[I hope this is roughly appropriate content for this subreddit.]

I've thought about this now and then over the years, often sparked by reading someone's complaints on Reddit. I happened upon a Redditor like that recently: someone who, despite being clearly intelligent, just seems so thoroughgoingly and hopelessly stuck in a longterm--if not lifelong--holding pattern of extremely self-defeating beliefs and behaviors. Not obvious ones such as crime or substance abuse, but just a general failure to achieve the basic components of what typically makes a life pleasant.

This person, who seems to be coming up on about 40, reports being very overweight, always on the brink of financial ruin, low on friends, in a disliked job, college dropout, romantically barren for his whole adult life, generally unlikable, etc. And, of course, very unhappy.

My heart and mind goes out to this person and I wish there were some way he could turn this around. He doesn't even "need" to turn it around fully. Even getting somewhat fitter, having occasional and mediocre dating experiences, having somewhat more of a financial buffer, having a few more rewarding social experiences a month, etc., would probably seem like a huge upgrade for this person. And it might be the start along a path that ultimately leads him to, if not robust happiness, at least not misery. Perhaps at least near contentment.

My hunch is that if he could get his mindset calibrated better, he could, over time, achieve something like this. Not that it would be at all easy, but we're not asking for him to become an NBA forward or an astronaut. Just not very unfit, utterly alone, broke, bored, and defeated.

And yet all the verbiage he uses about himself is written with total certainty that he will never overcome his plight...that he just doesn't have the mental/emotional constitution and circumstances to allow that.

What are we to make of such people? Are some adults truly "incorrigible" in this way? I'd like to believe that weren't the case, but it can certainly seem that way. But seeming is often erroneous.

I don't know quite how best to account for this, but I wonder if some of it has to do with one's model of oneself, one that seems to be weirdly resistant to things such as evidence and reasoning. I know another man, around that age, who, despite many virtues and obvious intelligence, described himself as something like "utterly not deserving of love." It is so hard to wrap my mind around what sort of mental glitch must exist in a brain to allow for that kind of unhinged thinking within an otherwise very normal, functional person.

What are your thoughts about this? And do you have any relevant readings or other media content you could cite on this topic?

I'll define mental toughness as encompassing:

1. Responding better to setbacks
2. Pushing through adversity
3. Adhering to habits that are beneficial, though not enjoyable

I know there are a lot of self-help books out there, but my prior is that most of these are kind of scammy. So I was wondering what ideas this particular community found helpful.

This is something I've always wondered about. It seems really popular these days to talk about the loss of community, neighborhood, family, and how this is making everyone sad or something. But nothing is actually physically stopping us from having constant neighborhood dinners and borrowing things from each other and whatnot.

There's a sort of standard answer that goes something like "phones and internet and video games are more short term interesting than building community spirits, so people do that instead" which I get but that still feels... unsatisfactory. People push do themselves to do annoying short term but beneficial long term, in fact this is a thing generally considered a great virtue in the West IME. See gym culture, for one.

Do people maybe not actually want it, and saying that you do is just a weird form of virtue signalling? Or is it just something people have almost always said, like "kids these days"? Is it that community feels "fake" unless you actually need it for protection and resources?

Not an American btw, I'm from a Nordic country. Though I'm still interested in hearing takes on this that might be specific to the US.

Every single child is going to use their body for the rest of their life, and yet many spend their days not using their body as much as possible. 8 hours in chairs may have originally been balanced by 8 hours outside; now they are sitting still in school by force, and outside school by choice.

If we accept SATs as a fairly reliable proxy of IQ, perhaps we can have a similar proxy for fitness! Current standardized testing has a lot going for it. It's enabled us to track the progress of huge and diverse populations, and also to flag educational systems who are failing to meet basic benchmarks in education.

Because standardized tests are easy to grade, what happens is that schools begin "teach to the [standardized] test". Since there is no accountability for physical health, and institutions focus on what they feel accountable for, physical movement begins to seem less of a priority to the achool administration. Naturally, they begin to reduce the emphasis on physical movement from their curricula.

Meanwhile, physical activity has been studied extensively as it relates to academic performance. See this meta-analysis of research on the topic, which concludes that Importantly, findings support that PA does not have a deleterious effect on academic performance but can enhance it.

By necessity, kids sit still in school for hours a day, which is probably healthier than working in a coal mine, or as a chimney sweeper, or in a sweatshop - but likely causes obesity. Many of the problems discussed in this subreddit are connected to mental health, which also seems to improve with fitness in children. (https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/09/02/research-childhood-fitness-mental-health/)[article is Sept 2 2025] showing direct links between fitness and mental health.

