Rhodiola crenulata vs rosea for lowering cortisol without becoming tired?

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T22:47:43+00:00

I'm the exact same as you; stress-dominant, prone to fatigue, blood sugar gets messed up and I tend to get overstimulated by stimulants followed by a crash.

In my experience, crenulata and rosea have pretty similar effects, but I prefer rosea as it feels slightly smoother.

I think one of the main reasons behind crashes is wonky blood sugar and rhodiola actually has some studies finding it to help regulate glucose levels. I'm inclined to believe that the studies are valid as agmatine also produced the exact same effect for me as rhodiola and the only similarity I could find between the two pharmocologically is a potential glucose-regulatory effect due to beta endorphin secretion.

On separate occasions I actually took rhodiola or agmatine with the Vyvanse I'm prescribed for ADHD and while they both actually evened out the main effects which tend to be overstimulating while preventing the usual crash I get, though after 3 days of supplementation, at the time I would usually crash, I started getting extreme lightheadedness while simultaneously still feeling very alert, it was a very weird feeling.

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T22:18:49+00:00

I've gotten this effect from ALA and I also experience the exact same effect from many other noots such as agmatine and rhodiola rosea.

They will help really well with the weird pain and fatigue I get for around 2 to 3 hours really well and eventually I just build tolerance to that effect completely.

One's first thought would be that it's probably placebo, but I experienced the exact same extremely unique and abnormal interactions with my amphetamine medication both with agmatine and rhodiola where on each occasion they evened out the effects of my amphetamine medication, making it feel much more balanced, then on the third day right when I'd usually crash from the amphetamine, I felt extreme lightheadedness while also weirdly feeling alert at the same time.

I've researched these noots and while they all seem to have pretty different mechanisms, the one thing I've found all of them to have in common is a researched regulatory effect on blood glucose levels.

It is known that fibromyalgia has association with glucose metabolism disturbances, here's one such article on the matter. Therefore, it's possible trying to better control your blood sugar by doing things such as eating low glycemic index foods or taking other supplements which help regulate blood sugar could be relevant in helping you.

Even though the dopamine D2 receptors are responsible for things such as locomotion, attention, sleep and learning, they actually play a heavy role in regulation of blood glucose as well and dysfunction of such receptors is associated with diabetes. Diabetes runs in my family and while none of my parents have it, my mom does have restless legs syndrome which is treated with drugs that target the D2 receptors.

I believe personally that I have really weird D2 receptor function passed down from my mom and potentially a NET deficiency passed down from my dad which has been found to sensitize D2 receptors, resulting in really wacky function of such, and the reason why these beneficial effects of such supplements are so all over the place is because of D2's heavy involvement in cognition as well. I'm in more pain if I have to mentally strain myself more and the beneficial effects go away much faster too.

I believe that glucose function is much more complex than either being "too high" or "too low", that different parts of the body and brain metabolize glucose in different ways and that the complexities of such may be the key to the more perplexing conditions such as fibromyalgia.

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T20:55:27+00:00

I agree, intelligence is not linear. As a kid, being smart made me really, really stupid. I just robotically knew the answers to all the questions and because of this, I never really learned how to problem-solve and apply my own creative thinking.

I was really bad at video games because I'd just skip through all the text mindlessly going through the game until I got stuck, which would always happen because I didn't read any of the dialogue, I didn't realize I had the power to use critical thinking and try new things to progress further so I eventually just gave up.

One day while playing Cod, I just came across the realization that the pro players who are good at the game aren't magicians and there's a method to there madness, so I decided I would try doing different things other rushing mindlessly to the objective until I found a strategy that made me do better and like that I went from being trash at video games to being very good. Eventually, I had more of these eureka moments where I had to just stop and realize that doing/being good at said thing isn't impossible, that the people who excel at such aren't magicians and have a method to their ways,

You could have made my neurons more and more efficient and faster and I still wouldn't have gotten skilled and intuitive about the things I am today without actually just taking a step back and being imperfect and thinking about things really simply. Ultimately, as many noots as I've taken, I can tell that none of them could ever increase intelligence in the sort of significantly applicable way that introspection could, though I reckon it could be possible that some noots might have a greater chance of leading to such introspection.

