[slvr77]

Lots of good advice in this thread but it seems you may have pushed your dopaminergic system into a bit of overdrive. Lots of novelty can leave lots of dopamine floating around your pre-frontal cortex which puts things on a hair trigger. It primes the brain for learning and has the side effects of making reaction times faster and unfortunately more spastic, which destroys fine motor skills like handwriting. It also lowers filters for novel stimulation which makes you more easily distracted. Longer term it will inhibit oxytocin release and make you less bonded to your social group, increase your tolerance for risk and has the side effect of making you feel that you don't measure up and need to prove yourself. If your ADHD drugs are dopamine agonists or partial agonists it likely would have made the problem worse.

Generally you may find yourself more productive if you break your day down into research, planning and implementation. During your planning phase you should limit yourself strictly to pencil and paper and remove computers, cell phones and other electronics. Use this time to design your product in your mind, break it up into sub-components and how they will interact. If you hit a wall due to a lack of knowledge you should work on it until you can write down a specific question that you can't answer and then address it in your next research cycle. Once you have something actionable only then do you move onto implementation and if you run into problems go back to planning.

I am going to warn you that the planning stage will be torture in the beginning! You will feel a huge need to 'get something done' because the lack of novelty will lower dopamine. It will be easier if you do your planning sessions in the morning when your brain has had some time to clear itself of excess dopamine overnight.

Some other supplements that will help clear out excess dopamine include SAM-e and/or TMG; melatonin at night; H2 blockers like Tagamet at night (the are antacids but raise prolactin levels), low dose lithium, avoiding blue light in the evening by using f.lux on your devices and/or blue blocking sunglasses and meditation. Usual caveats apply. I'm not a doctor, your results may vary.

[bstrand]

Have you any references you can share for further info / to back this up?

[slvr77]

I have a genetic tweak to that allows me to raise and lower tonic dopamine levels using betaine. It was something that I stumbled on and then spent a few years understanding the impact. While there is a lot of research very little of it is easily translated into human behavior or comprehensive so no good links.