In the mornings I sometimes take a few caffeine pills after the alarm and continue sleeping until I wake up spontaneously when the effect peaks. Another way that works for me to increase morning alertness is to time some bright lamps to turn on an hour or so before wake up time.
memoridem
Karma: 44
I hadn’t considered trying to counteract the nervousness induced by stimulants. I’ll have to look into various relaxation techniques.
You can do this pharmacologically too, with beta blockers for example. Consider asking your doctor about it.
Have you tried caffeine naps i.e. take a caffeine pill then start taking a nap? The caffeine absorbs while you sleep so when you wake up you could be more alert right away. This could also prevent oversleeping.
You could argue the opposite: if you expose yourself indiscriminately to people who don’t share your values, they’ll have a better chance to change them. I think I operate under this assumption. Most people wear some kinds of masks in various situations, and I think some people who insist they shouldn’t just lack basic skills in deception and lie detection. I’m not implying people are more malicious than some people expect, I’m implying deception is generally thought of as a lesser evil than some people think.
If we talk about really hacking your preferences on some deep level, I agree with the danger of unintentionally becoming someone else.
Isn’t there anything you already know but wouldn’t like to forget? SRS is for keeping your precious memory storage, not necessarily for learning new stuff. There are probably a lot of things that wouldn’t even cross your mind to google if they were erased by time. Googling could also waste time compared to storing memories if you have to do it often enough (roughly 5 minutes in your lifetime per fact).
What other skills work nicely with spaced repetition?
In my experience anything you can write into brief flashcards. Some simple facts can work as handles for broader concepts once you’ve learned them. You could even record triggers for episodic memories that are important to you.
That made the picture a lot clearer, thanks. Makes those income figures relevant to me seem a lot less enviable.
I see, my bad. It’s easy to lose the context by reading recent comments.
Have you tried any drugs to fall asleep faster when using stimulants in the evening?
Pharmacokinetics (half-life and other variables) of drugs and their different delivery methods are public knowledge, there are individual differences in metabolism of course.
When it comes to designing drugs there are quite a few things that are done in the delivery mechanism of the drug that can effect half-life.
For most drugs the elimination half-life is so long that a faster route of administration makes minor difference. For caffeine for example it’s about 4.5 hours. You can shorten the absorption from < 1 hour to seconds but that probably won’t matter much in this case.
You can make the absorption slower in a way that makes a difference however, for example there are several timed release versions of methylphenidate.
There are individual differences in metabolism rates of all drugs, so you might want to try some in the 3-5 hour range to see how they affect you. If tolerance worries you consider cycling some drugs or taking days off.
Nicotine could increase the clearance of caffeine as much as 50 %, you could use this to your advantage.
Consider raising your alertness nonpharmacologically, like exercise or cold showers for example. Consider working in an upright position.
In the other comment you said you have problems with sleep. There are several options to improve that side too, so that you might tolerate the stimulants better. This of course makes no sense if the problem doesn’t lie in your waking hours. Melatonin you can probably get OTC. The nervousness induced by stimulants could also be dampened in several ways.
Could you be a bit more specific about the positive effect?
Pure signal? Some people actually like their jobs, and perhaps the extra income too.
ETA: are people expected to work extra hours for free in the US?
It’s not just exploitation by elders in medicine though. Many young doctors work ridiculous hours by choice, and their more reasonable colleagues suffer as a consequence.
It’s terrible that the expertise of doctors should make them fully acknowledge the dangers of sleep deprivation for example, yet some of them wilfully ignore the facts.
A disorder would be a description of what the person is reporting, since you can’t scan their brain to establish the diagnosis. An important problem with this approach is that we don’t know whether there’s an impaired processing of the social necessity called self, or whether the person just perceives or describes normal processing differently, or whether they label a different process with the word self than people normally do.
You can migitate the problem by making the investment gradually.
If everyone was immortal and healthy by default, do you think it would even occur to you suggest death as a harmless alternative?
If someone tried to convince you that a 50 year lifespan is better than what we have now, what would be your reaction? Don’t you find it interesting that your intuitions support a very narrow optimum that just happens to be what you already have?
Do you argue that “death is just the end of your conscious experience” in the case of anyone who dies prematurely? Try to imagine actual deaths in real life and their outcomes.
Have you read this fable by Bostrom?