My journey: Mental health, mindfulness, psychedelics and nootropics
I began this journey around 6 years ago when I took my first mindfulness course. A friend introduced me to it and I remember him asking:
“Why do you want to take this course?”
“I don’t know, maybe just for stress and probably to get a better night’s sleep.”
Little did I know about the effects of mindfulness on the mind, the mental health and other methods that people are using consciously or subconsciously to get the same two things:
Happiness and increased performance.
Years after that were a rollercoaster ride, I fell into deep depression, found meditation and mindfulness again through repeat courses and witnessed its full force first hand. Then I combined travel, extensive daily exercise and (by the recommendation of a very dear friend) figured out that my subconscious already knows two methods to let the steam go, so I started practicing writing and photography, essentially a form of self-therapy.
That helped me change my mindset and move forward (the best experience was of traveling between different mind states, organically. The same person with the same cash in his wallet could feel at the top of the world and at the bottom of a pit at the same time and in the same environment. How cool is that?).
Many people simply call the experience life happening to us, however, while I agree that some stress is necessary for us to grow, taking tough decisions and to do what we do; falling into depression, getting anxiety disorder, acute stress, OCD, etc., and then making all of that lead to chronic diseases like cardiovascular conditions and type 2 diabetes is not what you sign up for when you come into this world, or do you?
I feel I was lucky that all of that happened to me, without feeling the pain, I could not have worked on solutions to resolve that pain.
Then the opportunity came when a couple of years ago, my mindfulness teacher came to me and expressed his desire of doing a startup that would work on developing breakthrough ideas to spread happiness and increase human cognitive performance.
A car mechanic’s natural way of practicing gratitude is fixing others cars and for a mechanic like me, what other purpose could have been good enough than relieving people from the pain and agitation that they live in day-in and day-out? I dived head first!
Our initial idea was to quantify and regulate emotions. Not an easy task by any standard, in last two years we came full circle, however, we figured that out and now our own emotion quantification tech is in R&D phase. The next one is the regulation, that is what this article is about!
A Mindful Disclosure
What I am describing below is the path that I have taken to experience and understand the linkage between the mindfulness practices I learned, the evolution and workings of our mind, mental health as viewed in fields of psychiatry and psychology, the clinical studies carried out by reputable research institutes such as Center of Mindfulness based at University of Massachusetts Med School, the work of neuroscientists such as Dr. Willoughby Britton, the findings of Flow Genome Project and the bio-hacks explained by Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Labs.
By no way this has or had to do with any religion. This was, is and will be a path of a scientist to research the causes, effects and outcomes and an engineer’s path to developing solutions based on that research.
Lastly, I know what I am writing about and the stigmas that exist in our society, especially when it comes to the use of psychedelics: Yes, I am a bliss junky and I know my own powerful way to reach my bliss point. I find it in practicing gratitude by the way of creating something new and useful and I do enough work everyday to get my share of dopamine and endorphins, no external help is required other than a bit of mindfulness practice and my evening exercise.
Finally, as is customary, do consult your doctor before signing up for anything even as harmless looking as meditation and yoga, first, that will keep your doctor happy, second it will keep you safe.
Step 0: What is mindfulness?
As a very simple definition, it’s a practice that makes your mind go quiet using variety of techniques. Most famous is by focusing on your breath, so as you focus or count your breath, the thoughts start fading away, you do this practice everyday even if it’s just for 5 minutes, it gives your mind break and as the time progresses your mind starts to stay in the Now moment.
It’s as simple as that!
Step 1: The Self-Awareness
Nothing can be achieved if you don’t know yourself. You have a personality and a behaviour, finding why you do what you do is the of foremost importance.
I started studying Myers Briggs Personality Test (MBTI) as I came to realize after 32 years of my life that we all think and do things differently. Especially, there is a huge huge mind-gap between feelers and objective people (Neither are wrong). I found myself too much on objective side, crushing others and my own feelings, often. People told me MBTI was not an exact science but I started putting people in those 16 personality boxes, that was my way of starting to identify people and then trying to react rationally.
Then I went around in a circle, studying everything from my star sign readings to my personality type to Tony Robbins DISC to skill strength tests. There was the same person everywhere.
