Curcumin, week 3: I’ve been taking the supplements with some regularity; on some days I had to reduce my dosage to half, because I don’t like the idea of taking the full daily dose all at once in the morning… but arrived home too late to bother taking the second half (since I don’t find it useful to waste those pills on hours I’ll be spending asleep). One day I completely skipped them.
Nevertheless, I still benefited from the effects to a sufficient extent. The antidepressant effect is pretty strong; I could maintain an emotionally normal, content state no matter what happened to me. I’ve also noticed improved attention and focus; I have been able to maintain good concentration levels in my college classes (during lectures and labs) even on days with tough schedules, as opposed to checking the clock every minute like I used to. I’ve asked my family whether they noticed any changes, and they strongly agreed that I’ve been faring much better in the mental energy department. I managed to fix my erratic sleep schedule so as to not be constantly sleep deprived (it was mostly a matter of prioritizing sleep vs. waking hours). I require less leisure time to feel stimulated and mentally comfortable.
So what have I been doing with all that productive energy?
Obsessive number-crunching, for the most part.
By this I mean anything from deciding in minute detail how to furnish and decorate my apartment and how every square centimetre would be used, to balancing calories and nutrients in the perfect meal plan, to anthropometric measurements and mean values and standard deviations, to deciding on the optimal number of work hours for my target income before even touching the actual work… All of this for hours and hours without getting bored; in fact it would be my activity of choice. Insane amounts of arithmetic and little actual skill gain.
(To be fair, I have been steadily developing two skills over the past year: better singing voice, and general athletic ability. Both of them are essentially physical in nature and at best secondary, if not largely irrelevant, to my goals.)
This wasn’t really what I signed up for. My intention was to gather enough motivation to take on impressive independent study schedules, to reach adequate skill/knowledge levels in my disciplines of choice. I had never managed to do even a modicum of what I aimed for because of lack of motivation, so I thought that having better dopamine levels would do the job. However… it’s true what I read on Longecity and other places about medications that help with motivation: yes, you could be spending 12 hours ceaselessly undertaking productive actions towards a desired end goal, but you could also be spending 12 hours ceaselessly organizing your sock drawer. It seems to me that a little extra something (interest in the activity, I think, or habituation) is required in order to do something you initially didn’t feel like doing.
Still, I’ll continue taking curcumin and try to find ways of channeling my effort and energy towards learning. At least now I feel like I have the volitional prerequisites for this endeavour.
Sounds like it might be a good source of raw materials, if not a finished product per se. The lack of optimization is interesting though. Are you able to focus on large projects just as well as small ones (and you’re just picking randomly), or is there a detectable upper threshold in the complexity of what you can engage with?
I’ll be sure and try this out myself soon. Thanks for reporting on it!
I think I would need to first try my hand at a complex project to be able to answer your question; my ordinary life hasn’t demanded anything of the kind from me lately. And anyhow, even so I couldn’t make sure that the real bottleneck is my power of focus; generally poor organizational capability seems a likelier culprit for potential failure. Right now, only trying to assemble a syllabus for my math studies is giving me headaches; there are too many things to study and I should have been done with them three years ago anyway.
Presumably I select activities according to personal interest and relevance to me, rather than according to task complexity or my long-term best interest. The data I’ve been compulsively analyzing and computing helps me answer questions I’m very interested in, although it may not be the kind of information I should be focusing upon.
Good luck, but remember that the kind of problems that are treatable with MAO-B inhibitors involve only your baseline capacity for desiring/pursuing anything at all. That may or may not be the reason you’re not getting as much done as you would want to. If you’re generally, how should I say, not much of a wanter, then curcumin will help you, but otherwise (if your lack of motivation is not unselective) I wouldn’t bet on it.
Curcumin, week 3: I’ve been taking the supplements with some regularity; on some days I had to reduce my dosage to half, because I don’t like the idea of taking the full daily dose all at once in the morning… but arrived home too late to bother taking the second half (since I don’t find it useful to waste those pills on hours I’ll be spending asleep). One day I completely skipped them.
Nevertheless, I still benefited from the effects to a sufficient extent. The antidepressant effect is pretty strong; I could maintain an emotionally normal, content state no matter what happened to me. I’ve also noticed improved attention and focus; I have been able to maintain good concentration levels in my college classes (during lectures and labs) even on days with tough schedules, as opposed to checking the clock every minute like I used to. I’ve asked my family whether they noticed any changes, and they strongly agreed that I’ve been faring much better in the mental energy department. I managed to fix my erratic sleep schedule so as to not be constantly sleep deprived (it was mostly a matter of prioritizing sleep vs. waking hours). I require less leisure time to feel stimulated and mentally comfortable.
So what have I been doing with all that productive energy?
Obsessive number-crunching, for the most part.
By this I mean anything from deciding in minute detail how to furnish and decorate my apartment and how every square centimetre would be used, to balancing calories and nutrients in the perfect meal plan, to anthropometric measurements and mean values and standard deviations, to deciding on the optimal number of work hours for my target income before even touching the actual work… All of this for hours and hours without getting bored; in fact it would be my activity of choice. Insane amounts of arithmetic and little actual skill gain.
(To be fair, I have been steadily developing two skills over the past year: better singing voice, and general athletic ability. Both of them are essentially physical in nature and at best secondary, if not largely irrelevant, to my goals.)
This wasn’t really what I signed up for. My intention was to gather enough motivation to take on impressive independent study schedules, to reach adequate skill/knowledge levels in my disciplines of choice. I had never managed to do even a modicum of what I aimed for because of lack of motivation, so I thought that having better dopamine levels would do the job. However… it’s true what I read on Longecity and other places about medications that help with motivation: yes, you could be spending 12 hours ceaselessly undertaking productive actions towards a desired end goal, but you could also be spending 12 hours ceaselessly organizing your sock drawer. It seems to me that a little extra something (interest in the activity, I think, or habituation) is required in order to do something you initially didn’t feel like doing.
Still, I’ll continue taking curcumin and try to find ways of channeling my effort and energy towards learning. At least now I feel like I have the volitional prerequisites for this endeavour.
Sounds like it might be a good source of raw materials, if not a finished product per se. The lack of optimization is interesting though. Are you able to focus on large projects just as well as small ones (and you’re just picking randomly), or is there a detectable upper threshold in the complexity of what you can engage with?
I’ll be sure and try this out myself soon. Thanks for reporting on it!
I think I would need to first try my hand at a complex project to be able to answer your question; my ordinary life hasn’t demanded anything of the kind from me lately. And anyhow, even so I couldn’t make sure that the real bottleneck is my power of focus; generally poor organizational capability seems a likelier culprit for potential failure. Right now, only trying to assemble a syllabus for my math studies is giving me headaches; there are too many things to study and I should have been done with them three years ago anyway.
Presumably I select activities according to personal interest and relevance to me, rather than according to task complexity or my long-term best interest. The data I’ve been compulsively analyzing and computing helps me answer questions I’m very interested in, although it may not be the kind of information I should be focusing upon.
Good luck, but remember that the kind of problems that are treatable with MAO-B inhibitors involve only your baseline capacity for desiring/pursuing anything at all. That may or may not be the reason you’re not getting as much done as you would want to. If you’re generally, how should I say, not much of a wanter, then curcumin will help you, but otherwise (if your lack of motivation is not unselective) I wouldn’t bet on it.