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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m discovering the obvious, but I began using THC for sleep in my 30s and as a side effect, I kinda get a little bit high for about 20 mins before bed.

I’ll be having a shower that usually turns into a bath for safety and I just close my eyes and think. And it’s truly miraculous… My brain just wanders so freely among the ideas of the day. But what interests me most are these “eureka!” moments. They’re so fast and fleeting and my brain struggles to focus that I rush to orate them to my phone before they fade. It’s an interesting sensation to have where I’m confident that the idea was brilliant but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was seconds later.

Upon review the next day, 75% of the time the ideas are gibberish and I have a laugh at my own expense. The other 25% aren’t brilliant but are colourable and sometimes actually pan out. Usually about software design or parenting.

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Weed is the secret behind my ability to debug really gnarly problems that others get stuck on. I'm not the best coder, and I'm incapable of finishing projects, but most workplaces I've been at I've quickly become the "hey could you look at this heisenbug" guy.

I never smoke in a professional setting of course. I read the code, set breakpoints, debug prints, yadda yadda. Then when I get home I smoke some hashish and suddenly it's like I can execute and debug the code in my brain and just see the bug in plain sight like I'm Gregory House if he was a programmer. Then I pull out my laptop and throw together a fix in the dumbest, simplest way possible, test it, PR it and let code review turn it into production ready code. Because I have no idea what that looks like, and hopefully the company has other people that do(wishful thinking, i know).

Caveats:

Yes, this is very hit or miss, maybe a one out of ten per try, but you can try multiple times of course.

I'm not recommending anyone mess with psychoactive drugs unless they know it's something they can handle, and more importantly that they know how to do it safely.

I'm not saying I have my shit together wrt drugs, I definitely do not.

Weed is double edged; it has negative effects that greatly limit its functional potential most importantly on working memory and focus. I like to say weed can temporarily turn you into a brain damaged genius.

There are many other ways to get this effect without drugs: Taking a walk, meditation, sleep, sex, and basically anything other than staring at the problem can do the trick through random associations.

I was high when I wrote all this so maybe none of it makes sense, but be nice.

I used to believe this was true, but I tested it and found that I was performed noticeably worse while high across a variety of tasks. The weed made me feel like a million bucks, but actually put me at ~80% capacity. I don’t know your brain chemistry, but I’d encourage you not to sell yourself short and believe that you’re only capable of performing well in an altered start of mind. You’re probably better than you believe.

Uhm, my post said explicitly it impairs working memory and focus and is limited due to that. It plays a rather small role in just providing an extra push for that aha moment. But the aha moment can't come without doing the leg work of digging into the problem first, and that's hard, thankless work that often amounts to hours, if not days of time spent sober and working. The drugs and the work happen mostly completely in isolation from eachother. I just smoke at home to unwind and then suddenly the thing I'm trying to figure out at work clicks for me and I know what to do, so I just jot down a basic PoC fix and then do it properly the next day, at work, sober, when I can hold something in my head for more than 5 seconds at a time. Not sure how that was unclear from my comment.

I could certainly stand to do less no doubt, but I'm on something of a sabbatical right now(personal projects and recovering from burnout) so the equation is different.

I’ve heard many sorts of rationalizations to excuse substance addictions, and this sounds like one, too. It’s easy to be seduced by the feeling of getting high, making you prone to self-deception.

You can learn how to unwind without getting high. Getting high can act as a short term coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, etc. but it also throws you out of balance, leading to burnout.

Oh fun, you created a new/throwaway account just to throw me some off the top of your head, paternalistic bullshit.

So here's the thing "dude". I am a 30 year old "dude" with an IQ of 130 who never even finished high school due to severe, chronic mental illness, this particular dude tried to kill himself at 19 to where he was in clinically dead for one minute then in a coma then and developed a mild then severe then synthetic weed addiction almost immediately after release from long term mental hospitalisation. I've been through every nook and cranny of the mental health system you can imagine. Closed ward, open ward, inpatient rehab, outpatient rehab, even assisted living with around the clock psych nurse staff present. I've tried almost every class of psych drugs out there except the ones I refuse to try because they're more dangerous than most of the illegal drugs I've tried(phenelzine, neuroleptics). Pretty much the only illegal drug I haven't tried is heroin because I watched that destroy my brother's life.

