I lived for years without meds before COVID and wish I still could.

Not everyone can or should, however, should you be able to find a way to roll with it and use it while recognising your limits and when you need to change tasks etc, it can be much better to use tools than to use medication.

Medications like ADHD meds are not a type of medication that builds up and maintains a status quo of effect. They burn out and they must, because most of them are methamphetamine based and would keep you up all night.

So, like pain meds, ADHD meds have a pendulum effect. Whatever ADHD focus is without them is a baseline; the pendulum is at rest. When you take them, your focus improves greatly which makes all the other symptoms easier, and now your relative baseline from your perspective has shifted. You want normal to feel like that all the time, and by comparison, your natural baseline is much much worse.

But then the meds wear off, and you take dive in the evening. Rather than returning to your normal baseline, you go more off the rails as your perspective has shifted, which increases the overwhelming nature of your baseline, and its like the pendulum swings past the resting point into a level of disorder you've never felt.

As someone who struggles with weight due to ADHD hyperfocus combined with late night cravings, this is a death knell to self control and weight control; however as mentioned without the meds post-covid, I cannot focus at my job. So they are absolutely necessary now.

Its better to not deal with a swinging pendulum, but sometimes its better to get yourself into a better place.