. Lines get added, adjusted, and removed as the evidence comes in, the stamp above tells you how current it is.
- WAKE5:00 AM
- Including the days I don't want to. It's the line I fight hardest to hold, because the morning is the highest-leverage part of an ADHD day, the only part nobody else has claimed yet.
- DIETKetogenic
- Steady fuel instead of spikes. My brain idles rough on sugar and runs clean on this. I notice the difference within days, both directions.
- FASTING18-hour window
- I eat inside a six-hour window. Fewer food decisions is as much the point as anything metabolic, every decision I don't make is attention I keep.
- CREATINE15-20g daily
- For cognition, not muscle. The line item people ask about most, and the one piece of the protocol that fits in a suitcase.
- TRAININGWhen I can
- Not every day, lifestyle doesn't allow it. I lean harder on fasting and keto, which actually fit how I live and are doing the real work.
- TRACKINGOura ring
- I check it obsessively and I'm not embarrassed about it. It's the FIFO board for my body. I want to catch the stuck job while it's still one bad night, not a bad month.
- SLEEPProtect the wake
- The 5am wake only works if the night before agrees to it. The ring grades every night, and I actually read the grade.
I'm not a doctor. This is what I do, not what you should do. It's one unmedicated ADHD brain's working configuration, published because I would have wanted to read someone else's.
// THE COMEBACK LOOP
Falling off is not the story
Here's the part most protocol pages leave out: I fall off this. The protocol above is real, and so are the weeks it collapses, a vacation, a stretch of chaos at the company, a run of bad sleep that unravels the rest. The block at the top of this page says I strive for it, not that I always hit it, because pretending otherwise would make everything else here worthless.
So the comeback loop is part of the system, not an apology for it. The doctrine, as plainly as I can state it: the fall is data, not a verdict. The restart happens at the next available opportunity, not at some clean future date. You restart where you are, not where you left off. And you say the number out loud, because a number you won't say is a number that runs you.
I've restarted more times than I can count, diets, training cycles, and once, with a duffel bag, my entire life. The restart is the skill. The posts below are where I practice it in public.
The reasoning and research behind every line above is becoming a book, Wired for More, written in public.
// THE BRAIN. POSTS
Twelve Pounds: The Restart, Documented
A week in Wildwood, two weeks of Italian relatives, twelve pounds, and the part nobody warns you about: the restart after the sugar. The numbers, the mechanism, and the weekends I'm still losing.
Why I'm Doing This
The first note. Why I'm done being polished in public and real in private, and what I'm going to document here every week.