debrief
Well that was intense.
I’ve had an intense life and that was still intense.
I’ve found the brakes for my brain, but they only work if you accelerate into them. The 2mg is starting to stabilise now - not fully yet - and if I have overshot then that will be ok.
Because I need to be able to rest, and this medicine gives me the ability to do so.
At the same time it opens the floodgates for emotional processing so the timing of dose changes needs to be careful. Choose times when you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. And make some rules like no trading bitcoin ha.
The last 6 weeks have - honestly without a word of a lie - felt like 2 years for me. I think this is partly because of the amount of processing and events but mostly because the medicine has changed how my brain encoded time. Fixed it.
So right now my life feels like it contains approximately 12 times more life.
I used cannabis but not much; this was almost all the ari. The dose increases toward the end were challenging but like squeezing a lemon to get to the juice; a lot of horribleness I feel toward my past life has gone. But let’s see how long this lasts. Nothing is permanent and now I need to stay the course.
The next step will be to get a T3 fMRI of my brain and start looking into the actual physical structure. Then to find a medical doctor who is able to prescribe drugs in the name of science and stick me in a machine while I trip balls. Ha.
But yeah the ari was what did it not the weed; they’re orders of magnitude different and ari goes knocks your endogenous dopamine off the receptors so no way a little weed is going to interfere. The weed was the same as the guanfacine and the valproate in that it kept the wheels on with a train which was going very, very, very fast indeed.
So we have dopamine and serotonin ramped up, on a scale of 5 I’d say D+3 S+2 and then we have GABA +2 NE -3 and CB1 +3. These are all inhibitory. I have to stress that this was _not_ self experimentation and going into this I did not expect this impact. The med was for autistic sensitivities. GABA and NE were from the doctor and CB1 was my own addition. I was also drinking caffeine.
One of the kids is here so I’ll go get a coffee. This doesn’t bother me like it would have, but the meds should settle soon and it’ll bother me even less. It’s a sensory issue; I love my kids and I have made peace with it. Still sucks.
The reality is that this was probably me teaching myself how to process emotions. It was very intense and I was thrown in the deep end with a lifetime of undiagnosed adhd and asd and minimal support network outside my immediate family. I had already exploded my birth family away when my mask flew apart. I was on my own.
The first 0.5mg sent me hypermotivated and super happy and if we had stayed there it would all have been ok. But my mum was visiting and she has never seen the 20 years I spent swimming with the sharks building businesses so when I started talking about building a company as my life’s calling, mania was suspected. I went to the doctor and was cleared. Adhd impulsiveness raised the dose to 1mg after only 10 days, which for anyone else would have been ok but for me was a bit much. Dominoes.
Then I go really intense. The autistic traits come out big style and I lose all my facial expressions because of coming out of fight or flight for the first time - a real clinical effect. This is combined with global improvement in everything and a boost in D and S so I appear manic. I borderline am at night. Something about ari makes me process things while I sleep, I now see, which is why I think the impact is so profound. I think it is accelerating neural plasticity and synaptic pruning in a 41 year old man.
This was not self experimentation. It was an unexpected issue which I identified as ‘drugs’ and managed effectively, even in hindsight. Things were said though and misunderstandings were had and I’ll not go into detail but this is really not something you want to do without supervision. And I mean 5 days of supervision, which will feel like two months to you, depending on your dopamine dysregulation.
We then stabilise and all is good for a while until the processing overload migraines I’ve had my whole life but been unaware of come back and I up the dose. This time without telling my wife (on her semi-suggestion) and slowly. I do 0.25mg per time and she doesn’t suspect a thing, because I have a lifetime of managing impulsiveness, but it throws me out of equilibrium and it not nice really. I end up processing quite a lot of life stuff and going a little too far on the business plan, but reeling it in it actually is good, like this site, so mania - helpful if you know how to harness it. Which most people do not. So don’t try.
I want the stability and I want to get this done and my kid is increasing to 2mg and to be honest I’m jealous. My wife was relieved to hear that I had increased secretly without her knowing, because she knows this is the right medicine for our family but needed data to decharge the emotions from the first dose increase. So I increase from 1.5 to 2.
This was 3 months ago. Oh. Wait. 3 days ago. 3.5 to be precise. I’m off for the school run in a few minutes, with child 1 who is on the same meds as me. My world feels safe like when I was a young child on a summer day, which is appropriate because I’m looking at a young child on a summer day. But it’s even better than that for me because I have a baseline that I was born without.
I can’t fathom why this med isn’t used for adhd. It is cheap. Well.. I can. It is cheap. It is generic. There is no financial incentive to get it to a suffering public. Plus I think it addresses the suffering - the dukkha - of adhd more than stimulants, which seems like a productivity bodge.
But the fastest way I see to get this kind of thing taken seriously is a political movement. Don’t something like 5% or some ever-variable % of people have adhd? People who have accidents, overeat, fight, suicide. All these people could have an improvement in all-factor mortality and morbidity and their families can have improved lives.
Wasn’t it an average of 19 years lost from an adhd life? And that’s not counting downstream effects.
Let’s talk about economics. How many missed days from work because of hangovers or injuries? How much of a drop in productivity?
I think the technology is very much ready to create a real diagnostic framework for adhd, and I think that within 5 years we will be able to map out the brain of the individual, and simulate how neurotransmitters act within that brain. It’s only a couple of years from there - or less with newer autoencoders - my info is 4 years old - until we can predict how to fix a specific soup and make it tasty for the swimmer.
This is the future of mental health care.
A diagnostic framework based on fMRI or other imagine data, and endocrinological testing, whatever else comes along, and deep reinforcement learning in the matchmaking skills I learned as a recruiter.
I spent 10 years working as the top recruiter for Japan’s international largest AI ventures. I know the people.
My lineage suffers from this ailment. I have the motivation.
I just spent 2 subjective years - 6 weeks - searching my soul and repgroramming myself. I have that unique expeirence.
I still can’t see this as mania. I think this is the meaning I always looked for. This might be my theory of relativity; my dhamma. I’m autistic and I see fate and if I embrace that then sometimes I can influence how it turns out.
So. Good data. Autistic. Patterns. Deal with it.
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