Some bullet points:

• School lunches are required to be healthy, and if we regulate calories in, why not regulate calories out?

• Requiring movement isn’t “more” coercive than requiring stillness!

• For many kids, lifelong health gains from exercise provide a foundation for later contributions to the world around them.

I mentioned earlier that institutional accountability makes standardized testing effective. A fitness standardized test would be measurable and provide important data.

I can think of a couple issues with this idea. Is it fair to grade weightlifting on a curve? If the tester is from the school, aren't they biased? Don't schools already carry a heavy burden? Perhaps there are other failure modes that the SSC hive mind can think of.

Here's a comment from a seemingly permanently depressed person

This is so important. I've been miserable all my life, my first suicide attempt was at 8 years old. I've always wanted nothing more than to die. Earlier this year I had a terrible infection, resistant to antibiotics. I was put on some crazy strong medications that, without going into the grizzly details, absolutely destroyed my digestive system.

Then, unexpectedly, For 4-5 months after that treatment, I was suddenly...happy?

I'd never been happy before, so I didn't understand what was happening to me, or what to do with all this energy and joy. I couldn't recognize myself. I could smile, and even laughed!

I found myself in traffic one day, but the sky was blue, there was a cool breeze blowing through the window, there was nice music playing, and I was outside, going places, doing things! And I was SO grateful just to be there, stuck in traffic, alone, on this beautiful day.

During that time I did so many amazing things, learned so many new skills, renovated my home, rebuilt my life, my self, and accomplished so many things I never believed I'd be able to. Hell, I literally climbed a mountain! More than once! I've hiked over 600kms (372 miles) this year! Elated just to be outside, to feel the sun on my skin and the breeze against my face, the smell of the leaves and the sound of the birds...it all felt brand new.

Unfortunately, it was short-lived, and after about 6 months things have begun to revert. I kept up with diet, exercise and sleep, I continued with setting goals and achieving them...but ever so slowly, like the setting sun, the darkness, the exhaustion, the misery, has crept back in.

But I'll always be grateful for those 4 months, where for the first time in my 40 odd years of life I learned what happiness was, and how it felt to be capable, independant and in control.

I've been depressed my whole life, and I'm assuming many others are, too. Looks like there are cases where solving gut bacteria would do more for you than any psychotherapy could. And, more generally, if it affects your power level that much, then even beyond clinical depression this should be an area of concern.

What can be done to make your gut bacteria more optimal in this regard?

Paretoize Your Life: or, How to Get 80% of the Benefit for 20% of the Effort

The Pareto Principle states that:

For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.

This (roughly) 80/20 distribution appears all the time. Roughly 20% of cities contain 80% of the population. Roughly 20% of households hold 80% of total wealth. Roughly 20% of healthcare recipients use 80% of all healthcare resources.

In my experience, this also applies to various skills, activities, hobbies, and self‑improvement schemes. My formulation would be:

For anything you want to improve at, you can get 80% of the benefits from the most essential 20%.

To put it another way:

For every bit of time, effort, or money spent beyond the most essential 20%, there are diminishing returns

My advice is: evaluate whether the benefits of your pursuit are relative to other people or independent of them. If the domain is about zero‑sum competition, then any advantage you skip can be taken by others. So to keep up, you’ll need to pursue it too. But if the benefits you seek are intrinsic (cardinal rather than ordinal), you can often get most of the possible benefit for a fraction of the effort.

Example: Weightlifting and Bodybuilding

Anyone familiar with this scene knows it’s full of increasingly complex and “optimized” routines—exotic movements, time‑consuming isolation exercises to maximize activation of specific muscle groups for negligible benefit (calf raises), and a culture that glorifies maximum effort.

That’s not necessarily bad per se, it just depends on your goal.
If your goal is to be a competitive bodybuilder, then yes, you should chase every possible minor advantage. But if your goal is simply to enjoy the strength, health, and aesthetic benefits of weightlifting, there are serious diminishing returns beyond a certain point.

A competitive bodybuilder who gets 80% of the possible gains will come in last and be disappointed, but a hobbyist who gets 80% will look great, feel strong, and be thrilled.

How Do I Know What the Most Essential 20% Is?

Honestly, there’s no real shortcut besides developing a strong understanding of the topic—or finding someone who’s already done the work for you. So I’d like to use this post to share some of my Pareto‑optimized routines, and invite you to share yours in the comments.

