Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning.

~ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

For a long while now, ever since my first child was born ~4 years ago, I've struggled with the "morning slump". I frequently wake up and everything just feels... gray. Bleak. Cottonish. Irrelevant, unamusing, unsurprising. On the worst of days it feels like depression, sad and lonely and helpless, and separated from everything and everyone. Sometimes it even devolves into irritability; I get angry at small things, and of course my whole family suffers because of my mood.

This is one of my "main" mental issues these days. Why is it that I'm moody in the morning but then by the time I go to bed I'm my normal happy self? Throughout the past few years I've tried some (unorthodox) things to combat these feelings, but none of them really fixes the issue; they just patch it for a while.

The first thing I tried, and it's probably the most common/popular remedy for this, was to drink a cup of coffee early in the morning. It does work for a bit, but after half an hour or so the "bleakness" comes back-worse than before, as now it's accompanied by anxiety (not to mention that the time between waking up and that first cup becomes "extra dark"; the caffeine monster is real). My strategy to more or less get around this was to drink another cup mid-morning, and then another around lunchtime, though what this does is really just push the anxiety, dread, and tiredness to later in the afternoon.

I've also tried smoking some weed early in the morning. I've tried smoking a tiny bit (almost in the spirit of microdosing) as well as smoking a lot. The latter is best for mood but leaves me feeling drowsy all day (which, in my opinion, is not that pleasant of a feeling) unless I smoke more (and the more I smoke the more tired I end up by the end). This approach also more or less works, but it's the same as coffee, as it wanes after around half an hour, and the bleakness is now accompanied by sluggishness1 that affects me throughout the day. Moreover, whenever I'm in such a negative mental state and smoke, when the effects start waning I find myself feeling a barely perceptible but definitely-there sense of "hunger" for more stimulation, which itself ends up being its own source of discomfort.

Something else I've tried is microdosing psilocybin with different schedules. These, again, more or less worked, but I did experience issues with concentration/focus (especially with things I didn't much want to do, like work). Microdosing didn't really do away with the slump; it just made it feel different. I still had that sense of things not being pleasurable, so the grayness was still there. Perhaps it helped a bit with the sense of hopelessness? Anyway, I only tried it for three months or so before deciding it wasn't for me. The concentration issues I experienced were just too disruptive for my day-to-day life. Also, I don't know how it is for others, but I didn't find the experience to be especially pleasant; it was even a bit uncomfortable at times. I tried varying my time of day when I took the dose just to test if the "slump" was the one underlying the whole experience, but I found that even when taking it later in the day I still experienced that unpleasant, pervading feeling. As I write this I realize I never tried the obvious thing of varying my dose, though it was already pretty small to start with, so I'm not sure it would've made any difference.

(An interesting note though: I was still an avid coffee drinker when trying weed and psilocybin, so I'm sure the caffeine-induced anxiety, not to mention the caffeine crash itself, had much to do with the negative feelings I experienced. I wonder what things would be like now that I'm no longer drinking coffee?)

I spoke about this in another recent post, saying that my mornings have actually been getting much better since I started weaning off coffee and introducing some movement into my routine. However, I sometimes still experience that bleakness in the morning, which has pushed me to at least keep an eye out for new things to try.

I don't know why I hadn't done it before, but recently it occurred to me to investigate a bit more about this phenomenon. It turns out that "the morning slump" is actually extremely common. I was reading about it and learned that the prevalent hypothesis is that in the mornings your dopamine levels tend to be pretty low, and lots of people also experience a strong spike in cortisol (stress hormone) a bit after waking up. If the balance between these two is off, then we get that "flat" feeling.

This got me thinking, "what's a good way to naturally (no substances) bring up dopamine levels"? After some looking I found out that cold showers seem to be a great way to go about it!

(I'm way out of my depth here, so I will try to present things as I understand them, which might be wrong. Please correct me if you know better)

It seems that there are multiple studies2 demonstrating that "cold water immersion" triggers neurohormesis (which is a new word for me). Basically, it means that brief, controlled stress actually strengthens the nervous system rather than depleting it. Cold water immersion has also been linked to an increase in the amount of norepinephrine by about 127-530% (depending on temperature and duration). From what I gather, "norepinephrine" is the hormone responsible for alertness and focus. Another excellent thing for us is that they found people really didn't build up tolerance to cold showers; the stress response seems to become less pronounced after the first few weeks, but the beneficial effects still show up at the same levels.

