Microdosing: Improving performance enhancement in intelligence analysis (2019) [pdf]
mca-marines.org
mca-marines.org
The idea of performance enhancing drugs making their way into the workplace arena scares me a lot.
Normally I feel like I see the world through the narrow end of a funnel. When I get done with a big workout, somehow for the next day or so my brain is chilled out and I can concentrate again. After two days or so I start to regress a bit but another bout of lifting resets me.
I only really need medicine during periods of bad health or incredible personal stress now.
I've also picked up meditating 10 minutes a day and that's been helping as well, but I don't think as much.
I bet that HIIT could be as effective as weights for me because the curative part seems to come from exhaustion and exercise of will.
Meditation may or may not be as mentally strenuous, I am not really familiar with it.
I think medicine should be used as a last resort and it is not a "fix" or "solution". Dealing with my ADHD is still a daily struggle and I didn't transform into a better person by taking the medicine
What it did was to turn my experience of my life from a large overwhelming interconnected problem into small doable issues. It made me able to pick up each of the many broken aspects of my life, fix it, and move on to the next
I'm afraid of the notion, I often hear, where medicine "fixes" something. My ADHD didn't go away with the medicine, but it did make me able to take responsibility for my own life and feel confident enough in myself, that I don't want to apologize for needing a different environment to be productive
The good thing about methylphenidate is that it works quickly (20 minutes or so after taking it), so you know pretty quickly if it's a good fit. It wears off after 4-8 hours depending on the formulation, so if you feel worse it'll only be for a short period
You say that as if it hasn't already happened, Adderall has been ubiquitous for years.
At my last office job we had an intern from out of state miss work abruptly because she couldn't get her Adderall prescription filled, and, I shit you not, skipped work to fly to Nevada to fill her out of state 'script because CA pharmacies wouldn't. She claimed she couldn't get any work done without it, from what I saw she couldn't get any work done either way, but the Adderall sure helped her focus on her phone for hours on end.
Really? Do you have any basis for saying this? For many people, going without meds is like going without glasses--you may be able to walk around without your glasses, but you're not functioning the way you want to.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-...
There was (is?) a duopoly of manufacturers for estradiol valerate: Par and Perrigo. [0] Perrigo stopped manufacturing, only disclosing issues with "shortages of an inactive component" to the FDA and refusing further comment. Par said their supplier for the API pulled out, and had to rework their supply chain.
I eventually managed to track down a trans-run compounding pharmacy that had apparently stockpiled the stuff (so grateful to my community!) but it was a rough time and I'm glad my ex came through for me. Detransitioning is harrowing, I speak from experience.
0. http://www.ridgepoliticalreviews.com/all-articles/no-country...
I was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADHD, and while I definitely felt the “high” from Adderall (and was convinced I was more productive) it was hard to say I actually was. I did find it easier to stay up later than I should; but that loan always comes with interest, the drugs just give you a bigger line of credit. Ditto other stimulants.
The only stimulant I still use is caffeine, and I would like to use that one less. For non-chemical coping, I find day-before and morning-of planning to help immensely with my ADHD symptoms. I do wish I had gotten non-medication help sooner in life, but even in my late twenties, still better late than never.
Smoked pot for a while in my twenties and it was crazy how I immediately became aware how much of my daily life was just stuff I was doing on autopilot.
When I haven't smoked pot in a while I sort of lose that awareness of it, and the autopilot just blends into the noise of everyday life.
It's a little scary when you think about how unaware we normally are of it.
Every single second is a struggle over the who gets control of the hardware, and most of the time the host wins.
What "I" want and what the primitive host brain/OS wants are 2 completely different things. Food, shelter, reproduction. That's all it needs. Needless to say, "I" want so much more.
Of course, what everyone else sees as "me" is the body/machine. We are one in the eyes of other people, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Misquoted from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
One commenter on HN once wrote, that meditation helps him more than the stimulants. The ten stages of meditation (https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) depicts the mind as an elephant too. It gets distracted by the ape mind (look! shiny!) in the beginning. If you want to start meditation, get the book that has been recommended here before: Mind Illuminated by John Yates
If you're lucky that's a common state of mind. But for people like me who have severe cases of inattentive ADHD, it's a once-in-a-blue-moon state of flow. Off medication my life is a perpetual hot mess, in large part because my self-image of who I am is not reflected in how I act, moment to distracted moment.