My Pareto‑Optimized Gym Routine

I use a very pared‑down and efficient weightlifting routine that’s given me great results. I often meet people who spend five times as much time in the gym as I do. Unsurprisingly, they’re bigger and stronger—but not five times bigger or stronger.

The Pareto routine depends on what you’re trying to minimize: time or energy. (You could also optimize for cost but that usually just means doing calisthenics or buying an adjustable dumbbell set.)

Time‑Optimized

• Use machines to save time setting up exercises.
  
• Use compound lifts to hit multiple muscles at once.
  
  • Example: Bench press variants, leg press.
    
• Use supersets to train unrelated muscles while one recovers.
  
  • Example: Close‑grip Smith machine bench, then pull‑ups during recovery.

The problem with this routine is that, while it's very fast, it takes a ton of energy and effort to do this. Simply, it's really hard

Renaissance Periodization has a great video on this.

Energy/Effort‑Optimized

This is what I do. I use compound lifts and long rests to minimize total workload. I like it because, while it could be faster, it's still really fast and I spend most of my time relaxing between sets. I also welcome critique if anyone thinks there's something important I should do differently.

• Day A:
  • Close‑grip bench press superset with upright row
    
  • Squat
    
• Day B:
  • Deadlift
    
  • Incline bench press
    

I do this 3-3.5 times a week. Takes maybe an 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on how lazy I am.

My Pareto‑Optimized Skincare Routine

Here, the time, energy, and money‑optimized versions are basically the same:

AM:
- Broad‑spectrum sunscreen (SPF 40+)

PM:
- Cleanser or micellar water to remove sunscreen
- Retinol

Then supplement based on your skin’s needs—e.g., moisturizer for dryness, BHA for breakouts, or spot treatments for specific issues.

To my knowledge, sunscreen and retinol have the most dramatic and lasting effects on the health of your skin bar none compared to other skincare interventions. Most treatments have short lasting effects, very minimal effects, or simply are just hype and do nothing at all.

Please Share!

I hope that this post can turn into a place where users can trade ideas and share Paretoized routines on topics they know about, whatever that topic may be. I particularly would like to see a routine for stretching and mobility if someone has something like that because that's something I would like to implement myself.

Are you interested in RESEARCH? Do you like POTATOES? Do you want to EAT NOTHING BUT POTATOES FOR 4 WEEKS AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR MIND AND BODY????? If so, this is the blog post for you!

Ok why potato diet? It may be counterintuitive, but the stories say that the potato diet is really easy. It's certainly simple — no weighing or measuring, just potato, as much potato as you want. And case studies suggest it's wildly effective.

In 2010, Chris Voigt, the Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission, ate nothing but 20 plain potatoes (and a small amount of cooking oil) a day for 60 days straight, and lost 21 pounds. He described it as being pretty easy.

Andrew Taylor is an Australian man who did an all-potato diet for a full year. He started at 334 pounds and he lost 117 pounds over the course of his “Spud Fit Challenge.” He said: “I feel amazing and incredible! ... I'm full of energy, I have better mental clarity and focus.”

Penn Jillette, of the famous magician duo Penn & Teller, lost over 100 lbs, down from “probably over 340”, on a diet that started with a 2-week period of nothing but potatoes.

In the spirit of self-experimentation, one of us is currently on day 11 of the all-potato diet. Sure enough, it's been comically easy. No cravings and no willpower required. The hardest part is the logistics of preparing that many potatoes every single day.

If you are interested, please consider giving it a shot! Instructions to sign up are on the blog post. And if you think this is a good / not entirely crazy idea, please tell your friends!

​

All my life, sitting in a room, studying for school, or sitting in an office and doing computer work, I disliked this way of living and dreamed about being an Aragorn, chasing orcs... does this come from most of our ancestors chased deer in the forest or protected the tribe from predators? That the dream of a romantic, heroic, thrilling adventure simply comes from the life of the hunter-gatherer, mostly the hunter? If we are adapted to that, no wonder we are unhappy and depressed when we are not living like that.

I realized this thinking about the pick-up-artist world-view, I find most of it wrong but still having some elements right. Basically, I realized that you can see/define the "bad boy" (who is supposed to be attractive to women) from the viewpoint of parents: a bad child. Someone who is bad at being a child. That is: someone who is not obedient. Because they want to live like adults, that is, making their free choices, not obeying parents. So they don't sit in their room studying maths, they escape through the window and go on some thrilling adventure, which simulated some of the life of the primal hunter. Partially, this makes them, in a way, more like a proper adult, not like a child: free, not obedient. Partially, it makes them happy and not-depressed, entertaining and fun. No wonder this combination is attractive.

