1. Maybe you’ve already established an online presence. You published a few pieces, but there is a gap between the person you are and the writing on the page. The idea in your head is lively and fun, but you feel like the writing is lacking that. Perhaps you’d want to publish more consistently, but you are frequently dealing with creative blocks.

2. Or maybe you want to learn how to write. You have things to say but you don’t know where to start. Perhaps you’ve managed to start a bunch of pieces, but now you have a pile of unfinished drafts and you cringe at the idea of ever publishing them.

If this sounds familiar, I can help.

I’ve been there

I now publish long essays on this blog. They are read by hundreds, thousands and occasionally tens of thousands of people.

But it hasn’t always been this way. I wasn’t born with a special writing talent. I used to struggle to compose a single tweet, let alone write a paragraph. If I had to document my code (I worked as a Software Engineer), I’d be fine. But god forbid I’d have to put something emotionally vulnerable on page.

My writing process was kickstarted by Sasha Chapin’s writing coaching (who is no longer doing it). I then challenged myself to write 100 things (which took a couple of years). In November I completed Inkhaven, a program for writers where you have to publish a blog post daily for 30 days or they kick you out of the program (my final post on what I learned).

Over time, writing stopped feeling like a mysterious talent other people had and started becoming a set of skills I could practice: saying what I actually mean, noticing what’s fun to write about, being vulnerable on the page, cutting out hedging and evasiveness, and developing the courage to finally hit “publish”.

Along the way, people started subscribing to my blogs and twitter. I started reliably receiving compliments on my writing from friends and strangers. Ex-colleagues I’d lost touch with started reaching out to get coffee. I also became way less neurotic about life and it has gotten more interesting.

I don’t think I can help a professional journalist win the next Pulitzer. But I am well-suited to helping people who are where I used to be: full of ideas, overly cerebral, scared of sounding stupid, and struggling to express what they actually mean.

My colleagues at work ask me for feedback on their writing. People at my writing club events in London (1, 2, 3, 4) seek my advice. So I’m making it official: I’m offering writing coaching online.

The process

I don’t use a fixed curriculum. We’ll start with your actual writing life: what you want to write, what you’ve already tried, and where the work feels stuck. Then we’ll adapt based on what actually happens.

During the sessions, I’ll be providing high-level advice and feedback. Between sessions we’ll work async: I’ll read your updated drafts, help you edit them and answer your questions.

I can help you with:

1. figuring out topics to write about;

2. telling whether an idea is stupid or secretly good;

3. making conceptual writing emotionally alive;

4. crafting sentences, structuring sections, figuring out endings, editing & titling your posts;

5. publishing online, promoting your writing;

6. establishing a consistent practice, creative project management;

7. dealing with creative blocks / performance anxiety / publishing cringe;

Sometimes the problem is the draft. Sometimes the problem is your relationship to the draft. I’m interested in both.

My skillset isn’t limited to writing

I do stand-up comedy (92 performances, for an example check this video of me making 450 people laugh). In addition to that, I’ve also taken 7 improv comedy/theater courses and 3 clown courses.

Most writers don’t get realtime fast-paced feedback for their art in front of an audience — I do, and I learned a bunch of insights from comedy writing that apply to writing in general.

Performing on stage has made me much more sensitive to rhythm, surprise, tension, status, and the difference between technically correct language and language that causes an emotional impact in your audience.

How to know if we’d work well together

If you read my work and think “I’d like my writing to become more like this in some way,” that’s a good sign. If you just go “meh”, probably not — you probably need some other set of skills, and I can’t teach what I don’t practice.

What writing to read? I’d recommend checking out these four pieces.

1. My viral piece of writing advice: Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That.

2. A cringe personal story, How I Lost My Backpack with Passports and Laptop.

3. A long researched effortpost that helped a non-profit raise an extra $1,700 in donations, Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics.

4. A fun whimsical post on comedy & communication in general, Prosocial mischief: gently fucking with social scripts via improv.

$175/hour for a session

I charge $175/hour. Sessions can be one-off, but they would be most useful if we work together over multiple sessions. Problems tend to unfold over time: drafts evolve, blocks mutate, and the real problem is not always the one that appears first.

Async work between sessions carries no additional charge. It’s not unlimited, but you can expect reasonable amounts of it — we’ll discuss the exact arrangement.

Book a free 30 minute consultation call

If this sounds like a fit, book a free call — I’d love to talk.

If you’re curious but unsure, I invite you to book a call anyway. Don’t worry about wasting my time — I like talking to people about their writing, and these calls help me understand what people are generally looking for. You can think of it as helping me do market research.

And feel free to email me with any questions.

But psychedelics also help against one of the world’s most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of the head, typically around the eye and temple, and last between 15 minutes and 3 hours, often generating intense and disabling pain. They tend to cluster in an 8-10 week period every year, during which patients get multiple attacks per day — hence the name. About 1 in every 2000 people at any given point suffers from this condition.

One psychedelic in particular, DMT, aborts a cluster headache near-instantly — when vaporised, it enters the bloodstream in seconds. DMT also works in “sub-psychonautic” doses — doses that cause little-to-no perceptual distortions. Other psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are also effective, but they have to be taken orally and so they work on a scale of 30+ minutes.

This post is about the condition, using psychedelics to treat it, and ClusterFree — a new initiative of the Qualia Research Institute to expand legal access to psychedelics for the millions of cluster headache patients worldwide.

Cluster headaches are really fucking bad

If you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’ve probably seen memes like the one above. Despite what it tries to imply, pain intensity is not really about the amount of red on a schematic — or even the size of the actual area affected.

A tension headache is just your regular headache — most people get these from time to time. A person with a tension headache can usually function, especially if they take some ibuprofen or aspirin. I get these headaches occasionally and I can easily imagine someone preferring a mild one to some CHRISTMAS MUSIC.

Migraines are much worse — there is debilitating pain that lasts for hours, often with extreme light sensitivity and vomiting on top of it. I’ve never had one, but I’ve watched someone close to me get them regularly — and I’d personally pause before wishing a migraine on my worst enemy. Our old good friends, ibuprofen and aspirin, are at least somewhat helpful for a majority of patients.

And cluster headaches are even worse than that — often far, far worse. So much worse that people often feel profoundly spiritually betrayed by the very fabric of existence, saying that they “feel betrayed by God”. Regular ibuprofen and aspirin are of no help.

Two quotes by patients (from Rossi et al, 2018)

Yves, a patient from France:

You no longer have a headache, or pain located at a particular site: you are literally plunged into the pain, like in a swimming pool. There is only one thing that remains of you: your agitated lucidity and the pain that invades everything, takes everything. There is nothing but pain. At that point, you would give everything, including your head, your own life, to make it stop.

Thomas, another patient from France:

If you want to understand what it means to live with cluster headache, imagine that someone is stabbing a knife in your eye and turning it for hours. Imagine the worst pain. Imagine a daily torture, gratuitous, incomprehensible. Imagine yourself suffering alone, terribly. Imagine being a prisoner in a straitjacket of suffering... Imagine the desire to finish, with pain, and the desire to finish … with yourself. If you imagine, you will understand

Not your regular tension headache, right? Pain like this is why cluster headaches were dubbed “suicide headaches”.

These quotes paint an extremely bleak picture of terrible suffering. But how much worse are these experiences compared to other very painful experiences, exactly? Can we quantify this?

The problem with measuring pain

Imagine you are tasked with designing a pain scale. Where do you start? This is easy: make zero be completely pain-free. Step one: done.

Step two: design the rest of the pain scale. Time to start comparing actual pain experiences with each other. Maybe we can take a common pain experience like mildly stubbing a toe and pin it to 1. A really badly stubbed toe could be a 2. So far so good: you’d rather stub your toe mildly than badly — makes sense.

Then you need to place varied pain experiences on the scale: chronic back pain, extracting a tooth without anaesthesia, breaking many bones in a car crash, and others. Now this is getting tricky. And finally, where do you put “pain so bad you feel spiritually betrayed by the very fabric of existence” which is what cluster headaches are often described as?

Maybe you are thinking: “Alright, you convinced me it’s not that easy. I’m just going to cheat by looking at what the medical profession came up with.” Fair enough, but the answer we get from the medical profession is to just (1) cap the scale at some number and (2) give people vague questionnaires.

The McGill Pain Questionnaire

The above is an excerpt from a commonly used tool, the McGill Pain Questionnaire.

The McGill Pain Questionnaire caps its scale at 78. It asks people to apply a bag of words to their pain giving a score of 1–6 to each label — the scores are then summed into a final one. “Sharp throbbing flashing pain that terrifies you” would be 10/78 (assuming no other adjectives apply to it).

While this scale is multi-dimensional, it does not exactly “carve reality at its joints” — it doesn’t provide us with actual insight into the nature of pain and the substrate that generates it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still useful, especially in the medical context. You can track a patient’s improvement over a period of time. And if one day’s “27” is actually better than another day’s “26”, that’s still fine as the overall trend over days and months is informative. You can adjust treatments and use the score as a rough guide — some “measurement noise” is fine.

But we can’t trust a scale like this to give us a trustworthy estimate of how much worse cluster headaches are compared to other high-pain experiences.

The 0–10 Numeric Rating Scale

Sometimes scientists take an even simpler approach. We’ve all had a number of varied pain experiences throughout life — and we can rank them roughly. Why apply a bag of vague words with arbitrary scores when you can just ask people to put a number on their experience?

That’s the idea behind the 0–10 Numeric Rating Scale — one of the most widely used pain scales in clinical care and research. This scale asks people to assign a number from 0 to 10 to their experience, with 0 being “no pain” and 10 being “the worst pain imaginable”. Pretty reasonable, right?

One problem with this pain scale is illustrated in this xkcd comic strip. The “worst pain imaginable” requires you to extrapolate features of your current experience to some imaginary ceiling. This extrapolation might be different for different people. And there is no a priori reason for your imagined ceiling to be the true physiological pain max.

Still, empirically this scale provides some useful signal that allows us to compare experiences, even if imperfectly — by averaging out individual differences. Cluster headaches frequently get rated at 10 on this scale.

The heavy tails of pain (and pleasure)

There is another big problem with mapping pain onto an arbitrary numeric scale, such as 0–10. The 9.7 pain is not twice as bad as 4.85 pain — it’s orders of magnitude worse.

There is no built-in objective “pain counter” in the human mind. When people report a number, their mind has to compress a multi-dimensional internal state into a single scalar estimate.

This compression ends up being logarithmic due to Weber’s law:

Weber’s Law describes the relationship between the physical intensity of a stimulus and the reported subjective intensity of perceiving it. For example, it describes the relationship between how loud a sound is and how loud it is perceived as. In the general case, Weber’s Law indicates that one needs to vary the stimulus intensity by a multiplicative fraction (called “Weber’s fraction”) in order to detect a just noticeable difference. For example, if you cannot detect the differences between objects weighing 100 grams to 105 grams, then you will also not be able to detect the differences between objects weighing 200 grams to 210 grams (implying the Weber fraction for weight perception is at least 5%). In the general case, the senses detect differences logarithmically.

(From Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering by ).

An intuition for Weber’s law for pain

The above picture is an illustration of Weber’s law from Wikipedia. Both columns have 10 more dots in the bottom square than in the top square. But the absolute difference is much easier to detect on the left than on the right, because the relative difference is larger.

Now imagine “units of pain” in one’s experience. The difference between 10 units and 20 units would be perceived clearly. But 110 and 120 units would seem almost the same — despite the same absolute difference in pain.

Detecting a step increase on a linear scale requires the underlying experience to increase by a multiplicative factor. And so a pain scale like the 0–10 Numeric Rating Scale ends up being logarithmic — with the underlying experience varying in intensity by orders of magnitude.

This section is only meant to provide an intuition — the full argument is more complex and outside the scope of the current post. I recommend reading the already-linked “Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain” by . It combines conceptual models with phenomenological accounts from meditation, psychedelics, eating spicy foods and even getting bitten by various insects.

That article makes another important claim. Traditionally people interpret Weber’s law as a compression that happens in your senses, in early stages of processing stimuli. That may be happening for things like dots in the visual field or sound, but for internal feelings like pain, the feeling itself follows a long tail. Precisely because we can’t estimate small differences when the internal sensation is so high, the sensation needs to change by a certain constant multiplicative factor for your internal estimation to be able to confidently say “ah, this hellish pain increased still a bit further”.

Why adequately quantifying pain matters

The medical field’s major metric for allocating resources is the QALY — quality-adjusted life-years. QALY has two anchor points: 1.0 (perfect health) and 0.0 (dead). It combines two different categories — length of life and the quality of it — into a single score.

To compute it, you multiply a patient's health-state score by the time spent in that state — so one year in perfect health is 1.0 QALY, one year at half quality is 0.5, and so on. The health-state score comes from standardised questionnaires that rate things like mobility, pain, anxiety, and self-care.

QALY as a metric kind of makes sense. Ideally you want your patient to be perfectly healthy, functional, and live long. A patient being non-functional and suffering for some time results in a drop in the metric. As does a patient dying early.

Some health states are deemed worse than death, which yields negative scores. This is reasonable and good, but those negative scores are capped at slightly below zero — the two common instruments bottom out at -0.281 and -0.594. And so extreme suffering ends up being compressed into at most a modest negative penalty on this metric — relative to other, less painful, conditions.

The QALY metric ends up as an input into many economic calculations for deciding whether resources should be allocated for this condition vs that one. And so the extreme suffering of cluster headaches gets a modest boost in funding at best relative to similarly disabling conditions with only modest pain.

Ideally, we need some kind of a qualia-adjusted life-years — a metric that takes into account the actual phenomenology of people’s experiences. In the absence of such a metric, cluster headaches and other conditions of extreme suffering are overlooked and underfunded.

