Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 18

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but Ritalin seems to make me... smarter?

Not only can I tackle harder math problems that would've overwhelmed me before, but I can do so for longer stretches of time, and the solutions come quicker.

But also smarter in terms of avoiding stupid things like consuming sugar, eating too much or wasting the entire afternoon on something pointless.

It makes me very goal seeking in everything I do, and that's something that's been missing before.

My Mastodon account has probably been a bit boring lately. I haven't been posting much and most of it has been about ADHD or medications.

I believe that one of the symptoms of ADHD is that you have a lot to talk about and a lot to say about it.

Another related problem: Struggling to give straight answers to simple questions, and sort of having to think out loud as you answer before you get to the point.

My sneezes conform to the English standard. They sound like "ACHOO!"

Some people just make this strange snorting sound like "AH-FNRT!" or sneeze like a cat, "CHI!".

Current status: I accidentally enabled the alarm on my new ceiling projection clock as I was setting it up in the bedroom last night, and the default alarm time was 06:00...

Ouch!

I have a cold, so I took some nasal spray. Unlike all other times I've taken it; this time burned like hell!

I have used this brand for years and it should definitely not be doing that to me.

It just so happens that both Otrivin; the brand of nasal spray I use, and Ritalin, that I take for ADHD, are vasoconstrictors. My nose *has* been a bit dry lately...

I suspect that my nose and throat are swollen, but also dry, and thus sensitive. Maybe I'll just make tea and inhale it instead.

Ouch!

I have a cold, so I took some nasal spray. Unlike all other times I've taken it; this time burned like hell!

I have used this brand for years and it should definitely not be doing that to me.

I've noticed that my mucus membranes get dry when I take Ritalin. It just so happens that Otrivin; the brand of nasal spray I use, is also a vasoconstrictor.

I suspect that my nose and throat are swollen, but also dry, and thus sensitive. Maybe I'll just make tea and inhale it instead.

My new glasses give me insanely sharp vision. I only got my old glasses a year ago, but I always felt that the prescription was a bit off.

There's only one problem...

They kind of never feel right, and the optimal sharpness seems to be at a slightly wrong tilt. I have to wear them somewhat sideways to see perfectly sharply.

I have also realised that my jaws are poorly aligned. My bite is off to one side and it gives my whole face a sideways bend.

@byllgrim No, milligrams per kilogram of body mass. So, if a medication has a maximum daily dosage of 0.5 mg/kg, and you weigh 80 kg, that's 40 mg per day.

Usually, they just state the dosage for medications in mg alone and assume that everyone weighs 80 kg, or that body mass doesn't affect the medication.

In the case of Ritalin, the research suggests that body mass is important, and that 1 mg/kg is a reasonable daily dosage.

My ADHD medication schedule is fairly ridiculous. I take 30 mg Ritalin at 07:35, followed by 10 mg at 09:14, 10:37, 12:00, 13:21, 14:41, 16:00, 17:17 and 18:33.

What's so special about those numbers?

They are at 99, 83, 83, 81, 80, 79, 77, 76 and 72 minute intervals to create the linear serum level increase in the image below.

My serum levels are going to be much lower than 22 ng/mL. I weigh about 130 kg, so this much per day is a reasonable number of mg per kg for me.

It's almost embarrassing to compare how well my head works when I medicate my ADHD to when I don't take the meds. I swear to god, it's like it adds a few points to your IQ. When I do code or math, the good ideas I need just come to me quicker than without them, and it feels like a very natural thing. It's like a car with a badly tuned engine. It'll take you where you're going, but it won't go well, and it might break down sooner than usual.

Glasses protop: Applying a heat gun to strategic spots on plastic glasses will let you bend them easily. Use 150°C on the heat gun, no mouthpiece and apply heat for about 2-4 seconds, and then see if it will bend.

Warning: You might end up spending all afternoon fine tuning the fit if your glasses. You can tune it way snugger than they have time for at the optician.

Math tip: If you need something that approximates a step function but is continuous, the logistic function is handy for that. It's also handy for functions that need to move between two different plateus for an approximate given range of x.

I switched from Due to the stock Calendar app on iOS over the weekend.

Due is very good at nagging me until something gets done, but it unfortunately doesn't understand what an upcoming event is, and it has no concept of a time span, nor a way to get a proper overview. Also, the macOS version of it is quite sloppily executed.

Unfortunately, the alerts in Calendar don't work any better for me than they did the last time. Sometimes, they don't work. At other times, I miss out on them.

@Thot-Crimes Yes. When I'm at the waterfall near my apartment, the sound is relaxing because it's a mix of brown noise with a lift in the upper treble that gives it a bit of a sizzle. It's very soothing. The recordings I have found of waterfalls are too coloured (too much midtone) so I'm going to mess around with a noise generator and a parametric equaliser and see what I can come up with.

@Thot-Crimes I'm using an app on my laptop for the moment, with a speaker attached. It has a good selection of infinitely and seamlessly looped ambient sounds. Audio engineering is a hobby of mine, though, so I'll probably create my own sound files at some point.

I tried the sound of a brook, but my brain did weird things to that, so I swapped it for pink noise, which is more uniform.

It's a bit sharp though. Might try brown noise next.

The wakeup at 4 AM seems to be fairly consistent. I've been known to lapse into biphasic sleep patterns before. I've heard that the notion of first/second sleep was commonplace in pre-industrial society. You couldn't do much work after dark, so you tended to just go to bed at dusk, wake up for a bit halfway through the night and then sleep again. Not very practical in 2019.

I need a bit of ambient sound to block out the auditive hypnagogic hallucinations I otherwise get at sleep time.

I've been using a radio set at low volume for that up to this point, but I've been waking up at night quite frequently as of late.

To figure out why, I've been recording at night. It's been very enlightening. I seem to wake up when I snore loudly and when there's a news bulletin on the radio.

I have replaced the radio with ambient sound from a speaker. I'm still awake now though.

Today, I have inadvertently explored the effects of taking not quite enough Ritalin all day.

In short: Stress and despair.

You feel like you have a million things to do, but can't quite settle down on one thing and focus on it, so you feel an increasing amount of despair as the day passes.

"Recently, Chermá et al reported a large variation in the optimal treatment dose of 59 patients with ADHD; however, blood sample analysis revealed that the median daily dose per body weight [for Ritalin] was similar (~1.0 mg/kg)."

Interesting!

I have a (gradually improving) obesity problem and I currently weigh about 130 kg.

This would explain why daily doses of about 100-100 mg seem to work best for me. I'm going to have to let the psychiatrist know.

@ned Haha. Yeah, so I'm just pissed off that my brain seems to rotate the eyes a bit hither and thither.

If I vibrate my eyeballs a bit, I can make them align with how they were when I took the eye exam.

It looks like my left eye, the dominant one with the better vision, is adapting better, while my other eyes is lazy about it, since the left eye is working. I might have to wear an eyepatch to force the "bad" eye to adapt its axial alignment.