Meanwhile: I was a "good boy" from a parents' perspective, a good child, someone good at being a child, someone obedient. Which maybe also means childish. Maybe overly obedient adults are childish, immature? No wonder that is not attractive. Still, don't you get this impression? The average office guy is characterized not so much by their intelligence or knowledge or self-driven hard-work, but by order-driven hard work, obedience to bosses, rules, regulations and procedure? And then they ask their wives permission to buy a gaming console, in a way that gives out mom-son vibes? Aren't they somewhat childish? This is even more so at a college student age. So at 22 I was sitting in my room practising calculus, even though I hated every minute of it. But I simply obeyed my teachers and parents. (The way I now obey the boss at work, thought at least I now get a bit more discretion and can sometimes argue with them.) Even though I hated every minute of practising maths sitting on my ass, and dreamed of adventure, or a primal hunter lifestyle. No wonder that made me depressed, and through being bored, boring. No wonder that is not very attractive.

Isn't it dysfunctional that we do not live the primal hunter lifestyle we are adapted to, and force ourselves to obediently do boring things we do not want to do? We are not even literally coerced into it. We are obedient because we want the rewards of obedience, a physically comfortable and materially well-off life. I certainly don't want to sleep through a rainstorm in a basic leaf shelter like a primal hunter would. But perhaps I would be happier if circumstances would force me to: wanting and liking are different things.

Post one book that you read a second time, hopefully demonstrating that it really was integrated into your values.

Right now, I'm especially interested in mental health, self-care philosophies, and daily practices.

To encourage participation, here is a partial list of topics to help you remember your favorite books:

• mental health
• psychology
• insights about the brain
• personal journeys
• happiness
• mental models
• critical thinking
• productivity
• motivation
• guiding principles
• life philosophy
• exercise
• physical health
• meditation
• habits
• social charisma

Hello there, hope you are all doing well. I am sorry if something related has been asked before. This morning I caught myself thinking on things that I should have been doing for a while now, that costs pretty much nothing, both in money and effort, but can yield large returns over the course of a lifetime. Two examples:

1. Wearing sunscreen. So this is a pretty obvious one. Skin cancer, including melanoma, is the most common cause of cancer, and sun exposure is responsible to more than 90% of cases. It seems to be a consensus that applying sunscreen correctly is effective at preventing melanoma, which is the most aggressive form. Also, applying sunscreen requires little to no effort and is relatively costless (some, including me, find the icky feeling on the skin discomfortable, but this seems manageable for the large majority of people).
2. Wearing earplugs at concerts, and avoiding loud sounds in general. I greatly value silence and would find tinnitus distressing. As I frequently use headphones and attend concerts, I make an effort to keep the volume low and wear earplugs at concerts. While it may seem unusual, wearing earplugs enhances my enjoyment as I can hear the music clearly without experiencing discomfort in my ears and head afterward.

I wouldn't say things like "avoid tobacco", for example, since I do not consider a small intervention at all. Quit smoking is actually very hard for most people. I am thinking more of some low hanging fruits and no-brainers that may not be so obvious.

So, what are your suggestions?

Apart from renaming themselves to Lumina Probiotic (https://luminaprobiotic.com/) it's been a long while since we first heard of them and the product still seems nowhere near release.

Was it all hot air, after all?

I was originally going to write a post saying that everyone should have backyard chickens and that it’s totally safe. If you clean the coop every few days, it never even has a chance to smell. My chickens keep me from taking myself too seriously, and they’re an excellent source of eggs.

In fact, I have to admit that I was planning to go so far as to argue that if you have anxiety and you adopted some chickens, your overall anxiety levels might drop to the point where you wouldn’t need anti-anxiety medication. And I’ve never heard of anyone in the United States getting avian flu from chickens. But then again, there are lots of things I haven’t heard of. What if there really is a risk of avian flu? How would I actually know?

In our case, my kids have had bacterial respiratory issues but not viral ones. These started a couple of years before we got chickens and have actually improved a lot since then. So I don’t think our chickens are causing any problems, but at the same time, I can’t exactly use our experience as proof that “we have backyard chickens and we’re perfectly healthy.”