Treating cluster headaches

The two most commonly used treatments for cluster headaches are high-flow oxygen and a class of medication called triptans (particularly sumatriptan). They are quite effective — 60-80% of patients respond to either option.

But they also have problems.

Oxygen tanks are difficult to carry around, which limits their effectiveness when an attack hits suddenly. And even when one is available, it can take 10–15 minutes of breathing oxygen to stop an attack — with the patient being in severe pain the whole time.

Triptans are very much a double-edged sword. Short-term, they help with attacks, but long-term, their repeated use can actually make attacks last longer, become more numerous and more painful.

Psychedelics are the most effective treatment

The above chart shows that a classical psychedelic, psilocybin, is more effective than the two usual recognised treatments — oxygen and triptans. And there is now emerging evidence that another psychedelic, DMT, is even more effective than psilocybin.

Vaping DMT allows it to enter the bloodstream in seconds — it starts working near-instantly, faster than any other treatment. Unlike triptans, it doesn't produce tolerance — you can just keep taking it without it losing its effectiveness.

And despite what the label “psychedelic” might imply, it’s effective in “sub-psychedelic” doses — doses that cause almost no perceptual distortions. Aborting an attack does not require meeting DMT elves or experiencing other crazy effects that high doses are famous for.

Because DMT is so fast-acting, patients can easily titrate it: take a puff from a vape pen, wait 30 seconds, take another puff — until the attack is gone completely, and before DMT’s psychedelic effects kick in. DMT has a very short half-life of 5–15 minutes, so even if you accidentally overdid it, you’d only need to wait a few minutes for the psychoactive effects to subside.

A DMT vape pen is your regular vape pen — just with DMT instead of nicotine. It’s easy to carry around as an emergency “get out of hell” device. Bob Wold, president of Clusterbusters and a cluster headache patient who’s tried over 70 different treatments (almost all ineffective), describes DMT in an interview on YouTube:

One inhalation [of DMT] will end the attack for most people. Everybody is reporting the exact same thing. […] It could end that attack in less than a minute. […] You can take one inhalation, you can wait 30 seconds, and if that cluster is not gone completely, then you know it’s time to take another inhalation. You don’t have to wait 2h into a psilocybin trip.

[…]

You can actually visualise a switch being shut off in the middle of your brain. I hear a click as the switch is shut off and the pain is completely gone. It doesn’t, you know, slowly go away. It’s a switch that shuts it off completely.

LSD and psilocybin are also helpful, but they take a while to kick in, so they are less immediately useful for aborting a sudden attack. Many patients use them preventively during a cycle — there are protocols involving dosing them every 5 days or so.

To learn more about the pros and cons of various treatments, including DMT, read “Emerging evidence on treating cluster headaches with DMT”, by Alfredo Parra.

Why psychedelics help with cluster headaches

We don’t have a complete mechanistic story for why psychedelics help. It’s clear that the usual perceptual and emotional changes are not key here — for cluster headaches, you take psychedelics in lower “sub-psychedelic” doses.

We also don’t know if there is a single root cause for cluster headaches — our story for how they happen is incomplete. The usual explanation: cluster headaches are a “clock + wiring” problem in the head.

The “clock” is the hypothalamus. It is a small, deep brain region that helps run the body’s daily rhythms (sleep/wake timing, hormones, temperature). In cluster headaches, this internal clock seems to get stuck in a pattern where it repeatedly primes the system for attacks at similar times each day, and sometimes in certain seasons.

The “wiring” is the trigeminal nerve — a big nerve that carries sensations, including pain, from the face, eye, teeth, and parts of the head into the brain. Think of it like a high-speed cable that reports “something is wrong” from the face and head. When an attack hits, this cable becomes intensely activated on one side, producing the severe, drilling pain around the eye and temple.

Both of these areas are rich in serotonin receptors. Psychedelics are serotonin agonists — they resemble serotonin and bind to the same receptors. If a cluster headache attack is a mis-timed, over-excitable network, a strong serotonin “signal” might temporarily change the network’s set-point, calming it down.

Triptans, a class of medications mentioned in the previous section, are also serotonin agonists. The most commonly used medication of this class, sumatriptan, acts as a serotonin 5-HT_1B, 5-HT_1D, and 5-HT_1F receptor agonist. DMT has a different profile: it’s an agonist at 5-HT_2A (the receptor most associated with classic psychedelic effects) and also shows agonism at 5-HT_2C and 5-HT_1A. The pharmacology of these compounds is quite different — but they affect the same underlying system. So it’s not that surprising psychedelics work for cluster headaches — even if the usual “psychedelic” effects we associate with these compounds are not involved.

Fun fact: sumatriptan is a DMT derivative, in a literal sense. Its chemical formula is 5-(Methylsulfamoylmethyl)-DMT — basically, DMT with an extra chunk attached. And while that chunk significantly changes the pharmacology (as described above), DMT is not some alien molecule with no resemblance to existing medicines — it’s a chemical cousin of one.

The full story of DMT action is likely more complicated: for example, DMT also activates the sigma-1 receptor, which reduces inflammation and interacts with pathways in the hypothalamus.

Bob Wold, president of Clusterbusters and a cluster headache patient, whose quote appeared in the previous section, has an even spicier theory of DMT action. Here it is: DMT is an endogenous compound, produced by many mammalian brains (including human ones) and cluster headaches are caused by a dip in endogenous DMT levels. I’m not sure I buy it — it doesn’t really explain why levels would drop or how that would cause headaches. But the fact that a patient reaches for a theory like this at all is a testament to how dramatic DMT can feel as a treatment.

ClusterFree

Millions of cluster headache patients worldwide are trapped in extreme, disabling pain — repeatedly, often multiple times a day, for prolonged periods of time. During attacks, people often can’t sit still, can’t work, and can’t think about anything except the pain. Between attacks patients experience PTSD-like symptoms, anticipating their return — a sort of “current traumatic stress disorder”.

Psychedelics provide effective pain relief for cluster headaches. DMT in particular aborts attacks near-instantly — in seconds.

And yet, most cluster patients worldwide lack access to these treatments. Those who obtain access do so by breaking the law — with potentially severe legal consequences in many jurisdictions (case in point).

ClusterFree is a new initiative of the Qualia Research Institute to expand legal access to psychedelics — and solve this ongoing crisis. ClusterFree was started in late 2025 and aims to:

— Publish open letters demanding that governments, regulatory bodies, and medical associations worldwide take action immediately.

— Engage with policymakers globally to advocate for better access to treatments.

— Publish research on cluster headaches and support other researchers in the field.

— Collaborate with entrepreneurs and philanthropists motivated to bring effective treatments to market.

ClusterFree is co-founded by Dr. Alfredo Parra (twitter) and (other blog and twitter). Both of them have been doing relevant work for many years — I’ve been linking to it throughout the post and I’ll provide more links at the end of this post.

I reached out to Alfredo Parra to learn ClusterFree’s near-term plans are — here is his response:

1. We’re going to publish an authoritative, multilingual guide on how to safely use DMT to abort cluster headaches, which will be extended over time to include other treatments.

2. We’re reaching out to journalists in the UK to run stories about cluster headaches (in particular the underground use of DMT).

3. We’re reaching out to MPs in the UK to demand increased research funding and compassionate access to scheduled substances.

You can help solve this medico-legal crisis

You've just read what cluster headache patients go through. Most of them can't legally access the treatments that works best. You can help ClusterFree change this.

Sign a global letter

The letter is already signed by over 1000 people, including many notable ones, such as and Peter Singer — you can see their signature at the end. My signature is there too. It takes a minute to add your signature there.

You can also sign a national letter — if you are in one of the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States. My signature is on the UK one.

These letters aren’t just for reaching policymakers in power. They are also a way to reach prominent people, find volunteers and collaborators, encourage other people to start projects and overall legitimise the cause area by showing that a lot of people care about it.

Donate

ClusterFree.org has already raised $107k+ in donations during their End of Year Fundraiser 2025. This allowed them to set up basic organisational infrastructure and fund Alfredo Parra’s full-time work on the project.

The current funds have also allowed to hire a part-time person to help with various projects, primarily outreach and communications. The aim is to raise $150k — the extra $43k would allow ClusterFree to hire that person full-time for at least a year.

Every dollar donated will go towards averting extreme suffering by patients of a condition that’s overlooked and underfunded because of how metrics like pain scales and QALY compress experience. This is one of the rare problems where a relatively small amount of money, effort, and political pressure can end a large amount of suffering.

Hell must be destroyed

Sometimes people say that pain is a meaningful feedback mechanism. While this is often true, in cluster headaches the mechanism goes haywire, trapping millions of people in torturous hell on earth.

There is no lesson in cluster headaches: no growth, no silver lining, no meaning. The nervous system misfires and a human being is tortured for hours — then it happens again and again.

This hell must be destroyed. We have the tools for this — but the laws won't let people use them. Laws change when enough people demand it. If you want to help ClusterFree, you can — with your signature and money.

Links to articles

1. Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

2. An academic article, “The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/pain and how to test it” by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson and Chris Percy

3. Emerging evidence on treating cluster headaches with DMT by Alfredo Parra, Curran Janssens and Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

4. Quantifying the Global Burden of Extreme Pain from Cluster Headaches by Alfredo Parra

5. 12+ Reasons to Donate to ClusterFree by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

6. Cluster headache is one of the most intensely painful human conditions: Results from the International Cluster Headache Questionnaire, Burish et al

7. Cytokines and Migraine: How Inflammation Drives Pain and How Psychedelics May Modulate It

8. How much should we value averting a Day Lived in Extreme Suffering (DLES)? by Alfredo Parra

9. ClusterBusters — a charity run by Bob Wold

Links to videos

1. DMT for Cluster Headaches: Aborting and Preventing Extreme Pain with Tryptamines and Other Methods — an interview with Bob Wold, Joe Stone, and Joe McKay

2. The Case for DMT for Cluster Headaches: Practical Tips & Why It Deserves Urgent Scientific Attention by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

3. Alfredo Parra’s talk on the topic below

Yesterday I was supposed to fly to Katowice from London. But I didn’t.

I fucked up that flight by running up to the turnstiles at London Luton Airport at 22:28, 22 minutes before departure. The security turnstiles wouldn’t let me through: “Too late. Contact the airline.” An hour buffer wasn’t enough to overcome my phone’s mobile data crapping out and cancelled British trains — you’d think I’d be used to them working every other time by now with all the train strikes.

At the airline desk, a girl in a hijab was on the phone about a ticket for some guy who'd ended up in the same situation as me. His flight was leaving at the same time as mine, just going to a different destination. And the guy got lucky: she told him to run to the plane, as fast as possible.

Me? Not lucky. The most the hijab girl was willing to do for me was change my Katowice ticket to the next flight there, in the morning, ten hours later. If I spent the night at the airport, I could maybe still make my planned connection — assuming the plane wasn’t delayed, because I’d have had 35 minutes for the whole transfer.

I said yes. She told me to wait ten minutes because The System™ wouldn’t allow it earlier. Ten minutes later — no seats left. They oversold the plane in that ten minute window as low coster airlines often do.

So my clever little money-saving plan — flying to the UAE via some sneaky overnight layover in the middle of Europe — finally went completely to shit, like when you’ve got this accidentally perfect line of dominoes and then you bump one in the middle and the whole beautiful chain reaction just… dies.

WELP. I didn't want to totally blow off the trip. There were no cheap tickets for the next couple of days…

Read more

Inkhaven ended up being an interesting and rewarding experience. It was also much harder than I expected.

One reason is that I produced much longer pieces than I expected. I can write 500 words in a couple of hours. But most of my published pieces were 1000–1500 words, several times longer than the required 500.

Another big reason is that writing has been a process of emotional work and “shadow eating” — shining light of attention on cringey and rejected parts of myself and integrating them via producing sincere stories, e.g. “Writing Under My Real Name” and “Mephedrone is a Cursed Drug”. The process of writing ended up a powerful psychotechnology — a mildly psychedelic experience that made my mind come out much more self-aligned in the end.

There was a lot of fighting my neuroticism around producing quality posts. And a lot of ongoing renegotiation with myself what a “quality post” even means. Rarely there was a moment I didn’t feel the pressure of another deadline coming. As soon as I’d submit my piece, usually close to the 12 AM deadline, the internal clock in my mind would immediately start on the next one. I had to learn the skill of winging it — cobbling together a post trusting my own mind to finish it and make it reasonably artistic and craftful in the process.

The ”cobbling together” sounds bad. It’d also feel bad internally. But often this feeling wouldn’t match people’s reactions to the resulting product. On day 23 I was at the lowest point of the challenge — I felt like I ran out of things to say and wished for Inkhaven to be over thinking no one would need eight more posts from me. And on the very same day I published my most-read post of the challenge: “A One-Minute ADHD Test” — 10k views, 20 times the median amount.

Gwern, one of Inkhaven’s contributing writers/teachers, suggested looking at publishing as buying lottery tickets — you don’t know which posts will end up doing well, so it makes sense to publish a lot. Most days I would be losing 1-3 subscribers and gaining 2-4. But on the net I gained 107 subscribers going from 578 to 685 total. Some bigger lottery wins: “On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics” (+18 subscribers), “A Nicotine Analogue I Had Known and Didn’t Love: 6-methylnicotine” (+17), “Do Nothing Meditation” (+16).

All in all, I produced a lot of work I’m proud of that I wouldn’t create otherwise. The practice of saying “fuck it” to myself and hitting publish was incredibly useful — if stressful and agonising most of the time. It also made me stronger. In the literal sense: yesterday I did my first pull up in 15 years. There is a gym onsite and on most days in the first three weeks I would go there to lift weights in order to burn off anxious energy and recenter myself.

