tired

Oh fuck me I was always exhausted. I don’t think I actually had a proper night of sleep until I took these medicines. I just kept burning the candle from all directions until I exhausted myself to the point of passing out, rinsed and repeated.

Late ironman days I would need a 60 minute nap every day just to function. This was my medicine, remember, and I had a tolerance. So I would wake up at 4 with night sweats, high cortisol, bouncing off the walls. Do something like meditation to try to restrain myself, then do my workout or whatever. 

The steel wool would spin faster as it does when I’m tired, but the adhd side would crave more stimulation. And it would spiral. Both on the micro intra-day level where I will be doing dumber stuff and getting more tired and angry, but also on the macro scale where I decide to spend my off season mapping out the entire mountain range, back country, solo. Sorry but anyone telling me that this is a better idea than a bit of weed needs to review their priorities.

These whetstones. Lovely. The natural world.

Anyway I never knew rest. I never knew sleep. I just knew activity and exhaustion.

I tried everything. Huberman wasn’t total shit here but he was expensive. And everything I tried over the years, medicine included, worked for a while then stopped.

Because my sleep issues all stem from dopamine and norepinephrine. It’s that simple. Even the sensory gating noise issues; dopamine. Those cold plunges in the mornings? They were bad for me. They spiked both of these and trained my body to do be in an even higher gear.

To be clear: dopamine hacking made things worse, in hindsight. I was good at it. I knew all the foods and behaviours and supplements. I was good at it, and it was bad for me. The sleep hacking was fine, but mostly ineffective.

So guanfacine lowers my NE and I sleep like a baby. My god the relief. But again - 2-3 months in it begins to fade. 

Now aripiprazole I think is the big one. It fucked up my sleep for a week or so as perceived dopamine ramped up, but now everything is at a stable clinical level I am sleeping the best in my life. Sleep latency is low, I stay asleep, and I wake rested, if a little earlier than previously. This is week one of good sleep though so we shall see.

I can’t stress enough how much these drugs have lowered my exhaustion. And they have done so by lowering the spikes in motivational hormones, not by exaggerating them. Lowering these hormones has increased my motivation and wellbeing. Lowering them. Restraining them. Not restraining myself, but restraining these two neurotransmitters with single-milligram-level doses of old drugs has changed my entire life. More =/= better.

But yeah. No fucking tips. I tried them all. They didn’t work for long. Because it was all about the songkran in my juicy bits.

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