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Naltrexone
I will start with naltrexone, which can help people who have difficulty regulating their drinking have a more natural and sustainable relationship with alcohol should they choose to not cut it out of their lives entirely.
water
- makes my headaches go away
- makes it easier to poop
- tastes good
- cools me down on a hot day
- super inexpensive, so cheap you can bathe in it
- only bad part is that it makes you need to pee
tastes good
Sir, let’s discuss the taste of water.
My sister tells me water is tasteless. I disagree. Water definitely has a taste. I have yet to find water with a taste I like except when I am very dehydrated.
Tap water? Definitely no. Filtered water? Nope. Mineral water? Nah. Flavored water? Eugh.
Tea, though. Tea is amazing. Especially coffee tea. Coffee tea is amazing. You take coffee beans, grind them up, and pass hot water through it. It’s so amazing.
Rain tank water is bloody lifechanging. Tap water tastes too strong, and filtered water doesn’t seem to do much to the water (although lifestraw filtered water does seem to remove the unpleasant flavours better) but water from our galvanised iron tank is recognisable and downright pleasant. Also the concrete tank is pretty good too. You can taste if anyone gets water from the plastic tanks on the east side of the house though. Ick.
These days I run rainwater through a lifestraw and call it good. No tea beats that.
Melatonin
I can’t do sleep hygiene. My cell phone is the first and last thing I see every day. I stare at screens all day for work and for leisure. With moderate melatonin use I can somehow maintain regular and restful sleep.
No side effects if you use it responsibly (e.g. 5 days on, 2 days off, stick with low doses). Very safe. Can improve sleep even if you’re already sleeping well. I don’t know why more people aren’t on it.
A fun hack for melatonin is that smaller doses work better than larger doses.
Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.
I’ve seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they’re for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.
Yep, this seems to the magic number; I shudder when I hear people taking like 5-10mg. How can that be safe unless most of it is destroyed via digestion
Do you use NightShift and Dark Mode, those are helpful altho the name of the game is also brightness, no matter whether its a “good” or “bad” color relative to its effect on sleep
I do. I also messed with the iOS accessibility settings to color shift even more. It helps so much.
I even went to monochrome red at one point and it felt like me cellphone was actively putting me too sleep. Unfortunately monochrome also kills a lot of the enjoyment of using a phone. I was getting sleepier, but felt so bored I just wanted to find something too do to fill the dopamine void.
Unfortunately I have to keep my brightness quite high. My eyes can’t focus well in the dark.
Do red laser safety glasses work for you? Laser glasses are really good at filtering everything but their color and red ones mean you won’t get the melatonin destroying blue light in.
Why does dark come into this? Like are you referring to lack of ambient light? Having trouble parsing this…
You should use lamps (no overhead lights) and in warm bulb color like as close to incandescent/warm as you can find on the market
Phillips Hue is fantastic for this
I love melatonin. It’s gentle and natural. I guess I stopped buying it years ago because my husband took it all.
Fly agaric / Amanita muscaria
is the only thing that is actually mucus dissolving. You are stoned as fuck but when dried slowly they are nontoxic anymore.
They are also very funny, perfect party drug. Actually stoned, without head paranoia etc. dancing is really fun, you can lie down or move its all very funny. And no alcohol 70%-directly-in-the-liver pain the next morning.
Cannabis
is a very complex substance and not for just chilling in my experience. It can be very helpful with stress, it is like soothing the brain with this other entity. I am sure it is not, but it feels like your subconsciousness taking control. Helps a lot understanding yourself and breaking free from toxic Adrenaline-Stress-Coffee-Capitalist thinking.
It is not just for chilling, it is not “an alternative to alcohol” and it is extremely abused, especially in the US. These “roll a blunt” amounts are simply not possible with todays potent weed, and mixing with tobacco while pretending you are not addicted to that ugly goblin clinging to your brain (for me tobacco feels like that) is absurd.