And yet in spite of all of the above, I was able to pull myself up by the bootstraps, saving up my allowance to buy a copy of k&r, learning C when I was 15, and eventually even being able to work as a coder. The only place I ever felt at home was in front of a keyboard or a chess board. The longest job I held down was 1 year, cofounding a since defunct custom electronics company designing, prototyping and building bespoke automation and at a hefty premium. But then I got worse again and it cratered.

So, you still want to educate me on the "danger of the marijuanaz?" I can almost guarantee I know more about it than you unless you literally have an advanced degree in psychopharmacology.

You're gonna educate me on rationalisation? I was rationalising before you were born.

Why the throwaway though, are you really so cowardly that someone at your precious FAANG job might think you inhaled? It's so ridiculous that you think that might a real problem that I'm half tempted to dox you just to tell your boss.

Paranoia is a very common side-effect from weed. Not saying it's not a throwaway, just saying.

Keep it real.

I'm just tired of being drive by therapised man. And then when I get annoyed enough to genuinely and truthfully pour my whole soul out just to prove how incredibly facile they were being I get downvoted. HN can be as cruel and unwelcoming as it can be illuminating and inspiring.

Don’t pay too much attention to them. Your posts were a big contribution to the discussion and thoughts on here. There’s a stack of evidence even a small amount of alcohol a week has repercussions - I doubt you’d see the same evangelism if you posted how sometimes a few glasses of red wine helps you tackle thorny problems - but it’s not wholly dissimilar if someone wanted to take the same stance.

Thanks for sharing your story!

I wonder how much of it comes from the ritual and creating the space for thought. I found just putting time between fact-finding and actual debugging has always helped me debug the wilder bugs, and I noticed GP was doing the same. Not taking away from GPs experience in general though, weed is a human experience like any other so if it works then it works. We can think about drugs too clinically for some discussions I think.

Thank you!

It can be frustrating and downright hurtful to share a true, and in some ways deeply personal story, looking for an intellectual discussion on a fascinating neurocognitive phenomenon, only to be met with some low effort off the cuff remarks suggesting I might be an addict when I actively admit to being an addict! I'm not here to talk about my addiction issues, my comment was not a solicitation for out of context medical advice. I'm guilty of this myself, too, but I try my best not to after I got served my nth harrowing "you think I haven't tried that" tale like mine down below. If you want to talk to someone about their mental health issues, the only way I've found is to expose yourself and share your own experiences. This helps make them(us) feel less alone and isolated.

Thank you once again for understanding my point of view. A glimmer of light in an otherwise depressingly unproductive thread.

I experience EXACTLY the same thing moments before falling asleep (no thc). It's truly amazing. If I manage to jolt myself awake I will write them down, otherwise they will be surely forgotten. And the ratio is similar to yours, good idea/gibberish(or not feasible).

Is it just as amusing to you, the sensation of being 100% convinced the idea is absolutely brilliant, only to review it and find its nonsense?

I've also experienced that a few times while semi-asleep, it is really intriguing. I haven't been able to write the ideas down yet, and had a tendency to discrad them at the thought that being in that state made the ideas sound amazing but wouldn't be in retrospect. I wonder how that phenomenon works, and if taking any psychoactive drug would produce similar results.

You can force the hypnagogic state by holding something heavy that you drop as you fall asleep.

https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/actualite/sleep-and-cre...

Cellphones are perfect for this. For maximum effect, hold it above your face while falling asleep.

(Only semi-joking, I've done this multiple times.)

Tangentially, it's one of the reasons why I'm still using an older iPhone for my daily life because the haptic Home button (which was removed in newer models) makes it easier to use in an half-asleep state whereas I end up tapping on things accidentally when using my 13 Pro in that state: that button is the escape hatch, like ESC on a keyboard.

Any friction between the time I have an idea and the moment I can capture it increases the risk I will forget it before I have time to write it down.

I think capturing ideas is lame. It delays thinking of more of them. The benefits of thinking to oneself come not from a single idea, but from the compounding effect of all of them. And you're not thinking of your next idea while you're wasting time capturing the last one.

It's better to let your mind wander to maximize the compounding effect between the ideas, rather than to fret about memorializing every vainly appealing thought (and btw, I bet if you did that while sober, it would look just as ridiculous when reading it the next day).

Just let it flow, man. You'll remember the good stuff.

