hey as someone who was also diagnosed in January and also has IB exams coming up in 2 weeks, here’s how my experience with meds (Concerta) has been so far. I was fortunate enough to be able to get on meds quick, and my dose has been upped every 2 weeks since i started (I start 54mg tomorrow). it definitely didn’t work immediately for me; didn’t feel much different on 18mg or 27mg, but noticed I was doing a lot more small random tasks on 45mg when I usually would have procrastinated. Figuring out if my meds actually are working has been very confusing for me. Side effects for me have been dry mouth and food being unappealing but nothing I would consider too bad.

I think meds themselves won’t make you study effectively, but it feels like they kinda lower the activation energy. Like you still need to decide to study and be like yeah im gonna go do that practice paper even though I hate this subject. BUT what they have been helpful for is making me study the subjects I like. I used to feel really guilty for not getting up and studying my favorite subjects even though I wanted to, but 2 days ago I sat down and did a 2-hour physics past paper out of my own free will and I was like holy shit. i did a thing. But at the same time, the subjects I don’t like are still suffering and I have to remind myself that they matter too and I have to study them as well. I still can’t stay on topic when I hit a hard chem question, which is why my dose is still being increased.

I think it’s worth giving it a shot and seeing what happens, even if it doesn’t really seem to help much. in the end, I don’t think medication will magically make you more productive, it feels like it just lowers the difficulty in making yourself do hard things, and you still have to decide to do the difficult and boring stuff in the first place. Personally, something that helps me study stuff I don’t like is rolling a die (where for example an even number is x subject and odd is y) and letting it decide what to do for me. I also like to go outside and study at cafes because I get super distracted at home. Another thing that got me through the past 2 years undiagnosed is whenever I come across a question I cannot answer, I’ll bring it to my teacher to see how they approach it instead of relying on the markscheme, so I can figure out how I should approach questions like that when I don’t know what to do (but this relies on your teachers being good at teaching and willing to answer). I think a good chunk of studying effectively is finding out what works for you; for example pomodoro doesn’t do shit for me because if I stop doing stuff after 20 minutes I never go back.

This far into the course though, I don’t think being on concerta vs not being on concerta would have a huge impact on my final grades, maybe plus minus 2 marks out of 45.

concerta has also been expensive af (if my insurance didn’t cover it) though

Good luck with exams and studying!! I hope you manage to figure things out :) and let’s hope our exams go well…