Adderall (or Vyvanse in my case) gets me a 0.95 batting average. Every moment of every day I'm on-task, energized, and achieving what I want to achieve. It makes the person I am, moment to moment, reflect the person I want to be.
Most people get prescribed Adderall because of failings at work or school. People come to think of ADHD as an unable-to-work-hard personality failure. But really it's a my-life-is-a-hot-mess-and-I'm-struggling-to-stay-afloat condition that you just can't escape. Adderall is a magical drug that makes this failing go away, leaving us on top of things and feeling normal.
You find the right line and I'm right behind you, buddy.
I've been an addict and dude you sound like an addict
How do you recover when you get distracted in the middle of work and can't get right back to it?
How do you even do the planning itself when that task is just one of the ten or so that your brain thinks should be done right now?
Even after exercising, I feel good but I still can barely concentrate on anything, I have to always bring my attention back "manually", for lack of a better word.
When I do manage, it’s a mix of things going on.
It helps to follow genetic advice like exercising, staying hydrated, sleeping enough, and not drinking too much. It’s generic advice because it’s pretty universally applicable.
Separating tasks into “must do” vs “want to do” helps keep things from falling through the cracks and makes it easier to prioritize.
I try to be mindful of when I am giving myself leisure time vs demanding performance, and reminding myself (preferably aloud) which mode I am in if I find myself distracted. Speaking of speaking aloud, vocalizing my internal monologue (aka “talking to myself”) helps me debug it, sort of like rubber ducking. I like to declare my goals for the day out loud to myself in my room, and it’s easier to get through hard times and make tough decisions when I talk to myself. I also feel like it improves my memory, though I haven’t measured to confirm.
It helps to work on my relationships with success and failure, and with meaningness. Some days will be failures. Most successes will be modest. Evaluating your self-worth on a day-to-day basis is like day-trading on the stock market, very risky and not the best growth strategy for most people. Warren Buffet’s investing advice is remarkably applicable to life in general.
Being in nature is incredibly healing. I love camping with friends/family, but any outdoor activity is good.
I’m incredibly optimistic about the potential of therapy involving psychedelics and I am a monthly donor to MAPS. Some people may benefit from pursuing similar treatment modalities on their own, though there are inherent risks and of course there is no silver bullet for mental health treatment.
I put the tasks into a text file.
I run a python script that keeps track of which task I should be working on, displays it to me, and shifts from one task to the next every two minutes with audio cues for 30-minute sprints.
So, I work on the email for 2 minutes, then I hear 'SWITCH TASKS' in my headphones and I read like two paragraphs of the paper and I hear 'SWITCH TASKS' and I spend two minutes on the code, then I hear 'SWITCH TASKS' and it's back to the email. It cycles through the task list in 2-minute bursts.
I know it sounds insane and incredibly inefficient, but it's the only way I can keep my brain on track. I have to keep it moving at a million miles per second. When my brain is racing as fast as it can to keep up it seems to be happy and my aggregate productivity goes up (even with the inefficiencies at a micro-scale).
Sometimes I'm lucky and I get through a few 30-minute sprints my brain will fixate on one of the tasks and I can do just that for the next two hours uninterrupted, but that's not something I expect every day. It's nice when it happens.
My brain wants to be doing ten things, so I just feed it ten things and keep cycling though them in 2-minute intervals so it doesn't have a chance to get bored with any one thing.
This is how I stay off of meds.
I've been productive in a variety of ways. Some examples are listed on my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shawwn but I feel silly bragging about comparatively minor accomplishments in ML.
But I know for a fact that without adderall, I wouldn't have done a damn thing. I've tried for a few months. Shrugged and went back.
Her flying to Nevada is completely understandable. CA pharmacies are some of the worst in terms of this medicine. I've experienced it firsthand.
Is it so hard to believe that I'd probably be a potsmoker working at a grocery store if I hadn't had adderall? Not that there's anything wrong with potsmoking nor working at a grocery store, but it's not ML.
I advise empathy. Try. And I wish I could put it more eloquently why it's worthwhile. Her missing work for a few ays is equal to a coworker getting sick for a few days. Your reaction is why so many keep their lives private.
I myself have gone from Missouri to IL to fill a script. A few hours' drive is nothing. Fun road trip.
