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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

What's missing is how much ability you have to sleep, rather than some sort of sometimes controllable factor like schedule. In my case, my brain wakes me up with anxiety one hour or more before the alarm rings (I never check time, I'm guessing). My room is always cold and relatively dark - not photo development dark, but not far.

The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.

I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.

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This sounds similar to me. I get cortisol spikes throughout the day and that can interfere with my sleep.

Conventional recommendation is to go see a talk therapist, but I have never really bought into it. Other thing I have seen recommended is LSD/DMT which I would have tried by now if I wasn’t married, it seems like too bug of a risk that LSD/DMT will alter my psyche in such a way that ruins my marriage which is not fair to my partner.

Best I have found is detaching from society, back country camping, no technology. But I don’t want to become a hermit in the woods to just be able to sleep regularly.

Mushrooms are not quite the same, but give you more intensity control (and are much shorter duration). And legally there is ketamine therapy.

I'm not sure if it'll completely remove the cortisol issues I have. This feels biological, maybe due to early traumas. Are psychedelics supposed to fix these? I thought it was more for depression than always-on vigilance.

Removing all real dangerous stressors (like work and house woes) would really help. I tend to be a lot more tolerant of less sleep while on vacation. That said, I spend a lot of money and time finding quieter hotel rooms or airbnbs.

My understanding is that LSD/DMT can “re-wire” your brain and give you an out of body experience that allows your psyche to realize what patterns are serving you and which ones are not (hence why LSD/DMT being very successful curing addicts). My theory is that early trauma and a somewhat explosive father has lead my nervous system to be on a hair trigger as a coping mechanism, if somehow I can convince my nervous system that this is no longer a necessary coping mechanism that would help.

That sounds familiar to me.

Ketamine with psychotherapy has become mainstream and legal I think in a wider context, and there are different ways they do it - one is to give that heroic dose under supervision with a drip which can be a controlled administration.

Psychedelic therapy with mdma or mushrooms is only legal in very few places. Personally I find mdma is more promising for what you (we) experienced there. There's a sort of ancient wiring due to childhood threats. MDMA has been proven to help soldiers with PTSD, which I think is a big adjacent to this (the vigilance being the common facor)?

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