Friday, November 9th

The Daily Report

Sorry for the lack of contact yesterday. Kind of impulse, we ended up having a "get out of the house" day, which proved to be much needed... especially since we've been having a stretch of genuinely sunny (if chilly) days after so many dark gray ones.

I've been doing some personal research into brain chemistry and caffeine. I've long been aware of the basics of how caffeine interacts with adenosine receptors, but I had no real knowledge of its effects regarding dopamine, or the full spectrum of what dopamine does in the brain. Two salient facts that stand out to me are 1) dopamine is responsible for the brain's pleasure/reward mechanism, the feeling of satisfaction or accomplishment and 2) caffeine increases dopamine levels.

These strike me as important because in the past five years, my caffeine intake has been decreasing from thoroughly unhealthy levels to almost zero, and at the same time my motivation has just been trending sharply downhill. I have a harder time starting things, and an even harder time finishing them... and not because I hit an actual wall or burn out or write myself into a corner (all things that do happen), but because... no matter how much on an intellectual level I'm aware of the point of what I'm doing, I'm not feeling it.

Not as often and not as deeply as I felt it back when I was drinking two to three liters of caffeinated soda a day, anyway.

I went from having a lot of ambition, to understanding on an intellectual level that I need to be doing things and moving forward, but not feeling any actual need or urge driving me onwards.

So I've been looking into other ways to encourage dopamine production, and I have some new tools to do that. I don't expect to be setting the world on fire the way I was in my mid-twenties, but I think I should be able to catch a spark more often.

The State of the Me

Still doing okay.

Plans For Today

Got a chapter of Tales of MU to finish.

So...

I am exactly two days into my experimental efforts in boosting my dopamine uptake, and part of me is thinking that it's probably too early for there to be actual results and anything I'm noticing is probably the placebo effect, but then I'm thinking: the benefit's "in my head" either way. If I'm feeling good, I'm feeling good. Whether it's the change in my herbal supplement routine that's altered my brain chemistry or the thoughts that I'm thinking in my head that's doing it, it's the same result.

I'm feeling on fire today in a way that I haven't in a long time. I feel engaged with things... with everything, really. I've actually scrapped my plans for where to go with Tales of MU and am going to be doing something a bit more exciting. It kind of dovetails nicely with what I've been wanting to do since I started doing the author commentary on the first book and looking back at what I've lost from my process since then... I've been wanting to pick things up a bit, but the need has been lacking.

This will all make more sense next week.