I started analyzing my reactions in different situations, founding and fixing bugs and leaving what is my core as I understood my gene pool, my career choice, my friends, my parents, the environment, everything has made me what I am today.
And just recently I understood that women think in a totally different way than men, how cool is that understanding after spending 34 years of my life here on this planet?
Then I found that we are evolving everyday, we might react differently to a certain situation according to the lesson we learned in the past, that reaction can be positive or negative, the key here is that if you are growing then you are changing, starting with what you are already and growing your sense of self-awareness moves you to the positive side of things!
We become happy on different elements as our weaknesses and strengths are different.
Making oneself historically aware of who he/she is and be mindful about what is happening in Now moment is the start of what we call self-awareness!
Step 2: Researching what is out there?
So, armed with that information and my own tiny self-experiences, for instance, yoga stretches your back and that helps you with your ego, similarly, the same effect can be reached through shoulder and back strength exercise (and countless other experiences like these), I went out to research what people had already made for mass market.
Given the engineering and science-based mindset that I have, my first reaction was of disbelief and disappointment. People packaged and sold all kinds of practices and things, the most astonishing was an electronic device that was invented by someone in 1930's (as far I remember he was a plumber or something) that could detect your disease and can heal you by simply putting your hands on the knobs. When I tried researching the science behind, one of the manufacturers of the devices wrote: “The device does not follow theory of physics, it works on something that we don’t even understand.” So, how do you come up with an electrical device that even electrical theory cannot understand?
Another group of people were trying to measure your prana level without any help from physics, what kind of waves are you trying detect? eh?
People were still selling these devices and most amazing were the people who were buying them.
This went on for approximately 12–18 months and for the most part I was not very hopeful that with so much stigma in clinical and mainstream side of things, we could do much other than packaging the practice again and selling it to same people with only incremental advances. There was no breakthrough in there!
However, I found a few devices that were starting to come out then and that are good: Spire, Muse and HeartMath’s emWave. They have made amazing use of biofeedback to make the person aware in the moment. I will write about them sometime else.
Step 3: Stealing Fire
Then out of the blue, I went to see a dear advisor and mentor in Palo Alto. He gave me a book and advised me to read it on my way back home. The book’s name was Stealing Fire.
That book was the trump card, it opened everything for me, all that knowledge that I was researching and experiencing, came together! For a logical mind like me, the book weaved through causes, effects, and outcomes. It explained me the endgame, the meaning of self-actualization, all of the dust settled to the ground. I could see clearly. The relation between things. From that point onwards whatever I learned, did or experienced, point me back to the same few principles.
The Basic Principles of Happiness & Cognitive Performance
Some of the high-level principles are:
1- Pre-frontal Cortex is where all of the chatter happens. That is the area that controls your attention or in other words your thoughts. If you could train and strengthen this part to only think about positive things and let go of negativity, all the magic would happen. Reference
2- The first thing that all of the physical exertion, mindfulness exercises, psychedelics, and nootropics do is that they stop this chatter. As you get rid of negative and self-critical thoughts, you feel relaxed. The more you train your pre-frontal cortex, the better your brain gets in regulating your emotions.
3- Subconscious take over the perception, attention and other functions as soon as the main chatterbox is properly offline. The processing power here is in terabytes. This is the zone you want to get in if you are finding something beyond simple relaxation and regulation.
These principles are also beautifully described in a documentary called InnSaei — the power of intuition. The documentary is available on Netflix.
Proceeding further, as per the authors of the book and the founders of Flow Genome Project, whatever experience you will get from a dose of LSD is equivalent of 12 weeks of meditation. I had no idea about what I was getting into but I had to take the short-cut of LSD to know and relate my meditation experience. I asked my friend, he is a true bliss junky in every sense, so in his mind I was not aware of the pleasures of the bliss states and also I was not accustomed to the rushes that came with psychedelics so he introduced me first to something else.
Step 4: The Ecstasy
This is where the things got interesting, I had popped my first pill. The first thing it did was quieting my mind. I already knew that each drug has it’s own effect and this one is to generate bonding and empathy. All of that trip, I was just lecturing my friends that they should unleash themselves to the world and should actualize their full potential. I also learned why people use it as a party drug and how you get clarity in that state, the reason is simple, as soon as your self-critique network goes offline, you start thinking clearly.
