There are good days and bad days....

I see a lot of frustration posts on this site and there may already be a post out there on this subject, but I am unable to find it so I thought I'd bring up the topic here and get some other opinions. 

As a person with ADHD (40 and diagnosed about 8 months ago), I have a hard time describing to my spouse the relative relationship between medication dosage and stress.  While I am still tweaking my meds, I do admit that it has helped a lot.  In my line of work, however, there are these short production bursts which amps my "stress level" higher than normal.  When it is done, I fall back to "normal", but in these periods, I feel like my treatment is not working.  Thankfully, I've figured out there is a problem when my spouse asks if I've taken my meds today (please note that taking my meds is the one religious thing I do).

I asked my doctor about this and he told me that dosage calculations assume "normal behavior".  Even though at the right dosage normally, when one adds stress, the meds may not be able to handle the increased load.  Early in my treatment, my doc and I fell into the trap constantly "tweaking" dosage amounts (talk about frustrating!).  The problem is that the medication may not take into account these environmental factors and stress periods.  And adding another pill that day to me is a scary thing to do (my doc doesn't recommend it either).

Thinking that taking medication will solely solve the ADHD problem is not realistic.  My 1st lesson with this new discovery about me has been that there is NO magic pill (or dosage for that matter) that will solve all of the problems with an ADHD relationship.  For the non-ADHD spouse, that is an unrealistic expectation for an overall treatment program.  Expecting such a result only adds to the frustration from the ADHD perspective.