Most recently, a person (who wasn't me) found themselves in CA unable to fill their script because their doctor wasn't licensed in CA. They literally just tell you "Sorry, can't do it." What are you supposed to do?
It's easy to say "Well, just deal with it." And we do. Let me cast a sleeping spell on you and see how well you do. You're getting verryyy sleeeppyy... you'll have a rough week.
You cut slack for someone with a broken leg or a blind cane. But unless you've been there yourself, you don't understand what's going on in the head of someone else. So the natural thing to do is to decide "they're slacking".
In fact it is even worse because e.g. irrational behaviour of a mentally ill person often invokes a negative response. This results in stigmatisation, which is inherently counter productive.
A general mindset change is needed to address this on a larger scale. Specifically, in education there should be much more of a focus on ethics than there is now. This is hard because it can be in contrast to "profit-focused" education where e.g. the main goal of studying a field is to get a well paying job at a big company. But of course there are many factors there such as how a university is funded and can keep running.
Sadly, it doesn't look like the general population is ready for these discussions because as a human race, we cannot even get over more known/discussed problems such as racism.
When you sit in front of your clean and prepared desk with over 20 and you sit there and hold a pen and you look at the book and nothing happens and you just can't and give up after 15 or 20 minutes starring at it, i realized thats how it is.
I don't know where this blockage comes from, i know it took me quite a while to see this barrier so clearly but i know now this was always here.
Ritalin just solved this problem. I had a small wall to break through with Ritalin, easy and then i just did it.
There's an underlying assumption here: that the medication either makes things better, or makes things worse. It may have different effects on different axes, but it has those effects while it is active, and they go away once the drug is metabolized.
This way of looking at things makes the logic of using many psychoactive medications inescapable from a school and career perspective (Maybe less so from a social point of view). But it's not the only way to look at things.
What if, for the sake of argument, we posited that that the drug has not one, but two kinds of effects:
1. Constant effects, like we are assuming right now, and
2. Derivative effects. Effects that change not how good you are at work today, but how good you are tomorrow. This could be either an adaptation to the medication, or a suppressive effect the medication has on learning.
If that is so, then we would expect type 2 effects to dominate in the long run, but type 1 effects to dominate in the short run. At any given two week window taking the medication is a huge win (because of type 1 effects), but on a longer time horizon of perhaps two or three years the prognosis could be better off the medication (because of type 2 effects).
The devil is in the details, ofc: do type 2 effects exist? How large are they? Is there a crossover point? Is it two years, twenty years, or two hundred years?
My personal experience with stimulant medications is that type 2 effects do exist, and that the crossover is something like two years. That means that getting off them requires one to put up with two years of being worse off than one was on the medication.
Very nice, nuanced analysis and sadly one I can relate to almost 100%. It was really hard to let go of it but I had to for the sake of my sanity. The side effects were getting too dramatic and long-term to ignore.
I happened to have a good friend on Adderall in university, and he let me try a pill one day.
In one day I went from thinking that I was just a lazy, low-achieving individual that would always zombie through life, that—like my dad said—just didn't have a fire lit under my ass, and I went to realizing I was just a low dose pill away from achieving all I wanted. (I would eventually tell my dad that I did feel like I had a fire lit under my ass before I found amphetamine, I just had felt like it was engulfing me and I couldn't muster to move.)
I live abroad in South America right now and I fly back every three months to refill my script, that's how much it has improved my life. Though I just took a year-long break from the drug.
Btw, I switched from Adderall XR to Vyvanse about half way through my amphetamine career. Definitely was an upgrade: a more gradual curve and ~no come-down.
Anyways, the talk of amphetamine and ADHD (whatever that loosely understood umbrella word includes) is a lot like the talk of opioid painkillers: yes, there's abuse, but the conversation can't just stop there.
I got back on it a few years back after realizing that normal people didn't seem to struggle with problems I just took to be my own lack of willpower.
I occasionally take breaks, sometimes weekends or weeks. I've noticed when I get off of it, it is basically the same as when I had depressive episodes. I start to feel completely lethargic, don't care about anything, I want to sleep and I consume all food within a 10 mile radius. I've notice the same thought patterns coming off of adderall as I do when I am depressed. I don't care about anything, I don't want to exercise because who cares, eat a box of donuts, sure it feels good now, and who cares about later.