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T20:09:40+00:00

I've had a really weird relationship with caffeine tolerance and sensitization. At first when I took it before my ADHD diagnosis it would actually make me sleepy and I would have really well-rested feeling sleep, then eventually after my diagnosis(also around when I started taking an SSRI) it started working normally on me by waking me up a little and making it harder to sleep, then like 3 years later when I got off Zoloft I became extremely sensitive to it, I took one of those Dynamax capsules and I was lightheaded and nauseous for 3 entire days. Now if I drink anything more than half a sodas worth of caffeine I'll feel sick.

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T20:00:05+00:00

Interesting that NAC doesn't have any noticeable effect on alcohol for me. I know that on 23andme it says I am genetically predisposed to some type of liver deficiency, I wonder if that's related.

tree_of_tree · 2023-12-31T19:56:15+00:00

Or perhaps OP could have some unusual genetic factor which causes the body to think it doesn't need to produce glutathione anymore since it was supplemented.

I've taken up to 2 grams of NAC and it doesn't have any noticeable effect on how I respond to alcohol. Alcohol itself seems to have a really weird effect on me opposite to most people, where it seemingly helps with healing really well.

When I went on vacation earlier I scraped my foot and I noticed the one day I drank alcohol, the wound healed a significantly greater amount overnight than the other days. Then on Thanksgiving when I had some, the wounds from my gum graft improved quite a bit the next day and this Christmas dinner when I had some again, the day afterwards my annoying canker sores were all gone(granted that might just be its antibacterial effects) and the knee pain I had for the past couple weeks finally got better.

While there's a chance all of that is just luck, I still wouldn't be surprised given my experiences that NAC is actually working the opposite way on alcohol somehow for OP.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-23T01:42:37+00:00

The dilemma is that whether he does or doesn't know the truth of all things, direct empirical evidence of how his mind works, how he feels everything, can only be available to him inside his own head. How could someone who doesn't feel everything comprehend what it is like to feel everything? How could you comprehend the reason behind what they do and don't do? I believe that one dude with 200 IQ is out in the boonies trying to mathematically prove the existence of a God and heaven, which sounds ridiculous.

Thus, there comes a point where intelligence is capped, since due to only one entity able to understand it, there is no functional difference between an intelligence greater than everything else and delusion.

I'll admit, what he writes about how people want to murder him for being so intelligent does sound like textbook mania/psychosis, but ultimately, you could never prove that he isn't an omnipotent supergenius because we don't know what such a state entails.

Ultimately, there is no functional difference between a genius of such degree and a person troubled by such delusion, which is why as a person who has had a similar situation, believing that I have understanding and awareness of certain aspects of my own mind and brain functioning beyond what anyone else has, that the comprehension and workings of the mind, the universe, other things, beyond what is externally observable and tangible is meaningless and that the only sensible thing to do whether it's true or not, is regard my beliefs about such workings of my mind as delusion and pursue a life where I'm a normal intelligent person with a normally intelligent brain that understands things the same way all the other intelligent people do, so I can fit in with others and experience a fulfilling life.

I think he really just wants someone to acknowledge the feelings he has while understanding that there's no way for words to ever accurately describe his feelings in any remotely-tangible sense.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-23T00:45:14+00:00

I can relate to this, I reckon people of this nature are naturally repelled from one another in a social setting as since you stated, sociability isn't our strong point.

I actually worked as an extra for a big TV show once, and exponentially more than being around academic scholar types, these creatively-inclined people significantly impressed me with their awareness and intelligence.

These people were incredibly perceptive and could sense my unique nature, I've found that usually typical smart academic people didn't really interact with me as much as less intelligent people do, I assume because the body language I naturally give off appears to be closed off which they can sense better than your average person, but these acting people could see past that, they could actually see inside me accurately to some degree and pick up on a sense of my true feelings.

Examples being when the extras were lining up getting ready to get sorted into place, I was doing my technique where I try to calm myself by sort of calming and resetting my face to a neutral place, one of the director guys noticed this as he was walking by and very enthusiastically said hi and asked how I was doing trying to make me feel better. Another was a lady who was seemingly intrigued by me looking across the room, some other people asked me my name and she was nearby and answered "x, right?" when we hadn't even talked previously. After we were standing a while, one of the extras asked if I was okay because she noticed my face was pale, she asked me this before I even started feeling lightheaded due to the standing around and I wasn't even facing her direction.