Sharpening perception and amplifying agency

There is an idea I’m currently fleshing out in my head: writing as a psychotechnology for sharpening perception and amplifying agency. The brain builds the model of the world, but it doesn’t do this dispassionately, sampling everything uniformly. Writing helps you construct those models. Then you use these models to infer more interesting details of reality.

Great writers aren’t great just because they possess a technical skill of putting words on a page in appealing fashion. They actively lead interesting lives that become interesting writing. Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is more interesting than an average person’s Las Vegas trip not just because he writes well. He arrives in Las Vegas with a deranged hyperpolitical model of America, a specific quest — understanding the American Dream — and willingness to act it out.

If an average Las Vegas enjoyer magically acquired a mere technical skill of Hunter Thompson, their writing would improve but they still wouldn’t produce writing of the same caliber. For a few months I’ve been meaning to write an homage to the book titled “3-MeO-PCE: Fear and Loathing in Amsterdam” about my trip to Amsterdam, but it just feels flat to me because I didn’t come to Amsterdam on a quest. At the same time another essay of mine “Can AI have a soul?” — A conversation with a Christian monk was much easier to write because it had a quest at its core.

To be an interesting writer is to live an interesting life. It is strange to look at a four-year period of my early life and see it become a mere 1500 word essay On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics, when I could now produce two dozen essays of the same size about the past two years.

Case in point. Last year I started doing standup comedy and so far I performed it on stage 82 times. Stand up is an excellent way to alter your psychology, and I could write a dozen essays about it alone. If you speak Russian, you can see four existing ones on my blog on Telegram in Russian. English-speaking people will have to wait, in the meantime here is a video of my performance:

I feel like I wasn’t even alive in some important sense before I started writing.

The brain is a matrix for agency, a darwinian meaning-making machine. The process of writing doesn’t just produce inert essays. Each essay becomes a part of you, and one that actively influences your life. Each interesting essay calls for more interesting essays. Interesting begets interestingness.

And that’s why I’m stopping publishing daily. I need new input, not more output. It’s time to go on more quests. See you after the next adventure.

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2C-T-2 is a wonderful chemical that generates a sense of connection to nature and its mystery. Have you ever felt that sense of wonder and awe at how magical it is that stardust from the early universe became planet Earth and all its diverse carbon-based life forms? 2C-T-2 would reliably create this feeling. It’s the feeling a hunter-gatherer might get, sitting around a fire and staring into the darkness of the forest. It’s perhaps the same sense of connection hinted at in the 2009 movie Avatar.

If 2C-B’s ground of experience is warm and entactogenic, and 2C-E’s is deep and analytic, then 2C-T-2’s is mysticism on tap.

2C-T-2 may sound like a lovely drug, but its big problem is horrendous nausea and gut-wrenching body load. It’s the absolute worst of all psychedelics I tried. I had four or five 2C-T-2 trips and I vomited every time during the come-up. It’s the kind of nausea where vomiting doesn’t help — you are dry-heaving for minutes praying for the come up to be over faster. After the drug fully kicks in, it does get better, but you’re still left with heaviness in your stomach and bad muscle tension throughout your entire body.

I only have a vague hypothesis as for why this is the case. Psychedelics are 5-HT2A serotonin receptor agonists — this is the main receptor responsible for their effects, the fun kind of receptor. But there are other receptors in the brain, such as 5HT2B and 5HT2C — a drug binding to them generally causes nausea and bodyload. I can only assume that God put them in the brain so we enjoy psychedelics less.

There are also serotonin receptors in the gut, and so an idea occurred to me: what if I tried to avoid hitting these by putting the drug in a different hole in my body? Would this work? Who knows: maybe the nausea is entirely brain-generated, and the drug would still reach receptors in the stomach from the blood stream. But perhaps it’d still hit them less overall due to the drug taking a bit of detour. Only an experiment could tell.

As an analytical young man confident in his heterosexuality and wanting to explore his body, I had no problem with the idea of sticking a psychedelic drug up my ass. Homophobia is gay, anyway. Homophobic people should work on their homophobia, so they can enjoy the upsides of putting their drugs in their ass.

And there are upsides, at least for phenethylamines such as 2C-T-2. Number one: higher bioavailability. This means that you can reduce your dose by a third or half while still getting the same effects. Homophobia literally costs people money.

Number two: faster absorption. If my plan wouldn’t work, at least the come up would be over twice as fast.

And so I bought some lube and put my dose of 2C-T-2, dissolved in 1 ml of water, into a small syringe. Then, with the excitement of a kid watching a rocket launch, I lubed my asshole, lay on my side, inserted the syringe into my rectum, and squirted it in. The resulting sensation was uncomfortable — an immediate urge to defecate that didn’t really go away for most of the trip.

The faster absorption did make the come-up twice as short, twice as fast, and twice as intense. The nausea and body load weren’t any better — in fact, they were worse because the whole experience was compressed. I had the absolute worst dry-heaving of any psychedelic experience, coupled with the most intense pareidolia of my life — looking out the window of my room, the trees were covered in human faces. They were schematic faces, but my brain was somehow convinced they were all my faces. Think of looking at a tree and seeing your reflection in every branch.

It was fun and scary at the same time.

Psychedelic trips are hard to remember, especially fifteen years later. I wish I could tell you more than this memory, but alas I don’t really have other memories formed. I remember basking in 2C-T-2’s mysticism with closed eyes, half-wishing for the trip to be over. It’s a special drug with special side effects.

Is there a lesson to learn? I’ll start from afar. The idea of anal sex is more fun than anal sex itself. It looks better than it feels. God made this hole for something else. I’m all for repurposing it if that’s your thing, but personally, I’ve never done drug rectally again.

A typical meetup starts with a talk, followed by socialising: people mixing and mingling in loose circles.

People really like the idea of talks — it’s great to have a specific reason for coming to a meetup. But think about the most fun and useful meetups you’ve attended: were they great because of the talk, or because of the conversations you had afterwards?

For me, the answer is the conversations. It’s amazing when the talk is engaging, but if the conversations afterwards lack depth, I might as well have watched a video on YouTube.

Meetup organisers significantly underinvest in making sure the post-talk conversations are great and people connect with each other. And there’s a simple way to upgrade that socialising part: turn it into an unconference.

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Unconferences

An unconference is usually defined as “a participant-driven conference with a write-in schedule on a wall”.

I ran 10+ of these and here is how they look. There are a few tables labeled A, B, C, …. On a wall there is a schedule made from large sticky notes (A5 / 15×21 cm) arranged in a rectangular grid — the start times are at the top, and the table labels are on the left. There are plenty of markers nearby so people can write things on the schedule — and there is a note encouraging them to do so.

At any point of the event, anyone can claim an empty slot and propose a session: a discussion on a topic, a mini-talk, playing a board game or even silently meditating together.

In my experience, 95% of sessions end up being discussions around a topic. Despite having the word “conference” in the name, an unconference ends up very different from its parent concept. The schedule becomes a matchmaking service to help people find others who want to talk about the same things. Attending sessions is optional — if you run into someone you want to continue talking, you can skip the next session.

I find that people put a lot of sessions in the early slots, and the later slots end up being mostly empty. People find circles they enjoy and just keep going. This is a feature and not a bug: there’s no need for this structure once attendees find interesting people and engaging conversations. Essentially, unconferences “default” to regular old unstructured discussion circles when this makes sense.

Typically, the person who proposes a topic also ends up running the session. But a classic unconference experience is arriving at a table and finding that the original proposer isn’t there. This rarely a problem — people figure this out, often the person most knowledgeable on the topic volunteers to be a moderator.

In my experience, the minimum meetup size where an unconference makes sense is about 25 people. Below that, there isn’t much advantage to it: there will be very few sessions, and everyone can talk to everyone anyway. And ideally, you need 40+ attendees — that’s when you get a diversity of topics on the schedule and the unconference format really starts to shine.

Tips for Meetup Organisers

An unconference requires minimal preparation. But there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to actually running one: you have to keep time and explain the format. Here are my tips that’d make your first unconference a smoother experience.

1. Signal the time slots clearly. Participants generally won’t keep track of time. As an organiser, you need a way to signal when slots end. I use a gong and walk across the space, gently striking it at the end of each session.

2. Explain the format more than once. If you have a talk or another shared activity, I recommend explaining unconferences both before and after it. Also, hanging out near the schedule to answer questions helps. If you already have an existing community (e.g. on WhatsApp), I recommend informing people in advance. Also, briefly explain unconference in the event description: here are my two example events: a Qualia Research Institute meetup or a Cognitive Security meetup.

3. Invite participation explicitly. Reassure participants that anything goes when it comes to topics, they don’t have to be experts on it to run a session. Make sure you have a note on the wall explicitly inviting participation. Mine usually says “Take a marker and propose something”

4. Pre-seed the schedule. Put a few topics you’re personally interested in on the schedule before participants arrive, so it doesn’t look empty. Plan to run these sessions yourself.

5. Consider getting creative with sessions you run. 95% of sessions are discussion around a topic — absolutely nothing wrong with this. But as an organiser, you might find cheap ways to run other types of sessions. For example, I occasionally run scent bars — getting attendees to smell my collection of essential oils and aroma chemicals and telling them about it.

6. A talk or another shared activity isn’t required. A talk followed by an unconference is often the best combination, but the format works on its own — just make sure you invest time into explaining it to attendees. Case in point: the schedule below is from a 100+ people meetup that was an unconference-only one.

Consider sending this post to your local organiser

An unconference is a low-tech and powerful way to make a meetup more serendipitous by increasing chances like-minded people find each other. If you are a meetup organiser — consider running an unconference at your next event.

And if you’re an attendee, consider sending this post to your local organisers. I myself will be definitely doing this. I wrote this post for selfish reasons: I want better, deeper conversations at the meetups I go to.

I also don’t know where the tradition of eating turkey comes from. And I refuse to find out. I don’t want to get my mind colonised by American culture any more than it already is. I already grew up watching Hollywood movies. For example, “Home Alone” is a New Year holiday movie for me — it was often shown on Russian TV in late December. I have many fond memories of rewatching it.

I write “New Year holiday movie” instead of “Christmas season movie” because Christmas in Russia is celebrated on January 7th. The main religion in Russia is Orthodox Christianity, and it still uses the Julian calendar. So the main winter holiday ends up being New Year’s Eve — it comes first. People do celebrate Christmas in Russia — but not to the same extent as people in the Anglosphere.

Until last year I also didn’t celebrate Christmas in the UK, where I live. I’m not Christian, and the UK celebrating Christmas on a different day than Russia made it feel acutely like a Catholic/Protestant religious holiday. On December 25th I’d simply walk around London, observing the lack of usual activity. The city would feel deserted — as if after a zombie apocalypse.

But last year I became a British citizen and gave in to properly participating in the UK Christmas tradition. My then-housemate invited me to spend some time with her. We ended up chatting while opening Christmas crackers. Together we’d pull the opposite sides of these tube-shaped things containing a trinket and an intentionally terrible joke or riddle. We took turns reading these terrible jokes and riddles. And whoever ended up with the bigger piece got first pick of the trinket. It felt great to finally be a British citizen doing British things, even though I was still feeling like a half-foreigner on the inside.

In the UK Christmas is immediately followed by Boxing Day. Apparently, it’s not a day for you to box with other people. In my first year in the UK, it was explained to me that the name comes from the present boxes people unwrap on the day. Why is it not called Unboxing Day, then? Make it make sense for me. Or, rather, don’t, because I still refuse to learn about the holiday’s history.

Back to Thanksgiving. Zero-fucks-giving about this holiday. Just say your “Thanks” on any other day, why are you making a whole-ass holiday out of this?

If there is a holiday I consider properly mine, it’s Bicycle Day on April 19th — a celebration of the first psychedelic trip on LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943. LSD greatly improved my mental health. I yearn for countries making it their official holiday.

There is another drug-related holiday the next day — 4/20. I’ve never celebrated it; I smoke weed only very occasionally. Besides, 4/20 is an American way to write dates — don’t get me started on the date format. But if I have to celebrate an American holiday for the first time, perhaps 4/20 with my friend would have been fun. Shitposting on my blog about that holiday would also be thematically appropriate. Alas, I’m not in a position to rewind time and start picking holidays now.

And besides, my friend and I only smoked weed together once. What we have done is spend many late nights in bars in Moscow, where we both also lived for a decade. So today I’ll be happy to be drinking beers with him again for the first time in years. And for that, I’m genuinely grateful to be celebrating Thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading this rant.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been actively trying to relax during meditation. And goddamn it, folks, this is hard. I am constantly spasming in different ways. There is a lot of tension in my body and my experiential field.

Relaxation is this game of whack-a-mole: relaxing one area of my body causes tension to pop up somewhere else. Proper relaxation requires coordinating mind and body in ways that’s not unlike learning to dance.

The thing is, intentional relaxation brings anxiety and fear. Sometimes it’s about past experiences. Sometimes it’s the stress of publishing daily — I’m currently doing Inkhaven, a 30-day writing workshop where you must publish a 500+ words post daily or they kick you out.

To get to each progressively deeper levels of relaxation, I have to be fairly equanimous. That usually means being a bit overwhelmed with emotion. Muscle tension seems to guard against feeling stress. It’s not just “bracing for impact” — something more complex is going on.

When I manage to relax more completely, something shifts in my experience. I get less reactive and less neurotic — I generate fewer negative “what if” scenarios. Interfacing with people feels less effortful too: e.g. it becomes easier to switch from planning my day to chatting with a friend who walks by.

It’s almost as if my default stance on reality changes. What’s going on?

