muflax65ngodyewp.onion/content_blog/experiments/concentration.mkd

title	date	techne	episteme	toc
Fixing Concentration	2010-07-13	:rough	:discredited	true

I had serious problems concentrating. Typically, I rapidly lost focus or just felt blah and unmotivated the whole day, often with a (minor to medium) depression thrown in for good measure. Here's what I tried and how I finally fixed it.

Diet and Drugs

Caffeine

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Caffeine drastically improves my concentration. It gives me an indiscriminate, but very narrow focus. I can work for hours on basically anything, but find it hard to change topics or decide what to do in the first place. But if I made those decisions early on and arranged it so that I could work all day without disturbances, then caffeine works really well. However, I noticed that this concentration isn't "real" concentration, but rather a synthetic kind. It feels similar, but instead of increasing my capacity it simply makes me ignore my tiredness. So I sit for hours, thinking I'm doing useful work, when I really only burn myself out and get really sloppy.

And there are more problems with caffeine. Most importantly, it reduces serotonin and builds up a resistance. Because of the resistance, you either soon get diminishing returns while still dealing with all of the downsides, or you keep on increasing the dosage till you crash. I typically went the crash route. Reduced serotonin levels lead to an unstable mood, depression, crankiness and twitching muscles. All very sucky.

Furthermore, caffeine screws up my sleep. It improves some part of it, but makes it less regenerative and harder to fall asleep. However, a sudden large dose has the opposite effect. I fall asleep easily and dream very vividly, totally cocaine-fueled. While I won't feel sleep-deprived, I will still be it.

Because of this, I'd strongly advice against caffeine.

Animal Fat

Despite what virtually all common wisdom is going to tell you, animal fat is probably the most important thing for you to eat. (The second-most important are bacteria¹). As I'm a bit lazy, I'll do no convincing here and leave this to the [Paleo][] crowd. (Ignore the libertarians. Just try it yourself for a week and be amazed.) If you are an vegetarian, then you really shouldn't be one. But the very least don't be a vegan, k? Because then you are royally screwed with regards to food.

Eating about 50-100g of butter refuels my energy almost completely in less than 20 minutes and greatly increases concentration. I perform better on all intelligence and memory tests I used and find learning (especially with Anki) to be easier and more enjoyable. I'm now reworking my diet to get in as much as I can. I eat plenty of quark, butter (even raw) and as fatty a dinner as I can get away with.

Butter is my clear favorite. Very high-fat (>50%) cream, cheese or quark work as well, but I don't like their taste too much. I do eat a lot of quark with about 15-20% fat content, though, and the occasional psychedelic cheese².

When choosing butter, be sure to pick one from grass-fed cows. It contains high levels of Omega-3, which also greatly increases all kinds of mental functions and general health. A good and wide-spread brand is Kerrygold, although there are often local alternatives as well.

The other component is protein. I'm not yet sure about a good base level, but I found that eating a lot more meat and eggs also helps. Not as noticeable as with fat (that is, the effect doesn't kick in right away), but it's certainly there.

Just as with animal fat, this doesn't apply to any plant source. Soy or flour don't count as a good protein source because of all their other negative effects. I know how much living without grains sucks, being a big fan of pizza and tofu, but having collected data for months now, I can quite clearly say that, at least for me, grains are never worth it. They screw up your digestion, your mental performance and sap away your energy. That feeling of being totally sated and need for a nap after dinner? That's the grains. It's not normal. Eating dinner should have you more active than before, not less.

Protein

TODO

Sugar

TODO

St. John's Wort

St. John's Wort has gotten quite a bit of attention recently for being as least as effective as all other depression medicine while generally having far less side-effects.

So far, it has been very successful in both preventing my typical seasonal depression beginning around November and in aborting an ongoing depression. I also took it during my most recent caffeine withdrawal and I think it greatly improved it, but I'm quite unwilling of doing another as a control.

I'm unsure if there is any positive effect beyond preventing the depression. I had no noticeable side effects despite taking 900mg of it for months. As a test, I stopped a week after my caffeine withdrawal was over, as my serotonin levels were stable anyway and I suspected that St. John's Wort slightly decreases motivation, at least when it is unnecessary.

Unfortunately, I had about a week of withdrawal, which mostly resulted in mild mania, severe tiredness and low motivation. Still more pleasant than caffeine withdrawal and certainly better (and shorter) than depression, which could last for months. I would still advocate slowly reducing the dose instead to avoid withdrawal.

After that, my motivation didn't really recover. My mood was stable and my sleep returned to more normal levels, but I was still wasting a lot of time, as is typical for depression. So I went back to my daily dose and am quite happy with the result. I'm still trying to find the perfect dosage that is just beneath the overdose when my muscles start twitching and I get nervous. About 600mg work seems to work, though. I may try getting off again next spring, nonetheless, after everything has stabilized more.

I suspect that 5-HTP works very well, too, although I never got to test it. I failed to try it a few years back when it was still unregulated in Germany, although I actually wanted to. It has a very good track record and I would recommend trying it if St. John's Wort doesn't work for you. I might... obtain it at some point, but so far, I am happy with St. John's Wort and see no advantage in switching.

I have a relatively low opinion of most mainstream medication for depression, though especially SSRIs may be worth a try. Personally, I also had good short-term success with MAO inhibitors, but wouldn't recommend them because they are so incompatible with many other drugs or important food. It's just too hard to eat right and too easy to kill yourself on MAO inhibitors. Also, raised serotonin levels and drugs don't mix at all, especially MDMA or DXM. [Serotonin syndrome] isn't nice. It's a bit of a pity, though, but I can live with that.

