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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

This is great and all but how can you objectively measure something like "mood" or "productivity"?

There are a lot of variables, even in your day to day work activities (e.g. you never debug & implement a fix for the exact same bug twice...one bug might be a satisfying and enjoyable activity, another might be a frustrating, difficult, and tedious pain in the ass)

I've done similar trials with magnesium glcyinate and personally not noticed any difference. But then I have not found any way to accurately measure differences between what a "good day" is Vs a "bad day". Even without supplementing, it feels like dice roll at the best of times

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I haven’t seen any cognitive / mood difference for me when taking magnesium supplements in any form.

But then I went to one of those sensory deprivation chambers, where they use magnesium salts to change the water’s buoyancy.

I felt the most content and happy in my life for a week after. It was really bizarre - I would “just not care” about pressures at work, failing personal relationships, any stress really.

And I remained effective, just with a higher EQ because I wouldn’t overthink things.

Tried it some more times with similar effect. So now when I end up in a situation where I build up stress and can’t seem to get to a chill state - just go for a deprivation tank and align myself back, though I try not to get into a situation where I need one altogether.

> There are a lot of variables, even in your day to day work activities

I consistently find the only thing I can correlate reliably is sleep quality assessment upon waking up. If I feel great and rested I know my performance during the day will be better at pretty much everything.

Chess puzzles work quite accurately IME to assess my mental capabilities for the day. Especially the puzzle storm on lichess. There are enough puzzles there to not repeat themselves too often and they are rated so they have similar difficulty for the same rating. In my good days (lots of sleep in previous nights) I have way better scores than on my bad days (30-40% better)

Getting big Taravangian vibes here.

I don't know but we can measure stress reliably by HRV. It correlates extremely well with fatigue in general. For me personally, I think it correlates with mood and productivity directly, or at least the preconditions for them.

The same guy concluded that LSD microdosing is without any effects so I'm ready to dismiss his ability to reach any conclusion worth listening to.

But he do excel at making a site a pain in the ass to navigate and bulking up the volume of text without adding anything useful to it.

It reeks of some effective altruist flavored breed of pomposity.

Maybe it has no effect?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11311906/

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