Ongoing personal brain experiments.
Mar. 22nd, 2015 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpIt's been a month since I went up from 50mg of Pristiq to 100mg. It hasn't been a productive month, but I think I've felt better mood-wise. Maybe I'm able to look back and make judgments about my own productivity because my brain state is improving? Or maybe I'm actually a nonresponder to Pristiq, and have been all along, and this is all the placebo affect! Who knows! Who the fuck knows.
I found I was waking up at dawn unable to get back to sleep, so ten days ago I decided to cut l-theanine and have less caffeine, to see if I could force my patterns into something more regular.
It worked, but predictably, dropping l-theanine means I'm way more anxious. It wouldn't be as big a problem if I weren't still so generally fatigued, and could actually concentrate on shit and get up and move the fuck around.
But I zone out, and my brain's constantly piling little concerns up into huge crises. Like, a couple hours ago I noticed that Buoyancy the Cat seemed kind of sluggish - he'd been curled up in bed all morning, which is usually playtime for him. He hadn't eaten much breakfast, either. And he'd been shedding a lot!
Normally I would have noted all this as unusual and let him be. Today, however, within like forty-five minutes I had reached the unavoidable conclusion that he had pancreatic cancer and was going to die horribly before my eyes just like Nixon the Cat oh god.
What was actually going on was that 1) the house was cold, 2) he got into Dubiety's bladder-treatment food last night, and 3) it's fucking spring, of course he's shedding.
So, yeah. Maybe smaller doses of l-theanine or higher doses of caffeine? I've been doing 2:1 l-theanine:caffeine, I'm going to switch it to 1:1.
At the same time I also started taking curcumin and bioperine once a day like a fucking Redditor. This is less for the combination's ostensible cognitive benefits than for its ostensible joint-pain benefits - it's supposed to both help with that on its own and keep kratom tolerance low.
(These are very cheap substances, okay. And it might work!)
I may have actually noticed some of the positive memory effects, though? I've surprised myself by correctly remembering dates and URLs and stuff without needing to look them up a few times, and it seems like I don't need to switch back and forth between windows/tabs as much when I'm doing research-y stuff. It could just be the improvement in my sleep, though.
I'm reasonably sure that the piracetem and phenylpiracetam are unrelated, because I have not been using them. I did load the piracetam into capsules, though, so now I can take it without tasting it? That's something.
I found I was waking up at dawn unable to get back to sleep, so ten days ago I decided to cut l-theanine and have less caffeine, to see if I could force my patterns into something more regular.
It worked, but predictably, dropping l-theanine means I'm way more anxious. It wouldn't be as big a problem if I weren't still so generally fatigued, and could actually concentrate on shit and get up and move the fuck around.
But I zone out, and my brain's constantly piling little concerns up into huge crises. Like, a couple hours ago I noticed that Buoyancy the Cat seemed kind of sluggish - he'd been curled up in bed all morning, which is usually playtime for him. He hadn't eaten much breakfast, either. And he'd been shedding a lot!
Normally I would have noted all this as unusual and let him be. Today, however, within like forty-five minutes I had reached the unavoidable conclusion that he had pancreatic cancer and was going to die horribly before my eyes just like Nixon the Cat oh god.
What was actually going on was that 1) the house was cold, 2) he got into Dubiety's bladder-treatment food last night, and 3) it's fucking spring, of course he's shedding.
So, yeah. Maybe smaller doses of l-theanine or higher doses of caffeine? I've been doing 2:1 l-theanine:caffeine, I'm going to switch it to 1:1.
At the same time I also started taking curcumin and bioperine once a day like a fucking Redditor. This is less for the combination's ostensible cognitive benefits than for its ostensible joint-pain benefits - it's supposed to both help with that on its own and keep kratom tolerance low.
(These are very cheap substances, okay. And it might work!)
I may have actually noticed some of the positive memory effects, though? I've surprised myself by correctly remembering dates and URLs and stuff without needing to look them up a few times, and it seems like I don't need to switch back and forth between windows/tabs as much when I'm doing research-y stuff. It could just be the improvement in my sleep, though.
I'm reasonably sure that the piracetem and phenylpiracetam are unrelated, because I have not been using them. I did load the piracetam into capsules, though, so now I can take it without tasting it? That's something.