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on Stances

There’s something in vasocomputation I’ve been calling a “stance” or way of feeling — stances are essentially discrete patterns of muscle tension (primarily vascular tension) that we can jump into and which offer specific affordances. The girl in this video is a great example: she goes from her default stance, to professional-calm, back to default (with a big release of tension)

Vasocomputation’s basic thesis is “vascular clenches stabilize neural patterns” — patterns of muscle tension will set certain aspects of phenomenology as constants and others as variables. I.e. every stance has a certain internal feeling that defines the stance and as long as you hold this feeling, you “hold frame” — if you lose the feeling (i.e. if this core pattern of stabilizing tension shifts), you break frame.

[continued on twitter]

Let’s unpack this.

The whole body is a computer: it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation when other systems could take part too. Muscle tension constrains and stabilises neural patterns. I picture this as some regions of “thought–feeling space” becoming less accessible — like clamping some pages in a book, or putting an overly active dog on a leash in a crowd so it doesn’t run away.

Mike says that this tension is primarily vascular — in the smooth muscle that lines blood vessels. The word “primarily” means that working with the “regular” skeletal muscle can be productive, but we could do much better by relaxing smooth muscle.

Clenched smooth muscle

Smooth muscle works very differently from skeletal muscle — it’s not under direct conscious control. You can consciously decide to flex your bicep, but you can’t decide to constrict your left renal artery.

If Mike is right, then the situation is cursed: there is a system in the body we have no direct access to, and it heavily influences our conscious experience.

What’s worse is that smooth muscle can also form energetically inexpensive “latches” — patterns of contraction that persist as stable, semi-permanent “knots” in the body’s tissues. A skeletal muscle is (roughly) either “relaxed” or “tensed.” Smooth muscle has three interesting modes: “relaxed,” “tensed,” and “latched.”

Mike’s hypothesis is that smooth-muscle latches can persist long-term — for months and years, depending on which prediction or mode of action they’re stabilising. He outlines this in Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex:

Latches can persist for minutes, hours, days, months, or years (depending on what prediction they’re stabilizing), and the sum total of all latches likely accounts for the majority of bodily suffering. If you are “holding tension in your body” you are subject to the mechanics of the latch-bridge mechanism. Migraines and cluster headaches are almost certainly inappropriate VSMC latches; all hollow organs are surrounded by smooth muscle and can latch.

He also claims that latching for months and years is possible because this tension does not require ongoing energy. So far I haven’t been able to independently verify this strong version of the claim. Textbooks say the latch state requires “low energy consumption,” not “no energy”, and the timescale usually given is “hours,” not years.

For example:

1. Brant B. Hafen; Bracken Burns in Physiology, Smooth Muscle:

The mechanism that allows the smooth muscle to maintain high-tension at low energy consumption; termed the latch state

2. Charles Asbury in “Muscle Physiology”:

This so-called latch (or latch-bridge) behavior is thought to help smooth muscles maintain luminal pressures (e.g., in the vasculature) more economically than they would otherwise, by allowing them sustain tension over long times while using less ATP.

3. Chapter 7: Excitation of Skeletal Muscle - Neuromuscular Transmission (PHYSIO 101)

Once smooth muscle has developed full contraction, the amount of continuing excitation can usually be reduced to far less than the initial level even though the muscle maintains its full force of contraction. Further, the energy consumed to maintain contraction is often minuscule, sometimes as little as 1/300 the energy required for comparable sustained skeletal muscle contraction. This mechanism is called the “latch” mechanism.

The importance of the latch mechanism is that it can maintain prolonged tonic contraction in smooth muscle for hours with little use of energy. Little continued excitatory signal is required from nerve fibers or hormonal sources

Still, from my meditation practice it’s pretty clear that skeletal muscle tension plays an important role. It would be surprising if evolution recruited only one type of muscle for computation without also recruiting the other. So while I don’t yet buy into the full story, it seems highly plausible that latches play some role in the way Mike describes. Perhaps even if individual latches don’t persist for years, they can unclench and re-clench in similar patterns, with similar effects.

EDIT: Mike posted a great response to these concerns on twitter and it makes me more confident in the model.

Meditative practice for unclenching

So how do you actually relax, given all this? Mike gives some advice in “Principles of Vasocomputation”:

Sauna + cold plunges are an effective way to force the clench-release cycle and release latches; likewise, simply taking time to feel your body and put your attention into latched tissues can release them. Psychedelics can force open latches.

I’m not sure why putting attention on a body part would cause unlatching when smooth muscle isn’t under conscious control. Perhaps the mechanism is indirect: you highlight a set of neural patterns in attention, and that in turn changes autonomic and vascular signalling in the associated territory.

If this works, there must be some way to tune our meditation methods specifically for relaxing smooth muscle. One guess: ultra-slow body-scan Vipassana combined with deliberate clench-release cycles, e.g. contrast showers or sauna + cold, using awareness to track exactly how and where the body grips and lets go.

This is the direction I intend to take my practice into. If you have other ideas — let me know in the comments.

Links

1. : Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex

2. Mike Johnson: In the beginning there was sensation

3. Mike Johnson: a video recording of a talk on vasomputation

4. Mike Johnson: Vasocomputation suggests that imagination is essentially tension-based

5. Hinterlander: meditation as mental stretching

6. Mike Johnson: The idea that sports physiology has a lot to say about how to train ‘mental muscles’ (which are literal muscles) seems super generative

In the first, I tried two dozen different psychedelics without much direction. It was like holding a magnet up to an old CRT TV and watching the image glitch and warp. Lots of substances, but not that much substance.

In the second era, I learned to direct my trips toward healing. Psychedelics became tools I wielded intentionally, and they dramatically improved my mental health, helping me with depression and trauma.

The shift happened over a brief period when two things coincided: I’d accumulate a lot of meditative insight and I discovered neural annealing — a model of how the mind updates itself. It’s hard to tease the impact of each apart, but in this post I’ll focus on neural annealing, as I wrote about meditation elsewhere.

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Neural annealing

Neural annealing is a model by , from his article “Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything”. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here I’ll just sketch the core idea.

Physics textbooks often depict metals as neat crystalline lattices — atoms locked into a configuration that represents a local energy minimum. The atoms are held in place by atomic forces — moving them elsewhere would require adding energy.

Real metals, especially ones that have been bent, hammered, or otherwise “cold-worked,” are messier. They accumulate defects and internal stresses. The atoms are still more or less locked in place, but the overall configuration is suboptimal and the crystalline structure is not regular.

To fix this you could let the atoms move more freely: add energy via heating the metal above its recrystallization temperature. The lattice loosens: atoms now shift allowing defects to “melt out”. The structure relaxes toward a less stressed, more regular state. Then you cool the metal down slowly, and the atoms freeze in their new more optimal positions. Not all imperfections get “ironed out”, but the lattice now resembles a more “textbook-like” state.

Another metaphor: packing a jar of nuts. You shake it vigorously at first, then more gently, and finally let it rest. Each round of shaking lets the nuts rearrange and settle into a denser, more tightly packed configuration. You add mechanical energy to let the system explore different configurations.

The mind as a belief lattice

Now imagine the mind as a huge, hierarchical lattice of beliefs. Everything you experience is mediated by this lattice.

Take a simple developmental example: object permanence. Very young babies don’t yet know that objects continue to exist when they can’t see them (which is why playing peekaboo is fun for them). But by the age of 18-24 months they internalise the belief that things keep existing when out of sight.

Object permanence is a high-level belief that constrains many downstream beliefs: if you place a pencil on a table, even when you turn away, some part of you still knows the pencil is there.

Not all beliefs are this straightforward.

Imagine a five-year-old who gets chased and bitten by a dog. Sometimes kids get over it quickly, but let’s look at the ones who don’t. The experience “freezes” into the lattice as trauma and becomes an irregularity. Additionally the kid’s mind acquires a belief “dogs are dangerous”, which is applied to every dog from chihuahua puppies to large pit bulls.

That high-level emotional belief constrains downstream feelings. Meeting any dog now evokes fear. Over time, the kid might carve out exceptions: “my friend’s dog is safe,” “my aunt’s dog is okay,” “my grandma’s dog is fine”. In a healthy, flexible psyche, enough of these exceptions would eventually nudge the top-level belief toward something like “most dogs are safe, but some can bite”.

But if the original traumatic memory is too frozen, that global update never happens. Instead you get a patchwork lattice: “dogs are dangerous” coexisting with a list of special cases that somehow don’t fully count.

Psychedelics as annealing

Fast-forward: that dog-bitten kid turns 18 (or whatever age you think is appropriate for psychedelics). They now want to get over their fear — it’s interfering with their life and they view it as irrational. They hear that psychedelics can help. They take LSD and then just stare at the wall, watching intricate geometric patterns melt and form. It’s a lot of fun, but the fear don’t change for them.

How do they increase their chances of resolving the fear during their next trip? Psychedelic drugs generate a lot of ”energy” — neuronal activity — in their mind, sort of raising the “neural temperature”. If this energy is directed at the part of the lattice containing the trauma, it might melt and the high-level belief “dogs are dangerous” might become more labile. The mind then has a chance to search for a configuration of beliefs that better fits the evidence: three friendly dogs plus one that bit. A more nuanced belief might emerge: “Dogs are usually harmless, but occasionally one might bite”.

Assuming this happens: when the trip ends their mind “cools down”, their new world-model stays flexible and keeps updating. The psychedelic did two things: it helped the grown-up kid see reality more accurately, and it left that new view flexible enough to keep refining itself.

Tips and skills to cultivate

A caveat

Psychedelics are both more healing and more dangerous than they’re usually portrayed. In a sense you’re getting “root access” to your own mind and gaining the ability to rewrite deep beliefs. This power doesn’t come from a substance alone — it relies on the general mechanism for updating beliefs. However, this mechanism sometimes goes wrong even without psychedelics, for example in psychosis.

Good epistemic habits help here. But as the already linked “Neural Annealing” article puts it: “In general it seems strongly preferable to err on the side of caution. You can always take that LSD tomorrow, or next week, or next year.”

How to

In this model a key aspect of psychedelic action is unlearning. You are deconstructing beliefs, de-weighting experiences and letting your mind search for a better configuration.

Psychedelics ramp up global uncertainty in the mind, subverting habitual patterns of looking at reality, so cultivate tolerance for uncertainty. The skill is to stay with it, without freaking out and without latching to the first new story that might explain what’s going on.

Uncertainty is your friend. Look at your inflexible beliefs and stored experiences — welcome them in your attention. Release often involves fully instantiating a stored experience or a chunk of beliefs in awareness so its tension can dissipate. The process is one of simplification, which can often feel like untying a knot — or peeling off leaves from a tree branch. Somatically, the body may shake — that’s normal.

Get familiar with a felt sense of what it’s like to hold a belief in attention — how it shows up in your body, emotions, and imagery. In particular, notice what it feels like when a belief becomes labile, and the different degrees of “disbelief.” Learn how to hold multiple contradictory or discordant beliefs in your awareness — let the learning machinery of your mind work out what’s going on with them.

Also, recognise when a belief drops out of the lattice completely. Don’t freak out: sometimes, in “hot” states, a belief becomes so labile it temporarily disappears. It can be disorienting, but it’s part of the search process.

Surrender to the search process. You are letting your inner parts renegotiate equilibrium: old coalitions of beliefs, fears, and desires dissolve and re-form in healthier alignments. This can feel like throwing stuff into the melting pot of uncertainty and steering it, but you don’t micromanage every update from the “top level” of your “self”. In fact, psychedelics can sometimes trigger a state known as “ego dissolution” — your entire self-concept melting off. It can be quite uncomfortable; there is a reason people call it “ego death”.

Very important — have fun. Annealing unpleasant experiences is an acquired taste, a bit like eating spicy food. Ultimately, annealing is about dissipating stored stress — and finding strategies for dissipating stress in the future. So, welcome stress. Think of this as “doing practice rounds” for the future. The “Yes, and I like it” mental motion is great here.

By default, annealing emotion-laden beliefs is best done with closed eyes, so that most of the energy is focused on those beliefs instead of on generating psychedelic visuals over your environment. However, if the experience gets too intense, reverse this tip: open your eyes to “lower the emotional annealing temperature”, watch visuals for a bit, and recenter yourself.

Is there such a thing as “overupdating”? I’ve only observed a single mind from the inside — my own. In my experience, some overupdating is inevitable. Over the next few days and weeks, the mind rolls back some updates and tweaks its emotional models.

If you are concerned with overupdating, it’s good to practice the same skills sober — with meditation and therapy techniques like Gendlin’s Focusing and Coherence Therapy. It’s also good to space your trips out in time and start with smaller doses: larger doses allow for bigger and wider updates, but smaller doses let you practise the skills in a more controlled fashion.

In conclusion

Annealing is a general mechanism of belief updating in the brain that you can leverage with psychedelics.

Done repeatedly, annealing makes the mind robust to stress, anti-fragile, and more “pleasant to inhabit”. You can’t change your past — but you can radically alter the way you look at it. If you decide to embark on the journey of rewriting your beliefs, build a good conceptual understanding of how belief updating works. I provide some links below.

May all beings anneal toward inner peace and greater coherence.

Links

1. : Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything

2. : Healing Trauma With Neural Annealing

3. : Yes, And I Like It

4. : YOU WILL FORGET, YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN

5. : Are You Just Pushing The ‘Insight’ Button?

6. : Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain

7. : Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty

8. : Predictive Processing And Perceptual Control

9. : Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

10. : Mental Mountains.

11. : What even is Focusing and why Eugene Gendlin is the greatest man to ever grace the Earth with his existence.

12. : What is Love? Neural Annealing in the Presence of an Intentional Object

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You simply can’t buy this in the UK. The UK is a nanny state that won’t let you purchase more than two packs of NSAIDs at once. And if you’re buying in a supermarket, each pack is 16 pills. The most I can walk out with is a measly 32 pills. Some Soviet bread-ration-card-level scarcity bullshit.