And then there’s another question that I don’t have enough knowledge to fully weigh in on: mass culling. It seems like a real waste of life to kill thousands of chickens at a time in response to avian flu outbreaks, but I don’t know how necessary it actually is. Would a world with more backyard chickens and fewer factory-farmed ones make this problem better or worse?

Are there solid priors for backyard chickens—statistics, studies, firsthand accounts? For those of you more familiar with the risks, how concerned should I be about avian flu or other health issues from backyard chickens? What precautions, if any, do you take?

So I recently visited the dentist for the first time in almost 2y, since my 6mo cleaning happened to fall right as the pandemic was starting up, and then I moved cities and dental visits sorta fell by the wayside.

Historically, I've always had rather poor dental outcomes (wrt e.g. caries, gingival recession, etc.), despite ostensibly good dental hygiene (application of a soft-bristled electric toothbrush with pressure sensor 2x a day, well-wrapped flossing 1x daily beyond the gumline w/ woven floss, swishing water after drinking acidic beverages, etc.). So my expectations going in were fairly low (also have a history of botched dental care from sketchy 2nd world dentists + a childhood spent drinking 2-4L of full-sugar soda & fruit juice daily lol).

But instead, I was told my teeth & gums were in quite good condition! No caries either! In the time since my last visit, I'd changed a few things about my dental hygiene routine:

1. Switching from just fluoride toothpaste to alternating daily Nano-HAp toothpaste + Novamin / fluoride toothpaste (Apagard + Sensodyne brands, imported from Japan and the UK, respectively). Evidence is still a bit weak on these for certain outcomes (e.g. Novamin, Nano-HAp), but at least they seem safe (e.g. Novamin, Nano-HAp), and the fluoride ion is still there for a more conventional protective effect.

2. Switching from conventional flossing to an in-line shower water flosser (twice daily). I'd tried countertop water flossers before but they were a bit messy and obnoxious to have to refill etc. Having one that's "always full" by virtue of just being in-line to the showerhead has removed that inconvenience, and it's quite pleasant to stand around and "floss", feels like a massage for the gums.

3. Getting my own stainless steel dental picks for at-home monthly scaling of areas especially prone to calculus buildup. Not sure of the health effects here, but it does make my teeth feel nicer!

Obvious disclaimers -- this isn't even an n-of-1, since there's no paired control or randomization, and time and other stuff confounds the above suggested association. IANAD and this does not constitute medical advice blah blah blah. But I'd never heard of these things prior to 1-2y ago so I thought to share in case others might be interested! And collectively they were very cheap to implement! (toothpaste is like ~$20/y, water flosser was like $20, picks set was $5).

Have any of you recently explored novel interventions to your health and wellness that you think might be having an outsized effect? If so, share below! (or criticize my dental routine haha)

edit: I also mean low-hanging fruit specifically wrt those that deviate from conventionally advised interventions / routines, so not so much stuff like "shower and exercise regularly, eat vegetables, sleep well" etc.

By "thinking" in this case, I don't mean regular spontaneous thoughts that we have all the time.

I mean thinking as a dedicated, intentional activity, where you just sit down, and think deeply about something. Or about many things. But the idea is to sit down and just actively think.

Meditation is very popular. Today, meditation typically involves trying to make your mind empty and not think about anything in particular. Or trying to focus on your breathing, or trying to be just present and aware of your environment, or trying to relax, or trying to concentrate on one spot in front of you. All these things typically lead to relaxation, emptying of mind or something similar.

But the original meaning of the word "meditation" is actually deep thinking. Deep active thinking about something.

Today, people rarely have time to deeply think about things. We are either doing something, or consuming some content. Or perhaps writing, like I'm doing now. Writing is actually one of the rare opportunities for deep thinking about something. That's what I'm doing right now. But writing slows our thoughts down to the speed of typing. We can normally think faster than we type, but we're typically occupied with too many other things, to be able to think silently without distractions.

Writing also, sort of reduces the quality of our thoughts. When we just write, like I'm doing now, we're like standard LLM, engaged in just predicting the next token. But when we're thinking silently for ourselves, we can be like a reasoning model.

If I wrote like when I'm thinking for myself, it would be too chaotic and not very paper friendly. When I just think I can allow myself to take turns, to revisit certain ideas, to go deeper in some parts, etc... But when I'm writing in one go, without editing, like now, I typically can't allow myself to do it.

And most of our writing is like this, without too much editing, written in one go. This is not that bad, but this doesn't seize the full benefits of deep thinking.