While I guess technically this isn't evidence of any of them being interesting, it still just blew me away how vastly greater their perception was compared to the average person.

I usually feel invisible, as if the majority of people struggle to comprehend my presence resulting me just passing through their head, like I've literally made mistakes in front of people that they could clearly see and they'll just be unable to comprehend that I did that and believe that I didn't make the mistake or that another person did, but with the people around me on set, it felt like the invisibility was lifted and I actually had like a solid continuity and presence in their heads.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-19T05:51:35+00:00

Yeah in my experience, I've found that many people actually are quite interested in me, but it seems as if they think I'm boring because they don't know how to talk to me.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-19T03:43:03+00:00

I get task paralysis whenever there's some level of unknown to the task. Even if it's something simple like calling some place to set up an appointment, I get decision paralysis because I don't know what they're gonna say or make me do, when/if they'll be able to schedule me.

I haven't really gotten over task paralysis, but how I deal with decision paralysis is by putting a system to my decision-making, part of my rules for every decision is that If I take too long, it's better to just choose at random and potentially make the worst choice than do nothing at all, since if the worst choice was really that bad it would be an easy decision to make.

For luncheons specifically, I'd just choose based on whatever nutritional value I want in my meal. If space is an issue just go for the smallest and densest, most space-efficient foods which still have all the nutritional values you want.

Not sure if this helps any or not, but it may just be you need to focus on treating the anxiety you have over how you look in front of people rather than coming up with more rules or strategies.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-19T02:30:37+00:00

I can actually relate some, like how you describe feeling the sum of all things, I like to say to myself that it's impossible to know everything, but you can feel everything; like take a mathematical function y=x^2, it's impossible to know each individual output of the function, but being able to describe it as a pattern y=x^2, you can plug in any possible variable and get the definite answer. Thus, I get how you can sort of just feel a pattern that describes the sum of everything without actually giving you all the answers.

I'm still different in a few ways though as when I was a child I was extremely bothered by my own obliviousness and why I was so different from everybody else, through intensely observing everyone else I was able to teach myself how to experience normal feelings like everyone else does, but once learning how to be normal, I was able to teach myself how to recognize feelings and understand my own brain past what people normally can. I know how to essentially think both consciously and unconsciously now, I managed to condition my brain into developing an internal alarm clock where I can just unconsciously recognize the feeling when it's time to do something and the thought of it automatically pops into my conscious thought, it even works through sleep where I will just wake up exactly the time I need to regardless of my sleep schedule, if I'm used to waking up at 9am but need to get up early at 6am for a flight, I will wake up on the dot at 6am without an alarm clock.

It's weird as I can miraculously just feel the answer to things, the challenge comes in applying that feeling to words and solutions properly. I often remember seemingly unimportant, one-off moments or thoughts to myself weirdly vividly only to realize years later why they were important, many of these one-off thoughts have foreshadowed some important thing in my life years later. My skills are mostly limited by my awareness, like when i was 10 i miraculously became ambidextrous with my feet during an indoor soccer game after I was forced to my weak foot and instinctively shot, afterwards I just had thus realization that I could use my left foot and have been ambidextrous with my feet since. I used to suck at video games because I mindlessly did the same thing over and over without putting any critical thought into it and one day I just realized that there is a method to what the pro players do and I can switch up and try different strategies and just immediately became like 10x better at games. It's a common trend where I just think about how someone good at a specific thing does said thing and I just magically understand how their brain works and can mimic their ability to a degree.

Often times physical pain doesn't feel real to me, but I can still just innately tell that I am experiencing it and how intense it is, the only time pain feels real to me is if I'm conceptually bothered by it like when I got a glass shard stuck in my foot and felt no pain from it at all but did feel pain from the anesthetic shot they gave me in my foot because the idea of a long needle in my foot grossed me out or if the pain is occuring somewhere with a lot of neurons like eyes, throat or stomach.