When on adderall I can be shorter with people and get angrier quicker; however I am also less likely to act out because I have better control of my angry impulses and am able to recognize it for what it is. I also don't deal well with distraction on adderall because I want to just go go go and focus on one thing. Take that for what it is worth.
Any chance you could expand on some of this self-work? I'm a big fan of self improvement books, and I certainly struggle with attentiveness. Any insight would be much appreciated.
But I could imagine getting government-vouched drugs for free could be more than appreciated by soldiers on the frontlines.
I’m not buying the holier than thou thing from the west anymore, or it’s Puritanism.
Free market of ideas need not be limited to retail shelves, and stock markets.
I was avg in school while being smarter than what i was able to bring to the paper and it frustrated me like hell.
With something like >20 i got myself Ritalin. Now i was able to get the next degree and actually start studying as well.
Whilei never took it every single day, i do took learned behaviour, like a certain 'i'm cleaning now everything' with me and other work/learning behaviours.
I prefer my current live and while i have full appreciation for everyone doing jobs which require less smarts, i would have been very depressed and unhappy if i would be stuck in another type of job without the need of my smarts.
There is absolutely no good that comes out of it and future peers will just be glad they didn't have to go through it.
That said it is such a vast different substance from a psychoactive substance that the problems that arise will all be different.
That ADHD drugs are also performance enhancing drugs in healthy individuals is just a coincidence.
As for performance enhancing dugs in the workspace, they have already made their way. The big one is of course, caffeine. Nicotine would be in second place.
And BTW, nice job managing your hyperactivity without drugs.
I go off cold turkey once in a while, and the worst I've ever gotten is a week of mild headaches.
What's good for you are other parts of the coffee bean.
I avoid taking caffeine with any regularity, let alone daily. This is why I can get a full kick from a cup when I need it.
Taking my last drink at the office and stopping for the rest of the day works.
Increasing doses only works up to a point, your brain has only so much capacity to support caffeine; anything beyond that just affects the rest of your body but does nothing to the brain.
I can drink coffee for weeks and weeks, and the stop abruptly and suffer no ill effects. Same thing with oral nicotine pouches. I can use them for weeks and weeks, and then stop cold turkey and have zero craving or desire.
I know people who do the same and the withdrawal absolutely wrecks them.
To my sadness, it feels like I'm excluded from a common universal community and performance advantage
I once tried to improve my math exam scores by drinking 4 espressos but didn’t feel a thing. I can easily fall asleep after 2 cups of coffee.
I wouldn't mind some coleagues taking some drugs, as long as they didn't make them very antisocial or generally bad to be around. But I would very much mind an employer expecting me to take something.
If there’s emerging research, which there is with micro dosing, that shows a potential tactical advantage for a particular substance certain groups within DoD will probably lean into it and try to get an exception. For things like marijuana or cocaine, not gonna happen, it’ll still get treated like alcohol influence even if it is removed from Federal scheduling. That said there’s been plenty of confusion in the past with workout supplements causing positive drug test results for Amphetamines. It’s an administrative problem without an easy solution that I can think of.
Seems that he never said it, if this Quora answer is to be believed (and it seems reasonable): https://www.quora.com/Einstein-said-that-you-cannot-solve-a-....
I've read that before it was made illegal LSD was the most studied pharmaceutical compound in the world, with literally thousands of papers written on it.
There were clearly medical uses, and it was being used medically. Whether the research was "conclusive" is a matter of opinion.
Pretty much all of the psychedelic researchers I've read or heard interviews with (which is a lot) were completely convinced of its effectiveness.
But that didn't matter to the administrators and lawmakers, who were much more interested in the headlines than the science.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2014/sep...
This was the end of 50s early 60s, seems we still did stuff like lobotomies. Idk if I can blame law makers for not taking psychiatry seriously at the time.
LSD was made illegal in 1968, so actually it was the late 60's (right at the peak of social unrest and reactionary backlash in the US), and they took psychiatry very seriously then, but they didn't ban lobotomies, just LSD.
It was pretty clearly a moral panic. Had absolutely nothing to do with science.
> I'm pretty sure the tendency for LSD users to ethically object to war or other offensive violence is exactly why the US decided it should be treated as more dangerous than crystal meth
The point I was trying to make
> It was pretty clearly a moral panic. Had absolutely nothing to do with science.