Tyrosine

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Now comes the magic bullet. Seriously, Tyrosine is among my favorite chemicals because it fixes a problem without creating new ones. That's quite rare.

Tyrosine is basically a building block for many important neurotransmitters, most importantly the catecholamines (CATs) which are necessary for concentration and proper motivation. If you can't get yourself to do something you actually want to do (and enjoy), then you have a big CAT deficiency. Caffeine is by far the most common "cure", but with all its side-effects, it doesn't really fix the problem.

Tyrosine, for me, does. On the first day, I took 900mg in the morning and all desire for caffeine was gone. I took another 900mg after dinner and kicked caffeine immediately. Without any side-effects or withdrawal symptoms. None. If you have ever done a caffeine withdrawal after heavy use, that might already be the selling point right there.

I now use 900mg every morning and occasionally 900mg after a nap if I have a lazy day. I haven't yet experimented with higher doses (up to 4g) because I don't wanna jinx it. Taking the powder orally (keeping it in your mouth a bit) has a faster onset (and slight high), but taking capsules seems to have more or less the same effect. I'm still experimenting with this, though.

I'm now completely caffeine free and have better long-term memory and a far more usable level of concentration. Full-on caffeine mode is slightly stronger, but so manic that it is utterly useless. Mental tunnel-vision is not a good thing, you know.

With tyrosine, however, my concentration is as it should be. I don't have to trick myself into starting anything, but can just work right away. I only get exhausted when I actually did something (and can refuel with sleep and butter) and not at random times.

As a last piece of evidence, I'm just going to mention three numbers. They are the number of daily SRS repetitions I could do per day before my brain would shut down. A year ago, using almost no caffeine and no tyrosine, I managed about 80 reps, max. A few months ago, using caffeine, I got up to 150, maybe 200, but that's a good day. 100 would be normal. The last two weeks, I did over 500 each day without breaking a sweat. I got up to 800 after 3 hours of continuous work and that's still not the maximum level. I just normally stop after an hour or so because it gets too time-consuming or boring otherwise.

Tyrosine is, however, useless when your serotonin levels are bad. You can be as concentrated as you want, if you are apathetic, nothing will get done. That's why I consider St. John's Wort more important, but tyrosine is more noticeable right away and ultimately the effect I was hoping for.

(Outdated, effect doesn't hold up long-term.)

Nicotine

TODO

Magnesium

I took about 150mg of magnesium for several months for my sore knee. While it improved the pain, I noticed a minor drop in motivation while using it. I'm not exactly sure why and I couldn't find many reports, but a friend who used a similar dose of magnesium at the same time noticed the same thing. This seems to happen most commonly with magnesium citrate.

Exercise

For simplicity's sake, there are two kinds of exercise: resistance training (short, high strength, causes muscle growth) and long-term endurance training. The first one is good for you, the second one neutral at best, harmful at worst.

I found endurance training to be utterly useless for concentration. As a reference, I have a caved-in chest (about medium) and can't swim. For most of my life, I had very poor fitness levels. During the summers of 2009 and 2010, I spend 3 months each on jogging. I went from not being able to run for 10 seconds to running for over 20 minutes without pause and overall jogging sessions of about an hour every two days. This did not affect my mental capacities in any way I could notice. It was enjoyable, but that's about it.

Resistance training, however, is completely awesome. January 2011 I started a serious strength program, including weight gain (from 75kg to 85kg at 185cm of height) and everything³. Besides obviously improving my fitness and confidence, it also increased my energy levels and sleep. Highly recommended.

Meditation

Meditation works great, but has a serious disadvantage - it has a circular dependency on its own effect. In other words, when you practice meditation daily, it will greatly improve your discipline and concentration (among other things, like bringing you enlightenment), but to meditate successfully, you need discipline and concentration. You see how that's a problem?

The typical solution to that problem has been either trying for years until you finally manage to bootstrap the process or going on retreats or entering a monastry, for a week to a whole year, where you are forced to meditate and have no alternative or escape route. It works, sure, but it's both kinda cruel and very inconvenient.

Because of that, meditation is more of a middle- to end-game strategy. I highly recommend it, but you need a certain level of skill and concentration already to really use it. If you can't get out of bed, then meditation ain't gonna work, either. For introductions to meditation, I recommend going on a 10 day [Vipassana][] retreat and [Shinzen Young's][Shinzen Young] videos.

Sunlight

TODO

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1. I'm just gonna send you over to [Seth Roberts][Seth Bacteria] on this. I completely agree with him on everything about nutrition, having tested it all myself. Seriously, grab yourself some strong jogurt (not the sweet stuff, but the good, sour one), kefir or miso and eat it. Every day. You can thank me later when most of the problems you just lived with are gone. ↩︎

2. I'm not kidding here. I have no idea what exactly is causing it, but something in certain cheeses is clearly psychedelic. I get a trippy mood, incredibly wild dreams and even some mild hallucinations. I suspect the tryptophan, but it doesn't really fit the dosage and only seems to happen with cheese. Anyway, I recommend Danish Havarti. ↩︎

3. Specifically, I follow [Convict Conditioning][] and ensure at least 150g of protein a day, mostly in the form of whole milk, meat and [quark][]. I exercise twice per week (as prescribed) and level up about one step per month for each exercise. ↩︎