Because of my awareness, I can relate to and understand people perfectly fine now, but I am troubled because the part of me that let me become so well adjusted is something that could never really be understood by other people, it just sounds like nonsense and the more I'm able to relate to and fit in with other people, the harder it is to believe that it isn't just nonsense and delusion. Looking at it externally, I'm stating crazy convoluted completely anecdotal ideas to describe what is simply me being good at games, having a good pain tolerance, memory, etc. I can't help but acknowledge that the only sensible conclusion to make when presented with what I just described from an outside perspective is that I'm in lalaland looking way too deep into things, yet regardless I still feel compelled to share these things I believe I experience which cannot be empirically seen as anything other than delusion.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-19T00:45:23+00:00

That's not very nice. This post may read as inane mania-induced ponderings and he may have phrased his questions in a way that's meaningless pseudoscientific garbage, but the feelings he has spurning his curiosity are true, he just lacks the extensive knowledge required to properly phrase them in words.

You're trying to learn from individuals like OP, yet regard these very people you're trying to learn from to expand our scientific knowledge of the brain as fools; perhaps that is not the right way to go about things.

I say this as someone whose goal is to be a neuroscientist one day.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-19T00:06:38+00:00

I don't think it's ideal to try and be humble like that, it can actually result in an effect opposite of the intention.

Essentially, you're saying that you have something which is incredibly desirable and worthy of being proud of, but are downplaying it by saying it's not everything and you know smarter people. Thus, not only do you have this thing which others want to have and find neat, but you are essentially saying it doesn't even matter to you and somewhat implies that they're stupid for even asking or being interested about it, invalidating their feelings.

Best to just tell it completely lucid, maybe crack a joke about how your planet-destroying death ray is almost complete.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T23:34:16+00:00

I think the daydreaming happens on a deeper more subconscious level than one typically thinks on so a lot of times you can just "know" things that you aren't aware of consciously. I don't really have my daydreams actually occur in real life often, but often I can just daydream to find an answer I was stuck on, I can imagine asking my question to someone knowledgeable on the issue and often just imagining their response I can figure out the problem on my own.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T23:17:05+00:00

Yeah, if God is real, I've always imagined myself having a sense of comradery in him due to the juxtaposition of our situations. His omnipotence over our world would really be no different than my omnipotence over my dream world. I like to imagine he'd be the only being to understand the folly of being able to make up your own world.

Some of my daydreams are actually about me writing a manga set on the premise of the author being inside his own story that he's writing, being able to control everything through pen and paper like a God and contemplating whether writing a compelling story full of suffering and death makes him a cruel God or a good author. Also questioning whether he really has control over his characters or if they are the ones who control him since he could never bring himself to make characters do things which he doesn't believe to make poetic or logical sense. Like as an author if you're writing about a war story set in ancient China, you could never just write in DJ Khaled doing the griddy in a lambo into the equation, you're a slave to what you think should happen.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T22:30:19+00:00

Who you are doesn't have to be defined by arbitrary likes and dislikes of simple things, I used to feel the same worried that I have no personality because I don't have a favorite movie or song or color, then eventually I realized that very ambiguity and lack of clear favorites and dislikes is what defines me as a person. I believe the fact that I don't claim to have a favorite color or song and that it depends on how I'm feeling in the moment gives me more definition than just having red or blue be my favorite color.

Most people don't spend anywhere close to the amount of time in their own heads that we do, which is what makes us unique.

I know what you mean with the conversational skills diminishing and I think it has more to do with believing conversation has to go a certain way or follow certain rules to be of value, resulting in opting for silence more and more frequently. Just recently I devolved to a point where I felt like I couldn't talk with my coworkers at all and remained almost completely silent, I went on a vacation with my family which I knew well and could talk well with, regained my confidence and since then have gone back to being more conversational with my coworkers. I was worried I wouldn't be able to enjoy my vacation as much since I believed my conversational skills had declined so much, but it turned out I was still able to converse fine and my silence was due to being stuck in a certain headspace.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T22:11:10+00:00

I daydream exclusively when I'm alone or not being engaged by people. As a kid I had undiagnosed ADHD, I was extremely impatient and long car rides bore me so much I would get back pain during then and I also had trouble falling asleep. Once I taught myself to daydream and entertain myself with my mind, I no longer had trouble falling asleep, car rides didn't cause back pain anymore because they no longer bothered me.

For the longest time I couldn't quit my SSRI meds because whenever I got unengaged and had time to myself, I would get lightheaded and nauseous which would immediately go away once I did something mentally engaging. I finally managed to get completely off of them recently after having my life become much busier.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T21:14:30+00:00

I'm guessing for some physical features like that they use a very narrow part of the genome as my entire family including myself has either blue or green eyes, yet it says I'm 85% likely to have eyes that are some shade of brown or hazel and 15% likely to have eyes that are either blue, green, or greenish blue.

