My little paradoxical reactions

Caffeine makes me tired, and a few other things have weird reaction too

Most people love coffee. It tastes nice, and also makes them feel more productive at working.

I wish that could be me.

I feel like medicines just like to react differently to me. Caffeine, Creatine, Terbenafine, etc.

I give some ramblings below, they are much less informed than I’d like them to be.

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Caffeine

I don’t fully understand why, but most of the time when I drink caffeine, I end up just feeling foggy and tired, yet still not great at being able to fall asleep. Or sometimes jittery and foggy and unable to think. Probably I have some slightly non-standard adenosine metabolism, possibly other things too.

This is not the case every single time. But it’s the most common reaction.

A few times, I have drank a very large amount of caffeine (probably like 500-700mg). And sometimes this has actually gotten me past the zone of being foggy, to being jittery and sociable, and it did feel pretty good.

But the worst, is that no matter whether I feel good or usually tired on the day of taking caffeine, I then get a subsequent crash the next day. It just sucks.

I would like to one day understand how dosages of caffeine affect me, but it’s hard to decompose. I do like a lot of caffeine-containing things, and it seems to vary unpredictably.

I also sometimes get crashes in energy after eating too, and I often accompany beverages with some kind of food too. I guess I feel like these may be more pronounced on caffeine, but I have yet to look into it.

I try keep track of things, but it’s easy to lose motivation sometimes.

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Creatine

I seem to also just get paradoxical reactions from things at an above average frequency from other things.

For one, I there were two times where I felt that my energy levels were extremely low, I thought it was just life or going to the gym too much, or something idk.

But the confounding effect for me seemed to be, creatine? unexpected. I might experiment with it again at a different dose, but both times the tiredness went away after I stopped, and I only noticed that it was the creatine the second time.

This is just generally pretty rare (most report less brain fog on creatine?) so it’s surprising, but it’s not something that never happens.

I was taking 3g both times, so possibly taking much higher doses would help, but it just felt like the creatine took the energy away from my brain and into muscles. (my physical body felt fine, just my brain was foggy)

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Terbinafine

Another interesting reaction I had was from taking an anti-fungal called terbinafine.

Within a day or two of starting, I suddenly felt like I just started feeling emotions in I way that they just felt inaccessible before this. When I was feeling kind of bad, it felt extra sad, when I was feeling happy, it felt euphoric. No longer did i feel perpetually mid!

Some have occasionally noticed some plausible negative mental effects from the medicint, but it’s very rare. But it’s not really that I felt bad emotions, just that any emotions I did have were more pronounced.

I was kind of disappointed, when I missed my dose one day, and the emotional brightness kind of went away, and when I started the medicine again, it didn’t come back. My emotions muted once more.

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Vyvanse

I have kind of struggled with having strange motivation patterns for a while, so I recently got prescribed Vyvanse to help with consistency.

Trying small doses of it, having not had it before, it was excellent. I could spend all day just doing tasks effortlessly with high speed, that before felt much more difficult.

I find it lasts a long time too, I can’t sleep by default and need to take melatonin to counteract it. I would wake with slightly less sleep but with some tail effects from yesterday’s vyvanse.

I guess the reason I’m writing this today, is that yesterday i took like 5mg vyvanse again and it was slightly helpful, not sure. But today I took 10mg vyvanse and, yet again, I just fall into a very tired slump of not being able to do anything, in a way very reminiscent of taking caffeine, wanting to nap but not quite able to sleep, to not be able to think any thoughts or put in any effort.

While vyvanse has helped me a few times, it’s just frustrating that I still need to spend time figuring out dosages, and modelling how how my tolerances change, and wondering when to use it. It is sad that all my problems are not solved with a single prescription. That I still need to worry about sleep and food and exercise, but also now additionally make sure that my meds are the right dose or I might crash out again.

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What to do

I think to some extent, the easy solution just seems to be to wave my arms and do what I feel like each day, and often this works. But it feels like this has just worked less and less over time.

I want to get better, I want to do the things that matter.

At this point I should just go all-in on biohacking personal tracking to figure things out, to understand why I have all these weird reactions. To monitor my blood glucose levels, to track every dose of medicine I take, to sequence my genome.

It’s annoying that I need to do this. I was really hoping that getting vyvanse would be the final piece of the puzzle, but it seems like it’s probably only a step along the way.

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I also just want to understand the biochemistry of all these things more, I have relatively insight into all of these things. I try to eliminate other factors but I don’t have clean AB tests of anything. It’s easier now that Claude exists and is mostly good at searching for these kinds of things. I probably am not completely unique here, so maybe someone else reading this can point me towards what they know about these things too. (please 🥺)