Britain, once a global seafaring empire, has been reduced to this petty level of red tape. The only reminder of its maritime glory is a fish-n-chips shop within a walking distance wherever you are — at least we still manage to catch enough fish.

Yet the UK’s legal regime has some surprising benefits. The government allows you to microdose trainspotting. A mild opioid — codeine, a prodrug of morphine — is available over the counter in pharmacies. You just have to ask politely. No amount of politeness will get you an OTC opioid in the US. Excuse me, America, how the fuck is anyone supposed to fully take part in the decadence of your opioid epidemic? Please reconsider.

There are two main OTC combination products in the UK: 12.8 mg codeine + 200 mg ibuprofen and 8 mg codeine + 500 mg paracetamol. Taking more than a few of these pills at the same time is dangerous because of paracetamol and ibuprofen, but if you wanted to megadose you could do cold-water extraction: codeine is soluble in cold water, and ibuprofen and paracetamol aren’t — you could use this fact to your advantage to separate out the more fun drug. This is not something I would do, but you could do it.

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“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career.” Exactly. I choose to choose life, occasionally enhanced by a small dose of a mild opioid. Very occasionally, in government-approved doses and following the government-provided instructions — no more than three days in a row.

Look, there is a reason Trainspotting is set in Scotland. Existence in the UK is mildly painful — it’s a stagnating country. We need something to dull the ache of living in the shade of past greatness. Not too much — not opium-war levels — just a tiny bit, enough to make life here palatable.

Besides, evolution is a harsh mistress and doesn’t care about our wellbeing. Evolution has left the vast majority of humans opioid-deficient. A happy satisfied monkey is not necessarily a productive monkey with lots of offspring. From evolution’s perspective, it’s best to keep the monkey slightly on edge, making it feel the pain of rejection a bit sharper than necessary — to keep it in line with its tribe in prehistoric times, when banishment meant death. (This idea is pirated from Captain Pleasure ’s video).

In modern times, a human can use a mild opioid like codeine to compensate for other painful experiences such as not getting enough likes on their Substack post, receiving a reminder from HMRC to file their taxes, or realising they’re 34 and that every dream they had is shattered and at best cobbled back together with cheap glue. Sadly, I’ll have to wait until I’m back in the UK before I can take this drug in government-approved doses.

Here’s the story of how I found the test. If you just want the test, skip this section.

The story

A few years ago when I was moving from Moscow to London I had small leftover amounts of simulants 3-FMC and MDPV from my student days. I’d use them for productivity during exam periods, but I never actually enjoyed them recreationally. Still, I was not going to carry sketchy chemicals across two borders, so I figured I’d experiment with recreational use.

I snorted a small line of 3-FMC and instead of having fun I finally felt clearheaded enough to stop procrastinating on writing a farewell post for my then-colleagues. I knew stimulants are a common treatment for ADHD, so a question popped into my head: do I have ADHD? Yes, stimulants help everyone focus, but the contrast was too striking to ignore.

I took a few online tests, they did suggest ADHD. I then read more about ADHD online and that also suggested I had it. I kept reading and reading wanting full certainty.

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There was only one definitive way to find out: get a diagnosis from a psychiatrist.

I was leaving Russia in a few weeks, and Russia bans first-line ADHD medications like amphetamine and methylphenidate. So I decided to wait until I moved to London. After two months after arriving in London, I booked a private assessment with a psychiatrist. Shortly after, I had the 1.5 hour assessment and walked out with an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for lisdexamfetamine, a prodrug of d-amphetamine.

One of the questionnaires they sent me before the appointment was very short. I later learned that this six-question screener is surprisingly effective.

The test

In the test above, give yourself one point for each answer in the grey square. If you score 4 out 6, you have a strong reason to suspect ADHD and get a proper assessment.

Just the six questions above have a sensitivity of 69% and specificity of 99.5% in the general population. This means:

• They correctly identify two thirds of adults with ADHD and miss the other third.

• They flag 0.5% of people without ADHD as possibly having ADHD.

If we assume 5% of people have ADHD (this source gives 4.4%, and this gives 6%), then:

• The test would correctly pick up 3.5% of the population as having ADHD (0.69 × 5%).

• It would incorrectly flag about 0.5% (≈0.475%, rounding up) of the population who don’t have ADHD.

So if you score 4 out of 6, the chance you actually have ADHD is:

3.5% / (3.5% + 0.5%) = 87.5%.

Why get an assessment

ADHD is highly treatable with meds. First-line treatments for ADHD — stimulants like amphetamine and methylphenidate — work really well. To quote a podcast on psychiatry: “Stimulants are one of the most effective meds in psychiatry” (source), ”Not many treatments in psychiatry have a large effect size. There’s stimulants for ADHD, ketamine for depression” (source).

70-90% of people with ADHD find stimulants effective and experience noticeable quality of life improvements.

And if you don’t want to take stimulants or they don’t work for you, there are non-stimulant medications, such as atomoxetine or Intuniv.

In conclusion

This test is an imperfect screening tool that misses a third of all true ADHD cases and incorrectly flags a small percentage of non-ADHD people. But it has an incredible signal to effort ratio — it only takes a minute to take. If you score above its threshold — you have a strong reason to seek a full assessment.

Even if you are confident you don’t have ADHD, it’d only take you a minute to test your distractible friend. The right medication could be life-changing for them — it certainly was for me.

6-Methylnicotine is a sketchy analogue of the good old nicotine: a slight tweak of its structure, somewhat worse toxicity data, and very little public research. In the last few years, some US companies started making and marketing products containing the (S)-enantiomer.

I’m a big fan of sublingual nicotine as a nootropic — I wrote about two years of using nicotine lozenges in my post “A Love Song to Nicotine”. 6-Methylnicotine is marketed as “smooth, long-lasting cognitive enhancement without the peaks and valleys” and “less addiction potential compared to traditional nicotine products.”

I am very much attracted to the allure for increasing brainpower to better serve the global technocapital the readers of this blog — I am currently on Day 22 of Inkhaven, a 30-day workshop for writers where you must publish a blog post a day or you get kicked out. So of course I had to try it, for science™ and for writing productivity.

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The products

There are two companies that sell and market oral products with 6-methylnicotine:

• Sett sells Zyn/Velo-style pouches with either 3mg or 6mg, branding it as Ceretine™

• Chewbizz sells gum with either 2 or 4.7 mg, under Nixodine-S branding.

I tried both. As expected both have very similar effects.

The L-theanine additive

Annoyingly, both products also contain 80 mg L-theanine — an amino-acid from tea that’s often sold as a standalone calming / anti-anxiety supplement. It’s the main reason tea hits smoother than coffee: counteracting the jitteriness of caffeine. People who take caffeine in pills sometimes stack with L-theanine.

Somehow both companies settled on the same exact dose to add to their products to sand down the rough edges of this new stimulant — to prevent anxiety and overstimulation.

80mg is not a huge dose. A typical supplement capsule contains 200 mg. Its oral bioavailability is ≈50%. We don’t have good data on whether sublingual/buccal use changes much, but at least we have a higher bound of 100%.

I still wish I could evaluate the pure compound. Some readers of this blog are thinking: “Bro, stop complaining about L-theanine already, just acquire tolerance to it over a few weeks, and then report back”. I got you, my brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings in Christ. This is exactly what I’ve been doing over the last 3 weeks of Inkhaven.

I’ve been taking 600-1200 mg of L-theanine every night to calm down from using 2-3 different stimulants:

• my ADHD prescription one, lisdexamfetamine (10-15mg daily)

• caffeine (≈250 mg daily)

• nicotine (5-12mg, 4.5 times a week)

A very sustainable lifestyle, I know.

My impressions of 6-MN

I’ve tried 6-MN three times so far in doses of 9-12 mg consumed over 1-2.5 hours. Unfortunately, my hopes of finding a better cognitive enhancer for writing didn’t come true. The compound has some merits, but it’s a worse tool overall.

I’m buzzed and stimulated, but it’s much harder to apply this to anything productive writing-wise. It’s as if my mental engine is just spinning in idle without transmitting it to the gears of actual work. I also feel somewhat dissociated, like I’m watching someone else move the cursor, type words, open tabs on my laptop.

As soon as I swap the gum or pouch for a regular 2 mg nicotine lozenge, my productivity starts to pick up.

The primary advantage of 6-MN is less physical side effects. It’s a smoother experience, with less muscle tension. I suspect my blood pressure and heart rate might also be lower, but I haven’t measured either.

Caveats

• I have ADHD, it might be more useful for someone without it.

• I’ve built ~3× tolerance to nicotine over the last 3 weeks.

• L-theanine — my tolerance to it blunted its effects, but I could definitely feel some

• The different delivery systems (pouch/gum vs lozenge) are also confounders.

Other people’s impressions

I gifted a tube of pouches to Gwern, a writer whose post on sublingual nicotine led to me using nicotine as a cognitive enhancer. His opinion: hard to distinguish from nicotine, feels more mild, not worth using given that it’s more expensive and much less widely used than regular old nicotine.

, a fellow Inkhaven resident:

I feel manic, focused, and euphoric. I ran across E Hall second floor a few times. I feel hot, but this could just be my space heater.

I can’t tell if my writing output / quality is better or not, I suspect it’s equivalent but would have to assess when not high.

Writing certainly feels more fun.

A reddit user used it to quit 2 tubes of Zyn a day habit (30×6 mg pouches, 180 mg/day):

I’ve been a degenerate 2 can a day user of Zyn 6mg for quite some time. [...] I switched to 100% Sett pouches on 9/19 with relatively minimal withdrawals and now only use like 4-6 of their 6mg pouches. Which was a massive reduction from using the Zyns. My heart rate has gone down 6 points and my blood pressure is better than what it was on nicotine.

Receptor binding materials from Sett’s website

The chart above comes from Sett’s website, where it functions mainly as marketing: trust us, we did the science™.

The X-axis is labeled “Log – Nicotine Equivalent” but the actual units aren’t specified. We cannot, unfortunately, precisely say “a 3 mg pouch corresponds to the –6 point on this curve”.

I asked GPT-5.1 to do some guesstimating. It says that the units for FLIPR are typically mol/L, and that plasma nicotine in regular smokers during the day is about 10–50 ng/mL, which is between -7.2 and -6 after you convert ng to nmol and take log10. This is where the curve for α4 and α3 gets above 1.0 nicotine equivalent. If there was a properly labeled chart, I would’ve spent time verifying the math and the sources, but for now I’m leaving this analysis as is.

The interesting bit is the α6 plot. The curve tops clearly below the 1.0 nicotine line, which suggests that it’s a partial agonist at this receptor. Can we “fix” worse α6 binding by taking a larger dose?

In On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics I described how I liked to stare at receptor binding affinity tables for psychedelics. With psychedelics, you can’t really compensate for weaker 5-HT2a agonism by taking a higher dose: you might get a more intense experience, but it still lacks “depth.” My very speculative hypothesis is that something similar might be happening here — 6-MN just feels “flatter” and less effective than nicotine, even when the stimulation starts to get uncomfortable.

Take this section with a grain of salt. I wish we had proper data on this compound — this is only a single proprietary study by the company making a product with 6-MN.

A Shulgin-Style Nicotine Analogues Research Program

In the same On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics I described how I tried two dozen psychedelic. Most were Sasha Shulgin’s discoveries. Shulgin would modify existing known chemicals and then test the compounds on himself and his friends.

I wish there were a Shulgin-style research program for nicotine analogues. Nicotine clearly works as a cognitive enhancer for some people, but it’s also just the first nicotinic drug we stumbled on in nature. It seems likely that in the vast space of “things that hit nicotinic receptors” there are very interesting compounds.

Big Pharma unfortunately explores these compounds for smoking cessation and some neuropsychiatric conditions. Still, there are already compounds that could be interesting for cognitive enhancement, e.g. Varenicline, Cytisine and GTS-21.

I’m sure the nicotinic “holy grail” is out there. But it’s definitely not 6-methyl-nicotine.

If you are opinionated like me, you might instinctively be skeptical of teachers. But the right kind of teacher can actually support an independent approach. A teacher who is further ahead, and can guide you — not as a guru but as a coach. Someone who doesn’t surround enlightenment in a fog of mystique but gives straightforward technical advice on meditation.

Roger Thisdell specializes in exactly this. I’ve been working on and off with Roger over the last two years and I had a dozen sessions total. You can work with him regularly, or — like I do — just check in on your progress every few weeks.

Roger describes himself as “a philosophy graduate and phenomenologist, turned meditation teacher.” He teaches Vipassana, one of the most popular and systematic approaches to meditation. In Vipassana, the journey to enlightenment is mapped out and divided into four paths with each path split into 16 stages.

Roger claims to have reached the 4th path — “full enlightenment” in Vipassana. For him, enlightenment is a technical thing: a phenomenological & psychological phase shift towards centerless boundaryless non-duality. He’d actually prefer not to use the label “enlightenment” at all, because he considers it to be “a gross nebulous abstraction”.

That’s quite different from the more traditional “ethics-maxxxed” definition, where enlightened people have perfected morality in addition to their psyche undergoing. An enlightened person has a permanent 5.0 Uber rating, returns the cart at the supermarket every single time, never doomscrolls, and definitely doesn’t argue on Twitter. There are good reasons to think enlightenment nudges people in kinder and more moral directions, but I don’t think you need to be enlightened to behave in an upstanding way. Roger himself considers ethics important, even though he doesn’t include it into the definition of enlightenment.

