The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Have you ever used smelling salts to stimulate wakefulness? I am afraid I am naturally very drowsy person, caffeine does very little to me (apparently I have an efficient liver) and I was wondering if using ammonium salts may be a useful option. Are there any big 'no-nos' of using smelling salts? Do you have any good or bad experience? Or maybe you know any good hacks for some nice adrenaline flush in the morning?
Hmm. I'm someone who does not get positive effects from caffeine either. But I don't think the liver is to blame. An efficient liver would make the caffeine be processed and done away with quicker, but it wouldn't keep the effect from coming.
I've no idea about smelling salts, but dullness/drowsiness can be trained to not appear much. This was part of my meditation training. You can use strong antidotes against the dullness whenever it comes, and deconstruct it (how do you know you're drowsy? Ask yourself this and look at its component parts), and your brain will learn not to produce it (or learn to counteract it autonomously, perhaps).
You can do hyperventilation, and/or tensing of all the muscles in your body for a while, repeating that a few times, and if you're really drowsy put cold water in your face too. If you train at this every time you get drowsy, dullness will be significantly reduced in frequency and strength after a month or two.
Thank you very much, that's an interesting reply. Yeah, maybe some variations in brain receptors are responsible for variations in caffeine sensitivity, I haven't studied the topic much.
Could please expand a little bit on your meditation for wakefulness? I have good results from meditation, albeit not for wakefulness yet. If I understood you correctly: you observe your inner state in the morning and try to identify the state of drowsiness until it fades away gradually or you apply some other practices?
I usually try to hyperventilate a bit before work, but unless I force it strongly, the effect is only slight, so I'm looking for some other ways.
It's not a "meditation for wakefulness". Wakefulness is always one of the two factors that should be present in any meditation. You should be both calm and wakeful/alert in any meditation. I do not observe my state in the morning specifically, though a serious meditation practice will make your awareness of your mind and your sati (mindfulness, working memory) stronger at all times. The advice to deconstruct dullness is one of the things you should do to get a handle on the problem, to understand it. The other thing you should do are the antidotes I mentioned. You must respond to dullness with sufficient antidotes every time it shows up. As much as it takes. This is the way to train it out of your system. If you're not in a place where you can start hyperventilating, do muscle tensing and deconstructing of the dullness in order to understand it better. Set aside as many minutes for this as it takes.
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