Tag: lifehacks

Melatonin

Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

the correct dose is 0.3 mg:

Most drugstore melatonin supplements are 10x or more the recommended dose. the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Microdosing

Janet Lai Chang, a businesswoman, endurance athlete and psychedelics biohacker, reports on her year of psilocybin microdosing. “I’ll share data from my 12+ month experiment with sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin for the purposes of increasing social skills through decreased anxiety and elevated mood, empathy, and verbal fluidity.”

Mental Models

A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are 10k of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.

There is a much smaller set of concepts, however, that come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.”

This post is my attempt to enumerate the mental models that are repeatedly useful to me. This set is clearly biased from my own experience and surely incomplete. I hope to continue to revise it as I remember and learn more.

Nonfiction Writing Advice

  1. Divide things into small chunks
  2. Variety is the spice of life
  3. Keep your flow of ideas strong
  4. Learn what should and shouldn’t be repeated
  5. Use micro-humor
  6. Use concrete examples
  7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
  8. Anticipate and defuse counterarguments
  9. Use strong concept handles
  10. Recognize that applying these rules will probably start disastrously

Self-directed neuroplasticity

the more you attempt to focus, the better you get at focusing on command, and so a real change begins taking place – you slowly become able to think differently, to hold thoughts differently and to dismiss thoughts that before led to attention difficulties or unwanted thoughts and clutter – and that’s not magical or the result of shaking hands with a deity. It’s biological. In the interview, Michael explains the benefits of the secular, scientific practice of modern mindfulness meditation