You can totally force the state of wakefullness and falling asleep by just staring at the wall too. Lots of creative ideas. No bed required. It is how I face planted in to a marble table early in 2022. New lesson learned: Check your surroundings before you do this.

Did you lock your knees and restrict blood flow?

Tell ya what, I come up with some damn catchy gibberish tunes in that state.

Here's some recently written-down lyrics from sleep-composition. Meant to be sung in a call and response hip hop kinda style, I think.

Professor: freedom's under your desk (desk)

Audience: huuuh?

Professor: freedom's under your desk (desk)

Audience: ohhhhh...

The chess genius David Bronstein famously dreamt a game of chess, woke up and wrote it all down.

I experience a similar kind of state before I fall asleep, but not every day. I sense the trigger of going into it, but most of the time I suppress it due to tiredness or lack of interest. However, there are certain days during which, I go into the state of super alertness, where I get amazing clarity of thoughts; one would wish to be in it while solving a new coding problem or trying to write super intricate code.

I've had the same experience, and often(when I'm not too lazy from smoking), I'll write down the ideas to read when I'm sober.

Usually they are correct and kind of insightful(by this I simply mean, insightful relative to the level of my normal "sober thoughts") but not as ground breaking as I thought - in fact it's usually something very obviously true and "known" but not "realized", as in the unique aspect wasn't having the thought, but recognizing the significance of the thought.

The easiest parallel I can think of during sobriety, is when you take something you know like "the ocean is filling with plastics", you're always aware that it's true and really messed up, but sometimes you'll think of it and see the thought from a specific angle that really makes you internalize how serious it is and how crazy it is that this is something happening in the world. You didn't realize anything you didn't already know, but it's still a new and useful insight

Be careful, THC messes with your REM sleep.

I wonder if that's why I felt unbelievably more tired the next morning after I smoked or something before bed,

Sure does. But it beats literally zero sleep. Day after day. Or dangerous stuff like some of the prescription meds. I’ve found a timing that gets me to sleep but I dream plenty.

This is true, although sporadic "single-dose" use will allow enough rem sleep towards the end of your sleep cycle.

Heavy use leaves enough of an after effect to supress rem almost entirely, which is partly why it causes issues with long-term memory

I started reading _The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test_ by Tom Wolfe a few months ago. He relates how Ken Kesey would write while high as a kite, to help the flow of ideas, and then edit sober.

I didn't end up finishing the book, because it was all just too foreign a subject for me to get into.

> I didn't end up finishing the book, because it was all just too foreign a subject for me to get into.

Might I recommend starting it again? The beauty of the book has more to do with Wolfe’s writing style than anything else. And if you think about it, it’s not all that foreign. Much of it comes from the spirit and ethos of the Beats (with Neal Cassady at the wheel no less); it might help you get into what Wolfe is talking about by first starting with Kerouac. Once you get through his work, the Wolfe book will make perfect sense. I think if I hadn’t read Kerouac first, I might have felt the same way as you. I’ve found that the themes expressed in both Kerouac and Wolfe are quite universal, and can be found in many different cultures. Give it another try, it’s not as foreign as you might think.

See, the names Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey don't mean anything to me. I enjoyed the writing, but I think it was a story for people who knew the people involved. I honestly spent much of the time trying to decide if it was fiction or biography.

I do have On The Road on my list, I figure I'll give it a try. Also figured I should try Bonfire of the Vanities. Especially once I finish building the new vanity for the bathroom remodel.

Bonfire is great, a true page turner. I read it while living in NYC (where it takes place). What a thrill! Enjoy it.

On the other hand, I went back to reread it 30 years later and found that everyone since has copied Wolfe’s writing style so it's not as compelling.

It’s a time capsule, for sure. For me, the most compelling thing about the book is the strange dichotomy between the sober author dressed in his three-piece white suit on a bus with young hippies and old beatniks in 1964, trying to write it all down for posterity. That’s compelling when you start to look at the entire book from that POV. It couldn’t have been an easy task.

I didn't find Kerouac very approachable (even though every sign indicates that I should), but loved the electric koolaid acid test

I’m so glad I have this experience before I get out of bed. Each day I have a morning “what do I remember from before getting out of bed” review, right after I greet my pup for the morning. It’s mostly lost, but a lot of times during the day something will come back to me.

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