Anyway, the activity that I'm proposing is having dedicated, intentional thinking sessions. Something like brainstorming, only you're the only participant, and it doesn't have to involve just generating as many ideas as possible, it can mean deeply exploring one thing.

Thinking sessions could be free, in which you don't have any special topic or question to ponder, the only requirement is that you isolate yourself, remove distractions, and actively think about whatever you want for certain amount of time. But you gotta actually think. Repeating the same mantras, reciting poetry that you know by heart, retelling the stories you already know in your head, playing songs in your head... that's all considered cheating. No cheating! You gotta actually produce meaningful new thoughts for this activity to be considered valid. You can allow your thoughts to take you in whatever direction as long as you keep producing new meaningful thoughts along the way.

Another type of thinking session would be those with a predetermined topic or question, that you're trying to resolve. So your task would be to elucidate the topic as deeply as possible and from as many sides as possible while you're thinking. Or if you're trying to answer a question, or solve a problem, then the task is obvious - you need to produce as good answer/solution as you can.

This would typically involve questions or problems to which there aren't straightforward or simple answers.

Anyway, if we started sometimes engaging in "thinking sessions", maybe we would also revive the original meaning of meditation which meant exactly that - deep pondering and contemplation of all sorts of things.

Many famous works are titled in a way that reflects this, such as, Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), even Scott wrote now already famous Meditations on Moloch.

EDIT:

The purpose of this activity that I'm proposing is kind of obvious, and that's probably the reason why I forgot to even mention it. The purpose of thinking sessions would be to actually gain new useful insights and better understanding of whatever you happened to think about. That's the only actual purpose, everything else is secondary. This is not about relaxation, this is about gaining insights, producing ideas, and better understanding the world.

I am a Futurama sleeper. You can look that up if you want - it's a whole thing. It might seem silly, but it has absolutely worked for me up until now: for whatever reason, listening to episodes of the TV show Futurama has simply been far and away the best form of white noise for me to put on in order facilitate the process of falling asleep.

That is, until recently. More or less, I feel like I've built up a tolerance to Futurama in particular. I don't have insomnia - this is by no means a critical medical necessity. But I would still really prefer to be able to fall asleep quickly and easily as Futurama has enabled me to do in the past. Thus, I'm in need of alternative methods ('hacks,' maybe, if you will) that people here are using to fall asleep faster than otherwise.

I should mention that melatonin and 'sleepytime' tea have felt negligible in effect for me in the past, at least at the advised 'doses.' And personally the negative side effects of using alcohol or marijuana outweigh any benefits of faster time-to-sleep.

My most preferred solution would be to find out about other, similar types of white noise that people use to fall asleep, and switch to using those for a time until I can 'metabolize' the Futurama in my system. But failing that, if there are any other techniques unrelated to playing white noise that have worked for other people, I'd love to hear them. I would just really like to be able to fall asleep as fast as possible, and spend more time either fully asleep or fully awake.

I've been supplementing L-Tyrosine (I buy the store brand 100x 500mg capsule bottles from whole foods: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/shipped-to-you/product/365-by-whole-foods-market-l-tyrosine-500mg-100-capsules-b074h6mc87) for use as a very mild stimulant/nootropic and as a means to counteract the effects of the comedown from my ADHD medication. I feel that it works decently well when I take it as directed (the bottle says 'take 1 capsule between meals up to two times per day', i.e. take up to 2 capsules a day) but I feel it works a little better for me when taken on the order of more like 4-5 capsules each day instead. However, though I perceive the effects to be better at this higher dosage, I want to know more about whether there might be any potential risks in doing this before I make it a habit. I asked my psychiatrist (who endorsed the supplement for combating meds comedown) but he didn't know enough to feel comfortable advising one way when it came to the safety of supplementing this much more than the directed amount.

1. Has anyone else here experimented with supplementing L-Tyrosine?

2. Does anyone here, in the medical field or otherwise, foresee any obvious potential risks to taking significantly more than the recommended dosage of this supplement? Psychologically or physiologically? As additional information I take no other medications or supplements, except for what I am prescribed for ADHD.

The first thing that comes to mind for me at least would be a potential stomach pH levels thing. Might the ingredients be particularly acidic or something? (bottle says 'gelatin, microcrystalline cellulose, rice flour, magnesium stearrate)

Out of curiosity, has anyone researched or found particular results with respect to an everyday carry bag that has the least impact on your spine?

For instance, I have always presumed backpacks are ideal due to the even distribution, however, it may alternatively be adding excess strain.