My sessions with Roger, briefly

I’d have a session every few weeks and Rogers would always meet me where I am. We’d discuss my recent progress, my goals and what on my mind meditation-wise in general. Some examples of specific things we discussed from different sessions:

• pros and cons of specific meditation techniques (Do Nothing, various “focus on your breath” techniques, Noting, etc) as well as challenges that arise applying them;

• conceptual models of enlightenment, “Progress of Insight” maps, psychological changes alongside the path;

• philosophy of different branches of Buddhism, its frameworks and how it can be restructured;

• philosophy of personal identity;

• burnout and how meditation can help it.

I’d also discuss specific experiences and their phenomenology. Roger would advise me on how to gain specific meditative skills to deepen my insights — as well as how to best put them into words, which is important for me as I write about meditation.

After each session I’d have a few specific practical takeaways or pieces of advice I’d apply on my own.

Who Roger Isn’t For

Roger’s approach is a technical, pretty Western and pretty individualist. If you’re looking for practice in a religious context, with shared rituals, values, and community, you’re better off approaching a traditional Buddhist sangha, or a modern internet one such as Evolving Ground.

If you are looking to study meditation under a spiritual master — Roger is 100% *not* that person. He is a coach — a session with him is like a session with a sports coach but for meditation. In my life, I worked with three sports coaches — two powerlifting ones and a boxing one. Working with Roger is similar in vibe, except for mental fitness. This isn’t just my metaphor: on patreon many of Roger’s recordings are titled “meditative workouts”.

Even though I’m using this “mental fitness” frame, and meditation has helped me tremendously with my mental health, if you have signifcant mental health challenges you’re still better off working with a therapist or a coach specialising in mental health. It’s similar to how, if you have a physical injury, you’re better off seeing a physiotherapist — with a coach playing a supplementary role.

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Pharmhacking enlightenment

Traditional religions, including most forms of Buddhism, tend to condemn drug use. Roger doesn’t. You can talk to Roger about drugs openly, including about using to accelerate them on the path of insight. Case in point: in the most recent session Roger and I discussed using Modafinil in meditation. After the session I sent him the link to the above tweet and he responded: “I am not surprised. It works.” I have ADHD — and I confirm that meditating on amphetamines (specifically, lisdexamfetamine) works.

Psychedelic enthusiasts might enjoy working with him too. Roger is on the board of Qualia Research Institute — a non-profit studying consciousness and psychedelics. That said, he’s not straightforwardly pro-psychedelic when it comes to enlightenment: his view is that psychedelics usually ramp up the “energy parameter” in a non-specific way, whereas meditation is more likely to produce the actual insight breakthrough. But he’s definitely not anti-drug.

Consider booking a session

If you’re looking for a pragmatic, technical teacher rather than a guru, I recommend booking a session with Roger. He uses an income-adjusted sliding scale — $45 / $85 / $120 / $190, depending on your level of income. You can book a session with him here.

Links to Roger’s stuff

Website • Blog • Twitter • YouTube • Patreon • Book a session

My favourite articles

1. Identity, God and Open Individualism

2. A Very Streamlined Enlightenment Protocol: Part 1 • Part 2

My favourite videos

A Stage Theory of Enlightenment: Part 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5

You know how people sometimes say, “A part of me wants to quit my job, but another part wants to stay”? There are various frameworks that treat this as more than a metaphor — they take it as a more literal description of what’s actually going on in the mind.

This post is a brief introduction to homebrewing your own “parts” framework, plus some thoughts on using it with mind-altering substances. Each of these techniques is powerful on its own, and the flip side of that power is danger: they can stir up old trauma, destabilize you, further “fracture your mind” or otherwise amplify existing issues. The 2-in-1 combination brainhack further increases power and risks — approach it with caution.

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Feral Neurons

Some “parts” frameworks are neuroscience-based. They start with the “low-level hardware” of the brain.

The above picture is from the article Neurons Gone Wild. It claims that individual neurons are feral: they possess more agency — more capacity to act independently in a goal-oriented-way — than other, more “domesticated” cells in the body.

Neurons form an internal economy in which they compete for resources, forming modules with independent purposes and “jobs.” The modules in turn form sub-personal agents with drives and goals. On the top level you have your ‘conscious self’ with its will — operating over a network of these semi-independent agents.

The brain is an anarchic matrix, particularly hospitable for growing these constellations of agentic structures. We often imagine a unified “I” imposing its will on ourselves and the world, but in practice agency is emergent and bidirectional, if not primarily bottom-up.

Internal Family Systems

Other frameworks start with the “software” of the human psyche and explain the mind in less alien terms.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is one such framework. It was invented by a family therapist, Richard Schwartz, who was frustrated that his usual techniques didn’t work for some clients. He started paying close attention to how clients described their inner experience. They kept bringing up “parts,” and Schwartz began to seriously entertain the idea that they might be describing the actual underlying reality of the mind being made of sub-parts.

So he started asking the parts questions — and discovered that they functioned like a family. Some parts were hurt, some were protective, some were controlling. Hence the name: Internal Family Systems. Schwarz says that IFS views each person as “ecology of relatively discrete minds”. Note the parallel with the “internal economy” frame from the previous frame.

Mowgli from the Jungle Book was raised by wolves, and I was raised by the internet. My first encounter with IFS was not a therapist’s office, but Twitter and other online resources. The most important one was @Kaj Sotala ‘s Multiagent Models of Mind. Kaj takes apart IFS and rebuilds it from first principles.

One particular consequence of this was not caring much about IFS’s standard classification of parts into “exiles,” “managers,” and “firefighters”:
— exiles are the hurt, vulnerable parts that carry old pain;
— managers are the parts that try to keep life organized and safe so the exiles don’t get triggered;
— firefighters are the emergency responders that jump in with distraction, numbing, or impulsive behavior when the exiles do get activated.

I’ve always found this scheme a bit clunky. In my opinion, it mainly exists to serve the purpose of interfacing with a therapist. But if you’re using this technique for self-therapy, why inherit a “third-person view” of your own mind? You can observe your mind and develop your own classifications, or simply deal with parts on their own terms without forcing them into preconceived notions. That said, your inner system might vibe with it a lot more than mine does.

IFS as a full framework comes with a few more ideas I’m mostly just gesturing at here: a compassionate “Self” that can relate to parts with curiosity and care, the practice of unblending (shifting from “I am this feeling” to “a part of me feels this”), and the principle that there are no bad parts — even the destructive ones are trying to protect something. I found all of these ideas useful. But in this post I’m only borrowing the barebones version: you have parts, you can put attention on them, and you can ask them questions.

The tweet above is by .

Dream Mashups

Different parts “grow” at different times in different environments. And the result of this is that we are living in dream mashups of our current situations and old emotional meanings.

One way to test this for yourself is to focus your attention on a part and ask it, “How old are you?” The answer might surprise you. Some of my parts have ages corresponding to key transitions in my life. For example, some of my parts are 17 — the age I moved from Siberia to Moscow to study at university. But sometimes I find parts that are 3 or 4 years old. This doesn’t mean that I literally act like a 3-year-old. It means that a part with that age is blended into my present experience — that’s what a dream mashup is. Parts are like tree rings.

Other questions

If you interact with parts non-judgmentally, you can often ask them questions and they’ll respond. Aside from “How old are you?”, other useful questions include: “What are your goals?” and “What do you want?” You can enter into an actual dialogue with a part and ask follow-up questions as the conversation unfolds.

Romeo Stevens has the following take on IFS: sometimes parts are instantiated with the meta-goal of causing future instances of themselves to be instantiated (yes, it’s a loop). I’ve found that it sometimes makes sense to ask a part, “What would it take for you to despawn?” Some parts realize they’re ghosts chasing an incoherent goal and willingly despawn themselves. Others resist despawning — for reasons that might be wise, misguided, or somewhere in between.

I don’t have a fixed set of ready-to-deploy recipes here. Cultivating the culture of one’s mind is more like gardening than precise engineering.

Gardening: a personal example

Two years ago I started lifting regularly. People say “listen to your body” when you exercise. A few months ago I realized I can “talk to my body” by directing attention to individual muscles and checking in with each one about how it’s feeling. This is a more bidirectional process than a label “listen to your body might imply”.

Here’s a situation that has happened a few times. I haven’t been to the gym for a week, and I don’t feel like going because I feel “tired.” I check in with each individual muscle and discover that all of them are craving exercise — the “tired” feeling isn’t being generated by the body at all. It’s an idea stuck in my mind. That idea is inaccurate, and the parts framework helps the evidence from the body — which wants to move — propagate through the system. Then I go to the gym excited for it.

Another situation: sometimes I do deadlifts, like in the picture. They’re quite strenuous for the lower back — those muscles are among the primary lifters. So I check in with them: “Are you doing alright? Can you do one more set?” Sometimes the answer is “Hell yes,” sometimes “No more than one more set,” and sometimes “No, I’d rather not.” All of this happens on a linguistic level — I literally have these words pop up in my mind.

I have no idea if other people talk to their backs this way. What do people even mean when they say they “listen to their body”? Not in the loose sense of “pay attention,” but in the precise sense of what mental motions and attentional patterns they’re actually executing?

People’s cultures of mind are wildly different. You might also find unusual ways to repurpose and reuse your own “parts” framework.

Drugs-enhanced IFS-like self-therapy

I recommend practicing an IFS-like framework sober first, perhaps mixing it with meditation. Get a feel for which parts tend to come up, what it’s like to ask them questions, and how often parts present as coherent subagents versus a soup of emotional reactions. Build a set of tacit skills for dealing with inner multiplicity.

Entactogens like MDMA and mephedrone can make the mind more plastic and more comfortable with negative emotions such as cringe, shame, and guilt. They often create a temporary sense of emotional safety and compassion: things that normally feel unbearable become painless or painful-but-workable. In that state, the grip of the top-level, self-like agent on the underlying network of subagents loosens, while much of the lower-level dynamics stay intact. This can be useful for helping parts despawn and for getting clearer, more honest answers when you talk to them.

Psychedelics can also be useful. Sometimes I can literally feel subagents renegotiating a new equilibrium. One time, on a very intense LSD trip, I felt nicotine-assisted gym-going subagents renegotiate their structure with the rest of the mind via a self-unifying wave.

However, most of the time — at least for me — psychedelics cause too much disintegration. The mind is a Darwinian meaning-making machine, and psychedelics ramp up the Darwinism factor by 100×. My IFS-like parts framework itself starts to disintegrate as well.

Psychedelics allow the mind to roll out much bigger updates; entactogens often hit a sweet spot between plasticity and coherence, allowing for smaller, targeted updates in a more comfortable way.

If psychedelics are like detonating a meaning-bomb in your mind and watching the pieces reconfigure, entactogens are more like temporarily turning gravity down so you can gently rearrange furniture while the house stays mostly intact.

Instead of conclusion

I’ve been experimenting with these techniques on and off for several years now. And I still feel like I’m only seeing one little corner of the space. Other minds will have different default settings, different parts cultures, different failure modes.

If you try any of this, treat it as a set of suggestions, not a template. Keep what clicks with your own inner ecology and throw out the rest. If you run into significant issues, consider talking to a licensed therapist.

This post is, to some degree, a response to this comment by : “Can you do a deep dive on the emotional/trauma resolution effects of this or other psychotechnologies that worked well?”. I’d love to hear which pieces were most useful or confusing, and what you’d like a follow-up to dig into.

Links

1. : Multiagent Models of Mind, the sequence of articles that kickstarted my understanding of IFS

2. : My current take on Internal Family Systems “parts”

3. : Different configurations of mind

4. : Good introductions to Internal Family Systems

5. : Mental Mountains

6. : Dream Mashups and this twitter thread on them

7. : Gendlin’s Focusing, another technique that’s more low-level, but useful in parts work

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1. Romeo Stevens: Lord help me I’m going to try to answer the questions I’ve been getting about karma.

This is a lie. I have ziploc bags of mephedrone strapped to my balls with adhesive tape.

Mephedrone is an entactogen-stimulant, MDMA’s deranged cousin — read more about my experience with it in my post “Mephedrone is a Cursed Drug”.

Nightclubs in the UK have this security theatre where they pretend they’re airports searching for explosives, except they’re searching for drugs and knives. God forbid a working man has any actual fun in a nightclub.

I put my phone, wallet, and keys in a tray and walk through the metal detector. The security woman lightly pats my pockets. I pocket my items from the tray. I’m in. Barely searched, but you’ve got to be prepared for the worst. Stuffing your suspicious items in a sock is not an option — there is a small chance they might ask you to remove your shoes. Underwear is safer. Even the police by default can only ask you to undress down to your underwear, but not remove it — a full strip-search requires a warrant.

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I go to the bathroom to execute my plan of snorting mephedrone. There is a big security guy at the entrance. The bathroom has three stalls and a long queue of men in front of them. The stalls have big gaps at the floor and the ceiling — these feel like the biggest stall gaps I’ve ever seen. An impatient guy jumps to look over one of the stalls. God fucking damn, man, let people do their business in private. British people know how to queue — it’s our national sport — but apparently not in nightclubs.

It’s my turn. I get in a stall and peel the tape off. I am a man of culture, and I can’t have ballsweat on my ziplocs. That’s why I have a mephedrone matryoshka: three ziplocs stuffed in an outer one, which I immediately throw away. Each of the three inner ziplocs contains roughly 200 mg of the drug. 200 mg is a bit too much for one dose, but I am ok with eyeballing — as long as there is a known upper limit for the measurement error. I’d prefer to use scales, but that’s not something I’m willing to tape to my balls.

I never snort drugs using banknotes — it’s unhygienic. That’s why I came prepared with post-it notes. I snort half the bag right out of it using one.

The mephedrone starts hitting and I feel slightly dizzy and relaxed at the same time. The centre of my experience becomes symmetrical. EDM starts to sound juicier. I am not a fan of nightclubs; I came for a bit of variety of experience, but now I start to viscerally get why people come here.