I think it is immensely powerful and its by far my favourite cozy drug, it saved my psyche when I didnt even know it lol (had an unrelated accident when stoned, got stitched up without anesthesia and my ears where fucked up for over a year after that).
LSD
is also great. Its such a shame it was banned immediately. There where so many studies and psychotherapeutic sessions, it is such an intense magnifier of these therapies.
Instead you now either sit there and talk, which is only effective after a year or so (while in Germany it is extremely hard to find a place); or you work with symptoms which is more effective but can easily result in the expression of your illness just switching to another symptom.
LSD is fucking magic. The lack of the nasty body effects of Psilocybin mushrooms is very good, as these can get extremely uncomfortable. And what it does with your brain, and how you think, is just so enriching. I already cried in front of my family, had great conversations with my then still alive grandparents, and I am so thankful for the existence of this drug.
Basically all the common ones suck, Alcohol, Tobacco, Nicotine, Stimulants. They are extremely unhealthy and have no beneficial effect at all. They only help you keep running, but you can easily break during this.
LSD is illegal because the government doesn’t want their working class plebeians to be happy and enlightened. we’d stop being obedient little work slaves if we were happy and enlightened.
LSD is reserved for the enjoyment of the people who make the laws. They are above the law so they can do whatever they want & enjoy life.
Thanks and you are very correct, the legal drugs are the most damaging and harmful and mundane. No imagination to them :( Terrible, shitty drugs
Metamucil (psyillium fibre)
It’s kinda simple, but Metamucil. I would get terrible stomach aches, bloating and constipation whenever I had greasy food. Now, if I have 1-2 servings of Metamucil a day, then 1 extra right as I eat greasy food, I don’t feel terrible!
Psyllium husk changed my freaking life. Probably TMI, but I used to have very severe hemorrhoid pain. I basically almost never do anymore, it’s that drastic.
I was shitting blood on the daily. Having had surgery for bleeding hemorrhoids, I cannot face that again. Been through some shit, but that was the worst pain of my life.
Psyllium had me back to normal in 1-week. Hope others read our words and it helps them.
Delicate question: does your butt ever go back to normal after a haemerhoid “heals”? Like functionally and cosmetically lol?
Pramipexole
It’s used for Parkinson’s and restless legs, I use it for restless legs. I’ve suffered with this condition as far back as I can remember, I’ve always referred to myself as a part time insomniac because this would keep me up a lot of the time.
I had a period of mental health problems and was prescribed Metazapine for it, which kicked up the RLS a notch. Despite being off them now for nearly a year, the Restless Legs are still kicked up.
Pramipexole, when taken at the right time, sorts the RLS out, I can finally sleep and when I do sleep I don’t kick my wife up the arse.
Side affects include hypersexualality and compulsive gambling, but I haven’t experienced this yet. I have warned my workmates that it could come up in the future though so if I ever say “I bet you a fiver you can’t wank me off” they know why.
Edited to bold Pramipexole
Have you noticed any issues with induced impulsivity from med, there’s crazy stories of folks getting on dopamine agonists like that who go wild and end up with gambling and porn addictions, criminal charges, etc. Really wild stuff
From my reading on Pramipexole it’s about 10% of people that have these side effects. It worried me when I started taking the pills.
I read the documentation that came with them and it had in bold DO NOT TAKE THIS MEDICATION WITH ALCOHOL AS THIS CAN MAKE SIDE EFFECTS WORSE so I read the side effects and it was compulsive gambling and hypersexuality.
So I gave up my nightly rum for a few weeks. Then I thought “Meh, let’s see what happens” and reintroduced my nightly rum and coke before bed. Honestly I’ve not had anything noticeable.
Nothing compulsive. But I can spend an hour or more solving Rubik’s cubes or playing the guitar without even noticing. I had that before the pills though.
Just be careful yo. I wonder if its always either an immediate development or it in sets over time. It could also be that your dopamine receptor destruction/loss over time could attenuate the motivating aspect of the meds I would conjecture.
