Some notes on my recent, sudden, improvement in mood

Two days ago, I went from feeling listless and unmotivated to feeling more or less like my usual self, quite suddenly. I’m not sure what caused this and I want to capture some of my hypotheses for latter pattern matching.

How I was feeling

On June 14th, I sent the following message to some of my friends:

I’m kind of in a weird place. I’ve been saying that I’m pseudo-depressed, but I’m not sure if that’s a good expression.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, sometimes more than 12 hours a day. In particular, I seem to be alternating, day by day, between getting up at 7:00 AM and getting up at noon.

I feel relatively unmotivated. Things mostly don’t seem worth doing. Like, I imagine setting a serious intention to do something, and part of me asks “why though? what good thing will result from this?” and I don’t have a good answer. Everything I want doesn’t exist?

Duncan was disappointed and concerned that I didn’t seem to have “a deal” any more. I don’t have anything to live for.

That said, I mostly don’t feel particularly or actively unhappy.

And,

• I’m doing a pretty good job of exercising every day.
• I’ve been meditating every day, and I’ve been sinking pretty deep into it.
• I usually write something or program something every day. I’m getting a little bit done, but not very much.
• I’m only eating between 2:00 PM and 7:00 PM, except for liquid food.

Earlier in this month, I was pretty distracted / dopamine addicted, and I successfully weaned that off.

I woke up at noon again today, and thought “ok, something weird seems to be happening with me”, and thought that it seemed prudent to maybe loop other people in on what’s going on with me.

I think I’m only going to be happy if I’m working hard, but at the moment, I don’t really feel the point. I’m currently just plugging along anyway, and maybe I’ll get some momentum + attempting to dialog with my desires.

Of course, it might be an entirely non-psychological thing. Maybe I should try eating a little bit of meat, as an experiment, and see if that helps. I might also go to another city for  a few days. Open to other suggestions for experiments, I guess, though I might wrinkle my nose at some of them and say no.

I’ve been feeling like this for at least a month, arguably all the way back to when I was in Taiwan in May.

A shift

Then two days ago, on June 27th, I had a pretty abrupt shift.

My notes from that day

• 18:23 – I’m feeling notably, specifically happy. #[[phenomenological naturalism]]
  • I started while I was mindlessly browsing twitter a few hours ago (as I have been doing a lot over the past few days). I remember seeing something that was funny, that made me laugh. In laughing I felt good.
  • Later, I noticed a feeling of warmth around my heart.
  • I lay down with my eyes closed for a while, and continued to feel the feeling around my heart.
  • This is markedly different from how I have been feeling (unmotivated, listless).

Since then, I’ve been feeling basically like my normal self, able to get momentum on stuff.

Causes?

What happened?

I still don’t know. Here are some possibilities.

1. It was something that I ate? I’ve been at home more and RGI less since I got back from Taiwan. I’ve been eating more eggs and more carbs, and less kale, than I often do.
   • On the 27th, I ate:
     • I ate a Quinoa bowl with vegetables (including carrots and zucchini and some others).
     • I ate some of Bulgur bowl with vegetables (including green beans, and some others)
     • I ate a bobos chocklate chip bar.
     • I ate a bunch of Made Good rice crispy bars. [Note I had been eating a lot of these over prior days]
     • I ate a bunch of pure organic fruit strips
       • I did note that these had a very strong taste.
     • I drank a Gatorade.
     • I ate some chocolate chipMade Good granola minis.
   • Could the vegetables have made the difference? The Quinoa? It seems like the next time I’m feeling bad or lame, I should just try varying my diet and and if that shakes something loose.
2. Creatine made the difference? I recently bought some creatine monohydrate supplements in gummy form. Those arrived on the 24th, and I’d been munching on them throughout the 25th, 26th, and 27th. This is probably 5x more creatine than I usually take in a day, and much more than I’ve been taking recently. Possibly that made the difference?
3. Other supplements made the difference? I haven’t been taking my standard supplement stack since I got back from Taiwan (because it was a arguably-trivial inconvenience to repack all my pill containers). But on the 25th, 26th, and 27th, I took my current stack of
   • I think,
     • Morning, empty-stomach pills
       • Korean Panax Ginseng
       • Inositol
       • Alpha Lipoic acid
       • Taurine
       • CDP choline
       • L-tyrosine
       • Creatine
     • With a meal pills
       • Bacopa
       • Ginkgo Biloba
       • Alpha GPC
       • b12
       • vitamine
       • Vegan EPA + DHA
       • Creatine
   • Could that have been it? It seems unlikely, because I wasn’t taking those supplements for very long before I started feeling lame. I was taking all of those for less than 2 months (I think), before I was interrupted by travel)
4. Earlier that day, I was thinking about deciding to be happy. I didn’t quite get to the point of committing to it, in that moment, but the way I was feeling it out felt real. I could imagine just deciding that I was going to be happy or deciding to to have high energy, because life is just better if I’m happy / high energy, that it is basically a free variable, that I could just decide to be one way or another.
5. I had decided the night before that I would start trying to cowork with people for 4 hours in the mornings, to build momentum. I am doing that (I’m typing this essay in a coworking session!), though I only barely did that on the 27th, around noon, for around an hour. That seems unlikely.