The music is great at symmetrifying the experience, making the emotional processing of my fucked-up past coalesce around the time-symmetries of the music — rhythms and motifs folding back on themselves. Delicious.

I sit down on the couch, close my eyes, and without visual input I experience a greater depth of reach into my broken inner world. A few minutes later, a security woman comes over and says, “You can’t sleep here.” Goddamn it, woman, I’m not sleeping — I’m metabolising emotional damage. I try to explain the basics of my situation to her — that I am fully awake — but the loud music prevents my words from being heard. So I perform conformity with the utmost respect for authority until she goes away and I can close my eyes again, enjoying the music.

Twenty minutes later a security guy comes with the same message: “You can’t sleep here.” Goddamn it, man, you are interrupting my DIY self-therapy session, can’t you understand? I don’t think he can. But I’m starting to understand why they don’t allow knives inside.

This time I stand up and go to the bathroom. To snort more mephedrone, of course. On my way I run into someone I’d met at a meetup. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember his vibe — and it’s excellent. We chat for 30 seconds. Inside the bathroom there is no queue — the headliner is playing, so everyone is on the dance floor.

I snort more mephedrone in comfort, waiting for it to hit. Mephedrone is great for dissolving your dysfunctional emotional patterns, but it comes at the cost of you putting your attention on your inner world at the expense of the outer one. And so I spend 15 minutes in the stall in this mellow state — until I start to worry that a queue might be forming and exit my stall. Luckily, there is no queue. Whew, I’d hate to think my questionable drug habits prevented an honest citizen from performing basic bodily functions in peace.

I try to dance a little bit, but it’s not that enjoyable: my skills are rusty, I am too neurotic about this — I want to look inside instead of worrying about how I look from outside. A woman asks if she can give me a hug. Sure thing.

A few minutes later the headliner stops playing, and it’s time for me to go home.

Every time I ask a nightclub-goer what they enjoy about nightclubs, it’s always some version of “doing drugs and dancing.” But how come doing drugs at a dance class is not a thing? Moreover, at every rave I’ve been to, 90% of the people were terrible at the actual skill of dancing. What gives?

I think dancing is secondary at raves; it is a vehicle for a tribal social ritual — with the DJ as a shaman softening social fabric and inducing a trance-like state. Drugs aren’t drugs, but entheogens — devices for acquiring spiritual and psychological insight, or at the very least, for deepening the trance.

I could get behind this vision, but I still don’t fit in in the actual environment. I’m too sober about the fact that I am not sober and I’m constitutionally allergic to being supervised. People actually going through something are treated as a liability by the people in high-vis vests and earpieces patrolling the perimeter like zookeepers. It’s hard to surrender when someone with a radio can tap you on the shoulder and tell you you’re doing it wrong.

UK nightclubs strike me as a cross between ersatz tribal ceremonies and DIY self-service psychiatric wards. I only wish the inmates were running the asylum.

“Oh, great. Last week we lost the majority in parliament, and now this. What do you think it’s going to do to my polling numbers?”

“If there is going to be an election at all, you’ll likely get a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Your numbers should go up.”

“Thank God, some good news tonight, fucking finally. What else?”

“The stars in the sky are going dark one by one”

“The only stars I care about are the stars on our flag. No time and no budget for any others.”

“Sir, the aliens are coming.”

“Illegally? To our country? Alright, you have my attention. What do they want?”

“Our best qualia engineers assume they want happiness, or some generalised version of it. All our leading theories of consciousness predict that they are converting nearly all matter into hedonium — a state of matter so blissful it’s beyond our comprehension. It maximises the amount of pleasure per unit of matter.”

“Of course these aliens are bringing their space drugs with them. How come this is all so sudden to us?”

“We detected them several weeks ago, when Altair went blank. Since then several more stars in the same sector have gone dark. Some are further away from us, but others are getting closer and closer. It looks like they were operating under the Dark Forest assumption for a while, hiding their presence as if the universe were a Dark Forest full of dangers, and seeding nearby star systems. After establishing minimal presence in all of them, they started constructing megastructures and launching a wave moving in all directions at a speed that’s close to the speed of light — 0.9c. They were hiding until they were certain they could win.”

“Why are they doing this?”

“I’ll start a bit further back. Our country tracks GDP — Gross Domestic Product. But Bhutan considers its primary metric Gross National Happiness. Now imagine—”

“Haha, this entire GNH idea is basically a scam, a front for corruption and ineptitude. Several of my friends work in their government. They can’t achieve real GDP growth, so they talk about GNH.”

“Right, but imagine if they weren’t corrupt and took their happiness idea to its logical conclusion. At first, they might have been raising GDP like us to make people happier through material possessions. But as soon as neurohacking became viable, the best way to raise GNH would be by selling wireheading devices. Then you might put a brain in a vat and make a blissful simulation. But then why would you need the brain at all? It’s just a clump of matter, and perhaps you can rearrange that matter into a better configuration. Iterate on possible configurations and eventually you get hedonium.”

“This is just weird as fuck. Is this based on the weird Eastern nonsense my friends in Bhutan keep talking about? Something something nirvana, samsara, something.”

“Unclear. Even Buddhism doesn’t go this far, preferring non-existence and aborting the chain of reincarnation. This is extreme for every Earthly religion.”

“This is all very alien to me, but I guess they are aliens. What’s our first contact going to look like?”

“It’s unclear if they want to have it. We have two mainline scenarios. The hedonium shockwave might be a result of a simple runaway optimisation process, generating more happiness, perhaps initiated by a smart but not wise AI. We stand no chance in this scenario. They’ll just convert the matter out of which everything on the Earth — including our bodies — is made of. Likely quickly and painlessly given they care about happiness, but not our definitions of it.”

“Disgusting. And what’s the second one?”

“So before taking office, you were running crypto scams on various blockchains, right?”

“Technically, they weren’t scams, Adam. The court ruled this, this my third time reminding you of this. We are friends, but I remind you of subordination, once again.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. So the second scenario is that they are essentially running a galaxy-wide, galaxy-brained blockchain with qualia as an externality. They need a way to coordinating their expansion, so if they have a distributed currency, it might run on a proof-of-qualia. You’d mint it by converting matter into hedonium. We haven’t cracked their protocol, and we aren’t even sure there is a protocol, but we have some early signs there is structure in their broadcast signal, though nothing definitive”

“And when will we know for sure?”

“When they send a message directed at us specifically or when they convert us to hedonium”

“Terrifying. I’ve been always dreaming of ruling till my death, but that’s not how I’d imagine my rule coming to an end. PR-wise, how much time until we have to present a definitive plan to the public?”

“People are debating what kind of process might turn off stars, and the obvious answer is aliens. We are close to the tipping point: mainstream journalists have started to write that it’s likely aliens. The consensus is mounting. We probably have a few days, two weeks maximum.”

“Start preparing an action plan for the public. Report to me directly every four hours. I’ll address the public in three days. I’ll get re-elected. And we’ll blame this on the other party.”

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***

The President was standing in front of a crowd of journalists.

“Today several more stars went dark. Our best scientists are certain: this is a result of an intentional process. Aliens are real, but we don’t know what they look like. And this is a direct result of the Other Party overregulating scientific research — their red tape prevented us from detecting aliens in time. Today we are fixing this. I’m starting the First Contact Task Force with a broad executive mandate. It will be led by Adam, our Minister of Advanced Technology. I’ll give him the word.”

Adam continued:

“Our best theories are that the aliens want a generalised version of happiness. We are still figuring out what this means, but one consequence is that they are likely to care about us and our biosphere. If only we had deregulated our science ten years ago, we’d already know much more about their civilization. Still, we’ll work day and night on cracking the alien code and contacting them before they even arrive. I am deeply grateful to the President for the opportunity to lead the Task Force. There is no one better to lead our country in these times but the President.”

Adam was politically savvy enough to know when to tell white lies by omission. It’s more like stringing truths into a convenient narrative than outright lying. He didn’t want to risk his chair: aliens might steamroll him, his friends and family, and everyone else he knew, but that would happen in two years — what was he supposed to eat in the meantime? Besides, as the head of the First Contact Task Force, he had a shot at actually figuring out what was going on: if he was going to die, at least he wouldn’t be dying from curiosity in the meantime. Screaming from the rooftops that there were no adults in the room, that no one was really in control, and that the King — or, rather, the President — was naked would do no good.

Supporting the President’s “Everything is Going According to Plan” narrative seemed like a small price to pay, a small compromise with his scientific conscience.

The journalists bombarded Adam with questions for two hours.

***

In two years, the aliens still hadn’t sent a message directed at Earth. All attempts to contact them were futile — if they could decode our signals, they never responded.

The broadcast signal did have structure, and human engineers were able to make some progress. It was a blockchain where the currency was minted by converting chunks of spacetime into pleasurable subjective experience — the higher the valence, the more “QualiaCoin” you’d get. This was what incentivised the hedonium shockwave. But the full design of the protocol wasn’t cracked in time.

The first contact never happened. The stars in the sky kept being turned off one by one, and they kept going dark past the solar system, an invisible front leaving Earth untouched. The aliens spared the Earth. No one knew why they did this.

Humans could still, eventually, build a Dyson sphere around the Sun and harvest its energy. But the dream of space expansion was gone as we’d imagined it.

The President immediately spun this into a positive narrative making his ratings soar right before the re-election:

“We’re restructuring the First Contact Task Force into QuEST — the Qualia & Extraterrestrial Strategy Task Force. The dream of star-faring is closer than ever. We’ll get there by trading with the aliens in their own currency.”

Adam himself was more pessimistic. He was excited about qualia research and applied psychonautics. But what could a mammalian brain offer in terms of mining interesting states more efficiently than an advanced star-faring civilisation?

Sure, maybe our brains could offer some valence NFTs — unique, registered patterns in qualia-space, such as “crystal cathedral flow” or “high-symmetry orgasmic lattice with low boredom gradient”. Perhaps the aliens would want to tile their hedonium manifolds with these motifs, turning the universe into music writing itself and nudging up the overall valence.

But wouldn’t they find these themselves in their galaxy-spanning labs? And they had made no effort to contact Earth. Wouldn’t they want to talk to us if this was really what they wanted?

To Adam, it seemed more likely that they kept us alive to observe how Darwinian life behaves when it stumbles into another civilisation.

Or perhaps they were building a highway through the Dark Forest, and Earth was a beautiful stretch of roadside scenery — left as a Dark Wild Reserve, too pretty to pave but not worth stopping for even a short roadside picnic…

HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!

Except, of course, the Earth.

Inspirations & links

The story is inspired by the following works:

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic.

2. Andrés Gómez-Emilsson of Qualia Reserch Institute: Utilitronium Shockwaves vs. Gradients of Bliss

   1. QRI has a line of perfumes, one of them named “Hedonium Shockwave”

3. Mike Johnson: Qualia Astronomy.

4. Robin Hanson, et al: Grabby Aliens

5. Robert J. Bradbury, “Life at the Limits of Physical Laws” (official, sci-hub pdf).

Mephedrone (aka 4-MMC) is an entactogen-stimulant, MDMA’s deranged cousin. Like MDMA it’s great for processing your fucked up past. But after the initial MDMA-like effects wear out, you might discover it’s a fun drug to masturbate on for hours. At least that’s what *I* discovered.

Over the last few months I probably racked up a couple hundred hours watching porn and masturbating on it. I am not proud to admit this at all, but day 17 of the 30-posts-in-30-days challenge at Inkhaven is sucking out the last remaining bits of shame protecting you from my true personality.

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Effects

The first few hours of mephedrone is like diet MDMA. It’s less potent at serotonin release, so it’d be less effective at emotional processing for the vast majority of people. But on the flip side, it also lasts longer. And if you are a serious meditator used to reconfiguring the inner machinery of your mind, you might take this trade off — mephedrone is synergistic with meditative and introspective skills. Unlike MDMA, it’s not neurotoxic, so it’s probably safer to use.

Redosing MDMA more than 1-2 times is futile. But after mephedrone’s MDMA-esque effects wear out, you can choose to continue doing it. This is often a wrong choice, but it’s the choice I often somehow end up making anyway. At this point the drug becomes a mellow stimulant while still carrying the echo of its entactogenic vibe. Mephedrone is the only stimulant that has my seal of approval for recreational purposes, and I tried a bunch: cocaine, amphetamine, Metaphedrone (aka 3-MMC), 3-FMC, MDPV. None come close.

Like other dopaminergic stimulants in recreational doses, it’s difficult to orgasm on. Additionally, it also makes me deeply interested in discovering new types of tastefully fucked up amateur porn. It has to be amateur — mephedrone makes me more sensitive to reading emotions in faces, so the truth of the pro entertainers not quite really wanting to be there pops out.

This combination of inability to orgasm and being interested in porn creates a cursed flow state where I don’t notice time passing. I’ve been binging mephedrone for 12 hours and it’s several hours past my bed time. I look at my clock. What time is it? 11:13 AM? The clock is wrong, it’s actually time to do more mephedrone. Mephedrone has a short half-life of two hours, so I tell myself I’d just snort one last line and delay my sleep by an hour — not much of a delay in the grand scheme of things. But then the clock shows 12:25pm — and it’s time to do one last line of mephedrone again. Porn gets progressively less interesting, but the drug still manages to keep it fresh enough somehow, for hours.

You might ask: if masturbation is great, how’s sex on it? My answer: I wouldn’t know, I’ve been single for the last few months. We can easily fix this, for science and new blog posts. This post is my dating doc. My virtues: being able to semi-adequately describe the phenomenology of mephedrone and other substances. My vices: everything else about me, like writing this blog and my addictive personality. What I am looking for: a single lady to fall in love with (the girl reading this). DM me, queen.