There have also been measured increases in peripheral dopamine (doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier) of ~250%, though it's likely that "central/brain dopamine" also increases, but that's harder to measure, of course.

For the past three days I've been taking 2-minute cold showers just after waking up, before I even give myself the chance to enter into that slump. I can confidently say that (so far) it works really, really well. Subjectively, I feel there's that initial "shit fuck, goddamn shit" shock that completely pauses and throws away whatever I was thinking when I initially got under the shower, which is great to pause any negative train of thought and start anew.

Then there's also a more psychological component, which is the act of "doing something hard". I imagine that choosing to start the day doing a relatively hard (but quick) task does wonders for your own sense of accomplishment. After I'm done I always feel reinvigorated and with an undeniable sense of agency. Of me being the one controlling what I do rather than just riding the waves of life. Choosing something hard helps to reframe the whole morning (and, for that matter, the whole day).

I'm not sure about this, but there's probably something to say about the fact that this willful, repeated triggering of the stress system might "harden" it, make it more resilient. That is to say, it might raise the bar for what counts as "stressful" later in the day so that smaller things no longer bother you as much. This might be just me extrapolating without really knowing what I'm talking about, but it does align with my experience these past few days. I've found myself not being as bothered about small things, like being much more patient with my kids or things around me.

Now, it must be said that only three days is probably too little time, and it could very well be that all the positive effects I'm feeling are placebo. It could be that I'm just feeling better, more alert, just because I'm expecting to. The good (or bad?) thing about placebo is that it eventually wanes, so it's just a matter of giving it time. I'll try to do this experiment for around three more weeks or so and do a follow-up post after.

⛄

Thoughts

  • Interestingly, I kept thinking about writing something else for this post (i.e., not about cold showers), but nothing else would come to mind! The topic was insistent, so I eventually gave in and wrote about it. My idea was to get some more days of experience with cold immersion before writing about it, but my subconscious wasn't having any of it, so we came to the compromise of doing this sort of "intro post" and then doing a follow-up later on.
  • Yesterday I finished reading The Will of the Many, and holy crap was it good! It's funny because around the 20% or so mark of the book I was thinking of just dropping it because I wasn't liking it much. I'm glad I didn't! It goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover (nor by its first 20%, it seems).
    • I'm now starting on the second book in the series :P I'd actually planned to read something else, but the first ended in such a cliffhanger that I just couldn't help myself.
  • Yesterday I was cleaning up my old bookmarks and stumbled upon the remains of the great Dendrite Stories website! I'd tried to find it a couple of times recently but didn't exactly remember the URL, and web searches didn't really give me the result I wanted. I'm sad to see it's now just a graveyard since the maintainer turned it off, but I can also understand that the cost of moderating such a site must have been enormous.
    • In case you didn't know, "Dendrite" was a site where you could read and write "choose your own adventure" stories. The cool part was that some stories allowed anyone to contribute new branches (choices and their results), so if you were reading a story you liked and found yourself at the end of a branch that was still unfinished, then you could continue that story as you pleased. Or you could even add new choices to existing nodes. Really cool experiment in social storytelling.
    • I've thought many times about doing a similar project myself but never did. Now that I know the official one is dead, I find myself slightly more motivated to do it than before. Not sure if anyone would use it, but that doesn't necessarily mean I won't do it :) though I would need to think a bit more about the moderation aspect. If you have any ideas, please do let me know!

Footnotes

  1. To be fair, I've only tried CBD-heavy strains. I'm curious what the effect would be with a THC-dominant one, though I still suspect the benefit will be temporary. I also would prefer not to depend on an external substance for daily regulation of my neurochemistry (if I understand correctly, weed was found to blunt dopamine release in the long run, so there's no telling if my symptoms would actually become worse with extended use). I still enjoy smoking a little bit every once in a while (maybe once or twice a week?), but it's for fun and relaxation, not because I need it to cope with reality. ↩

  2. The main study I referenced for this post was this one, which is a sort of short "review article" of different studies on cold immersion and their claims. ↩