It has nothing to with being anti war, lawmakers panicked when it became a recreational drug and didn't know what to do.
Also california and nevada made lsd illegal in 1966
So still the late 60's, not "the end of 50s early 60s".
"It has nothing to with being anti war, lawmakers panicked when it became a recreational drug and didn't know what to do"
It was a recreational drug long before it was made illegal, and the illegality had nothing to do with it being a recreational drug, but rather had to do with panic over sensationalized media stories about LSD's involvement in things like the Manson murders, and Art Linkletter's daughter committing suicide.
LSD's role is Linkletter's daughter's suicide is highly questionable, as are all the urban legends at the time of people frying their eyes out by staring at the sun under the influence of LSD, or their chromosomes breaking because of LSD, etc. Yet sensational media coverage like this, along with a panic over "look what all these crazy kids are doing! They're having orgies and frying their brains on LSD!!!", combined with LSD's association with the anti-war movement and the counterculture (including Leary very publicly telling kids to "drop out", LSD being associated with "free love", etc), which shocked and outraged the very conservative powers that be is absolutely what led to it being banned.
LSD use was basically seen as a threat to established social order.
Why would crack be legal If cocaine was banned 60 years earlier?
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/14/171822608/the-drug-laws-that-...
There were, to my knowledge, no scientific studies of this relationship, and anyway it was confounded by the US being in a hugely unpopular war, with the Civil Rights movement making non-violence a popular position among its supporters, and by the fact that there was a draft. Now there's no draft, no war, an all-volunteer military.
Also, back then LSD tended to be used in way higher doses. So even if there was a relationship between large-dose LSD use and anti-violence or anti-war views, that doesn't mean that there'd be a similar connection when microdosing LSD.
Something else to consider is that while in the popular consciousness, LSD is associated with hippies and peacenicks, and psychedelics are also associated with peaceful indigenous peoples around the world, there have been some societies (like the Jivaro) which both used psychedelics and were extremely warlike and violent.
So the connection between psychedelics and anti-violent/anti-war views is far from established. That's why it'd make for a very interesting study.
I agree it's absurd that it's illegal (or that any drug is illegal, but it's especially absurd that LSD is considered more dangerous than amphetamine, as you say), but I'm skeptical both of the motive you state (that the US government banned it because they feared it'd make more people opposed to the war) and that it necessarily correlates much with generating anti-war sentiment in people who otherwise didn't have any.
I think the effects are highly dependent on the environment, the intentions, and existing predisposition of the user and the people around them. For example, it's been reported that viking berserkers used to take psychedelic mushrooms before entering battle, because the mushrooms would help induce the berserk state.
That requires both currency (are you...) and breaking a law (unlawful).
Please don't spread misinformation.
Every time I see someone post it I immediately want to read them the long list of all the dumb shit they've ever said in their life (we all got a really, really long list).
analyte123 also corrected the guy, but I read it and instead thought, 'huh, learned something new today.'
The major contributing factors for "harm to others" for cannabis, over tobacco, are:
- "Loss of relationships: Extent of loss of relationship with family and friends"
- "Crime: Extent to which the use of a drug involves or leads to an increase in volume of acquisitive crime (beyond the use-of-drug act) directly or indirectly (at the population level, not the individual level)"
- "Family adversities: Extent to which the use of a drug causes family adversities—eg, family breakdown, economic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, future prospects of children, child neglect"
"Microdoses cause cortical functions to be more fluid, leading researchers to believe that psychedelics may help certain brain areas work in increas- ingly flexible and expansive ways."
If ever there was a meme elixir designed to punch holes in your pre-frontal cortex, microdosing is it. There's basically zero evidence such substances enhance anything. In my experience, and in my observations of others, it makes you feel like you're enhancing your noggin, but real world performance definitely, sometimes dramatically suffers.
Modafinil and amphetamines probably enhance performance on grinding tasks. Nature, concentration and lack of sleep definitely enhance performance on creative tasks. Caffeine works too, and nicotine and the racetams for keeping the cobwebs out and the acetylcholine high. Microdoses, yeah, nerd "muh microdoses" articles ain't gonna cut it for me: I've seen the effects and will stick with coffee and snus. Hell, simply looking at scientific or technological output pre and post civilizational psychedelic use: you can see it hasn't had any obvious benefit. People did more amazing things back when day drinking was common.