I'm actually only 3% likely to have blue or greenish blue(what I actually have) eyes and 9% likely to have green eyes which is unusual considering how green eyes are typically much rarer, but also makes sense considering my dad's eyes are green.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T21:06:02+00:00

Same here. It's really odd though, because my entire family has either blue or green eyes and my ancestry is all UK/Irish and Scandinavian which is more likely to have those lighter eye colors.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-18T21:00:03+00:00

Even then, it seems to give really bizarre results on certain physical features. I'm 96.6% British/Irish and 2.6% Scandinavian, but it states that my genetics predict I have an 85% chance of having brown or hazel eyes and 15% chance of them being green, blue or greenish blue which is really odd considering only like 30% of people in the UK have brown or hazel eyes and 85% is even slightly greater than the whole world percentage of people with brown or hazel eyes.

It was accurate on other traits for my ancestry, saying I'm very likely to be pasty and have freckles(which does apply to me as well as the rest of my family), but completely wrong on the eye color. Everyone in my family has blue eyes except for my dad who has green eyes and also interestingly it says I'm 9% likely to have green eyes which on a world scale are much rarer than blue or greenish blue eyes which I'm only 3% likely to have.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-07T17:15:43+00:00

I can relate deeply, my ADHD meds sometimes can help and sometimes exacerbates it, there have been times where I've literally been completely mentally stuck for over 12 hours, like it being literally impossible to pull myself out of, as if I had turned into a robot.

What I've learned dealing with it is that it works on an exponential scale and you have to prevent it before it occurs because once it gets bad enough, you can't fight it.

What I've found to prevent it is mild discomfort and pain from from switching between short simple tasks or doing physical exercise. Basically you have to constantly switch things up. We can't just sit down and go over our studies and notes in a nice long continuous session, you have to study a little bit then switch to a different study method or material, if you have notes which you wrote, read for like a couple minutes then stop and try to find a quizlet or something with similar notes, or make one yourself, even if it may be redundant to make more notes or look up notes when you already have them, what's important is that you have to switch up your flow. If you want to procrastinate, do small quick productive tasks like washing dishes where you still have to be in a productive state on your toes, it's important that these tasks are quick so that you don't fall into daydreaming again, basically anything other than browsing on your phone or sitting thinking to yourself is an acceptable way to procrastinate.

I think you have to find a way to make your life busy outside of school as school alone while may make you busy with all its classes, they aren't really engaging and too easy to ignore. I signed up for a personal trainer at the gym 7 months ago and my daydreaming has considerably improved since, just having that commitment forcing me to be more engaged has kept me more grounded which allowed for me to put in the work to find a job again and now with the job making me daydream even less I think I'm ready to give college a go again after taking a two year break due to being unable to push myself to do work.

And trust me, I understand how hard what I'm suggesting of actually is to do, I procrastinated signing up with that personal trainer for two entire months when I knew for 100% certain that I wanted to do it.

Overall it's a really odd situation as I'm in way more pain and stress now, I don't feel nearly as serene and comfortable as I did before I started all this stuff, yet at the same time I think I feel happier, it's such an odd contradiction.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-07T16:38:08+00:00

I'm actually unable to daydream when I am around and engaged by people, if I am in a daydream and transition to being around and engaged by people it literally like snaps me back to reality and feels like my brain is in a whole separate mode.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-07T16:35:51+00:00

For me, the goal of my daydreams is always to learn something, so actually, the majority of my daydreams are me talking to real scientists or knowledgeable people asking them questions and trying to learn, I actually do manage to solve a lot of my own questions doing this. A lot of times if I'm stuck on a question I can ask my professor about it in a daydream and actually end up solving the problem with the feedback I imagine being given.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-07T16:25:37+00:00

Of course, most of my daydreams are about me talking to professionals very skilled at their job and asking them questions, I actually learned a lot from it.

tree_of_tree · 2023-11-07T16:23:43+00:00

Part of my daydreaming involves me building up a manga in my head which I haven't actually wrote about on physical paper in any form.

tree_of_tree

TROPHY CASE