Is this an attractive proposition? I don’t know. Would I date myself? Oh hell no. But then there are a lot of things I wouldn’t do that other people are still doing — like eating squid, playing cricket, or voting for Trump or Harris. You might be wondering why I took such a hardline stance against both mainstream candidates. The answer is simple — I was not allowed to vote in that election, as I am not a US citizen.

Compulsiveness

But back to mephedrone, that son of a bitch. It’s very more-ish — it induces a compulsive desire to re-dose during the experience. This compulsiveness is distinct from addictiveness, which is a desire to do it again after the experience. These two dimensions are correlated but still distinct.

I used to beat myself for lacking the willpower to abort a mephedrone binge. I’d easily go 24-36 hours without sleep subsisting on meal replacement drinks, such as Yfood and Huel. This is surprisingly sustainable, except I’d feel like shit for a few days later, having depleted myself of the key monoamines — dopamine and serotonin. And then I’d wonder: why the fuck did I do this to myself, again?

So, I used to beat myself up for this. And then I observed two of my friends being left in a living room with a bag of mephedrone that had somehow found its way there. They talked throughout the night going through the entire bag of 2.5 grams. They were opposite genders, but as far as I can tell they didn’t have sex, so they left me without an important data point. The woman was poly, the man might’ve been gay. I don’t mean to say that he was gay because he didn’t have sex with this woman. I mean that he was gay independently and irrespective of not having sex with her, but I am not 100% sure of his orientation.

The next day, after having some sleep and eating fucking nothing at all except one of my meal replacements drinks, these two decided to do another binge. I observed them go through another bag of 2.5 g of mephedrone that hadn’t been there the night before. Again, they didn’t fuck but had some excellent conversations. I am happy for them in that regard. It can be a very social drug too.

Afterwards we were discussing the drug’s effects. Both of my friends agreed it was quite compulsive. The female friend commented that while it’s definitely that, it’s not addictive for her. Once it wore off, she had no desire to do it again for a while.

I 100% believe her. That’s what the drug does to your brain, turning you into some kind of maniacal rat pulling the fun lever for until the lever kind of breaks — either you run out of the drug or deplete your dopamine so badly it barely works anymore.

So yeah, I used to beat myself for lacking the willpower to abort a mephedrone binge. And after observing my friends, I realised it’s the drug. It’s definitely the drug, and not me. I’m not taking any personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is not my thing, it’s worse than mephedrone.

Addiction

It took a few binges for my addiction to mephedrone to form, and the addiction took the form of a frozen compulsion to do it. In “A Love Song to Nicotine”, I write how I didn’t get addicted to nicotine over the two hours of using it. At the same time I definitely got myself moderately addicted to mephedrone.

Mephedrone would be self-limiting for me. I wouldn’t do it more than twice a month and often even rarer than that. But it’d take 5 days to bounce back to my baseline, and during these 5 days I’d be more distractible than usual and my prescription ADHD stimulants wouldn’t be as effective — my productivity would take a hit. At 7-10 days post-binge, I’d start craving wanting to do it again. I would resist cravings for another 1.5-3 weeks because I’d know I wouldn’t enjoy it.

Sometimes I’d try to go for longer without it, but this would produce a high-degree of internal conflict. If you are a well-adjusted and not depressed individual, your life has ups and downs, but you still find external sources of meaning and fun. I was not a well-adjusted individual, and so my life would often seem dull or routine in a way that’s obviously internally-generated.

Buddhism and meditation teach that pleasure is something you generate internally — what we’re really chasing are specific mental states and transitions between them. The darker side of this insight is that on some level you feel like it’s good to wirehead a little bit. The optimal amount of wireheading is not zero.

And so I’d end up wireheading way more than “optimal.” At some point I made a pact with myself: I can only do mephedrone if I actively try to maintain meta-cognitive awareness of its effects — to watch what it’s like to snort a line, what it’s like to keep snorting even when I am better off sleeping. The path to inner alignment is not through white-knuckling and internal conflict but through learning more about yourself.

Imagine a part of you wants to do something. You can try to resist it, or you can say: “Fine, you get what you want — but we’re going to watch closely, and then decide whether this is really what we want, given all the trade-offs.”

This mostly worked. The last time I did mephedrone, I clearly felt that its negative effects outweighed its positives. By that time I’d already resolved a large chunk of my trauma with it. And it wasn’t all that enjoyable anymore — in the same way that scrolling YouTube Shorts or Twitter stops being enjoyable after some time, you’re just doing it because it’s the path of least resistance. Mephedrone is truly the twitter of drugs. It’s like snorting tanha (a Buddhist term for clinging).

So I realised an extended break was in order. So far I haven’t done mephedrone in two months. This essay could be a farewell to this cursed drug.

But I know I’ll do it again. Somehow it feels I’d strike a better balance from now on. Maybe I’m just deluding myself.

Meditation isn’t an all-purpose feel-good technique. Originally it was invented by ascetic religious people to reach an unusual mental state — enlightenment. Enlightenment comes with deep perceptual changes, including shifts in the sense of personal identity. People often describe the process of getting there as “the mind deconstructing itself” — reaching deeper and deeper into the finer details of how what you call ”reality” is constructed to you.

These changes do reduce suffering. So it’s tempting to think: doing a bit of meditation is like adding a pinch of exotic South-Eastern spice to your dish. You might not want the fully authentic, ultraspicy version that takes years to prepare. But you can try cooking some playful fusion dishes, and if you don’t like them, you can just stop adding the spice. Right?

This view is not accurate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with stopping meditation if it’s not working for you. But meditation can sometimes induce permanent changes that you might not be able to reverse. There is an ominous saying about enlightenment: “Better not begin, once begun, better to finish”. The idea is that sometimes meditation causes significant problems and the only way out of meditation-related problems is more meditation, over a long period of time.

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The Dark Night of the Soul

Different spiritual traditions have various disagreements over the term enlightenment. Zen folks are often like, “Bro, just get enlightened, bro,” and they don’t dwell too much on detailed theory. Theravada Buddhism’s pedagogy is very different from this. It has Vipassana (insight meditation) — a systematic method that attempts to map out the process.

In Vipassana, enlightenment is broken down into four “paths” (broad periods), and each path into sixteen stages (with the last five happening in a split second). The fourth stage, “The knowledge of Arising and Passing Away of Phenomena,” is an important threshold after which there is no going back. This stage is fun, flashy, and sparkly — a kind of hyperthymic (“hypomania-light”) state where spirituality suddenly starts to make profound, visceral sense.

But then come a series of stages with less fun names: “Dissolution,” “Fear,” “Misery,” “Disgust,” “Desire for Deliverance,” and “Re-observation.” Moving through these stages involves suffering in different ways.

1. “Dissolution” makes the “spiritual high” go away. Meditation starts to suck. And the reality of there not being a permanent “me” starts to set in.

2. “Fear” is all this is accompanied by feelings of unease, fear and paranoia.

3. “Misery” adds dwelling on sadness, grief, and loss.

4. “Disgust” might mean literal disgust, but also your experience might just become colored in the “bleh” kind of revulsion, like waiting in a queue while someone drags a nail on a chalkboard.

5. “Desire for deliverance” is where you are fed up with everything, be it your life or your practice, and just want out.

6. “Re-observation” is when you’re sharply confronted with the earlier Dark Night stages and your clinging to them. Once you start dropping your resistance to them, you get to “Equanimity which” is much more smooth and pleasant phase.

If you are interested, read the corresponding chapters in Daniel Ingram’s book “Mastering Core Teachings of the Buddha”.

Daniel Ingram also writes “Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anything from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, such as narcissism and delusions of grandeur”. He quotes Kenneth Folk: “The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” The chart above is quite hand-wavy, but it implies that meditation is inherently somewhat destabilising. For more detail on meditation-related mental health issues, you can check out Cheetah House.

For most people, the Dark Night stages are mild and pass quickly. That was my experience on the first path. For a while meditation was more chaotic in a buzzy “dizzying” way. In my daily life I felt like an automaton — a bundle of automatic subroutines — for about a month, which was uncomfortable. But eventually I started feeling like an automaton who had accepted that the mind lacks a fundamental center, and my meditation got smoother.

Some people experience harsher versions of these stages and cycle through them for a long time. Imagine experiencing a depression-like state of looping through Fear, Misery and Disgust for months or even years. At that point, meditation might not seem like such a good deal: “Better not begin, once begun, better to finish”.

This isn’t a situation like “a kid takes way too many drugs, ignoring the recommended dosage, and ends up with a year-long depression.” This is a meditative path “done right” and in “recommended doses.” And that raises real ethical questions about how meditation should be recommended to people.

The conundrum

The field of psychology largely doesn’t want to grapple with these issues, even as it integrates meditation into mental health programs under the label “mindfulness.” The default instructions “focus on your breath and observe your mind, gently letting go of distractions” are based on Vipassana — the same Vipassana that is bound to produce the Dark Night if you do it. Therapists generally don’t warn clients about this when they recommend meditation.

To be fair, they usually suggest small doses, and a “microdosed” practice of 10–15 minutes a day is highly unlikely to cause problems. Still, what if someone enjoys meditation and ramps up to 45–90 minutes a day?

I am even more bothered by experienced Vipassana teachers running ten-day retreats without warning participants about potential risks. Ten-day retreats are designed to let practice to snowball into breakthroughs. And yet the this important information isn’t conveyed.

Then there is my case, writing about meditation. Obviously, I don’t want to stop — meditation has been transformative in my life. Whatever side effects I’ve experienced have been outweighed by the benefits. But other people’s brains might be different.

So how should I be warning people? Should I plaster tobacco-style warnings all over my blog posts about meditation: “CONTAINS INFOHAZARDS, MIGHT PERMANENTLY ALTER YOUR PERCEPTION”?

So far, I’ve mostly avoided confronting these questions by not explicitly encouraging serious practice, hoping readers will make an informed decision themselves. In “Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment” I talk about my experience and link to books that cover the risks.

Recently, though, I’ve been writing about meditation more directly. In “Do Nothing meditation” I describe a meditation method, in “Control is a Drug” I actively encourage readers to try it for an hour. An hour is almost certainly safe, but if someone starts doing it for an hour every day, crossing important thresholds over the course of months becomes a real possibility. I’m not exactly sure what to do about this. Folding all the nuance from this post into that one would bloat it, and in any case, readers ultimately have authority over their own lives.

Still, while I certainly can’t be responsible for every change in mental state of a person who reads words written by me from the screen of their device, I think that any blog discussing meditation seriously should be doing something to warn about its risks. And today that something is publishing this post.

Instead say, “I’m going to schedule a phone call with you in two months to catch up, I’ll send you the invite — if we need to adjust when we get closer to the date, that’s fine.” (#21 in ’s “50 things I know”)

This is the story of how I made a transcontinental friend by following that policy.

An unexpected DM

A year and a half ago I received a DM from a mysterious twitter account called Sleepr. The account was interested in attending one of the meetups I organised in London for the community around Qualia Research Institute — a non-profit studying consciousness and psychedelics. Sleeper also invited me to his psychedelic art exhibition that was opening that night and would be running for about a week.

A mysterious anon invites you down to some kind of rabbit hole in the centre of London? Sign me up!

The exhibition

The next day I went to the exhibition with a friend.

I am usually not a big fan of “psychedelic art” — the kind that shows up on the first page of Google when you type these words — think a hippie tie-die shirt-style picture of a mushroom with smeared colors so acidic they make your eyeballs bleed.

But Sleepr’s art was not that.

His works were either metaphorical — trying to capture an important emotional aspect of being a consciousness explorer. Or very technically precise, as if someone implemented a dream of every psychonaut — taking a photo of psychedelic visuals — and then artistically photoshopped that photo. My first immediate thought on seeing some works was that the resemblance to my DMT trips is uncanny.

There was an opportunity to talk to the artist himself. After a fifteen-minute wait in the queue, my friend and I were kneeling in front of the masked artist sitting in a chair. Kneeling wasn’t some weird status ritual; it was just practical — it was hard to hear him speak through the mask. He was leaning physically, and also leaning metaphorically — into his “mysterious anonymous artist” persona.

We chatted about our psychedelic experiences and exploration paths. He confirmed my suspicion that his art was DMT-based: he’d had hundreds of DMT trips, and his art was informed by them.

After a ten-minute conversation, my friend and I exited the exhibition — it was closing for the day. I was hanging out with some of the attendees on the street when the artist himself joined us, this time without the mask. The contrast between the persona and the real person was stark. His persona was… slightly demonic in a DMT jester way. The real person was a friendly, cheerful, optimistic guy with blonde hair.

I mentioned an event about psychedelic art I was planning to attend, organised by Psocial — a London community of people working in psychedelic medicine. We ended up hanging out there, too.

Instead of “Let’s stay in touch”

We had planned to go to another event, but he couldn’t make it. He messaged me:

“You were a fantastic emergent friendship. Hope we can connect again.”

Instead of replying with the usual “Let’s stay in touch”, I screenshotted Sasha Chapin’s post and suggested we actually set up a video call in a month. And so we did.

We’ve been in touch ever since, talking about psychedelics, art, spirituality, work/art/life balance, life in different countries, and many other topics.

We usually schedule a call about a month in advance. The calls often get pushed back a week, sometimes multiple times, if one of us is busy — so we end up speaking every 1.5–2 months on average. This is a feature, not a bug; it’s a rule we agreed on from the start. The combination of always having a call on the calendar and the flexibility to reschedule is what allows the calls to actually happen.

Only exchanging contract details is still fine

Often when meeting new people, exchanging contact details with them “just in case” is perfectly fine. That’s what I do in the vast majority of cases.

But if you’re saying goodbye to someone you vibe with unexpectedly well, and you feel that sharp twinge of wishing they could stay a few more days, don’t say “Let’s stay in touch.” Suggest a concrete moment in the future to connect — and, if they agree, put it on the calendar.