My friend told me that the drug has told my brain to release all of the endorphins and dopamine that I would normally get in a week but now the negative effect is that those chemicals will not come back for a week and I will feel cranky.
Here is where things took an interesting turn, as I continued my morning breathing and meditation practice, I was able to recall the same feeling instantly. My friend said the chemical will stay in your system for couple of days but I was actually able to go back in there, on will, for a full week. That was mindfulness playing, simple breathing exercise was turning off my chatterbox, allowing my subconscious mind to take over and allowing me to go back again and again.
Step 5: The LSD
So, after two weeks, here came a little acid induced paper that would make even serious bliss junkies fearful. The reason: it does not provide you any pleasure, there is no bliss. It just shuts down your conscious mind and sends you in your subconscious mind where processing speeds are very high (richness), the time goes slow (timelessness), you forget yourself (selflessness) and everything comes to you on the prompt (effortlessness).
The downside of your subconscious mind is, you meet real you! Ha! Kidding, normally he/she is a good person.
I discovered a basement in my head that day, it was a place where you could go, sit down on a chair, cross your legs and ask your trip-mate: Ask what you want to ask?
The world felt very near that day, difficult tasks became very easy, implementation and resources already available! Before taking the trip I thought I will think about my projects but as I understood later from InnSaei, I was in my subconscious mind. There was no structure there, it was all an organized chaos. That day I learned from where the Hyperloop, Tesla and SpaceX are coming from.
I wanted to call my friend in Silicon Valley, he has a huge Elon Musk poster pasted on the wall in his house, the poster says: WWED — What would Elon do? He was also anti of me doing LSD so I wanted to tell him what would Elon do, but I didn’t [you know who you are old man ;)]
The most powerful thing for me was the tip from the book that the same state can be achieved through meditation. However, then a strange thing happened …
Most people experience a trip of 10–12 hours, mine was 24 hours long! Last 6 hours were those where I got the grip of rushes and the toll of the drug. I was in a basement and my trusted friend was the only one left with me. There I went into the top gear and then that strange thing …
I went into a square in my mind, that square had a thought stored in it.
Now the LSD does two things to everyone, as in the documentary, you learn that your subconscious mind is where all the creativity happens, so you instantly become very creative. If you don’t find anything you start painting if nothing else you start filling out colouring books (that day I got to know why adult people buy colouring book). The other thing it does is that you get to know a lot about yourself on the first trip.
I got to know, it wasn’t my first trip.
I knew that square, I knew that box. I knew that thought.
I thought and thought and thought, where else? During LSD, the memory blocks are not that easily accessible and this thought was in my subconscious, not easy to remember where I have seen it earlier (reminds of the elephant in Pixar’s Inside Out) but then I got the answer — 4 years back, at a silence course in the mountains. We did meditation all day long for at least 3 days, sometime during that, I visited that square…
The game was now open for me! I had taken that shortcut, I could relate the experiences, I knew how I can try to replicate the experience using mindfulness.
Step 6: Nootropics
Then a dear friend of mine introduced me to nootropics. These are the pills whole of the Silicon Valley is popping for their off-label advantages. Some are prescription drugs, some are not. At the forefront of this self bio-hacking movement is Dave Asprey of Bulletproof, he came into my research again and again, multiple people mentioned him, while nothing is clinically proven there as were the techniques mentioned in the Stealing Fire, the promise was interesting, for me, increasing the productivity.
So, on friend’s recommendation and after reading Dave’s article, I popped 200mg of Modafinil. Again, this was all about the chatterbox! The tablet tunes the chatterbox within minutes, leaving nothing but focus and attention. The good thing about this one is that there are no rushes and no wandering in the subconsciousness, it allows you to use your pre-frontal cortex and you become in-charge of your attention!
It’s the same promise that mindfulness extends to you.
Step 8: Mindfulness Mental Health
General happiness and performance are good but if you are developing an approach to help people, you got to find the people who are in most pain, where the impact can be greatest. All of the research led us to go and explore the impact of mindfulness on mental health.
There are clinically conducted, NIH funded, outcome validated studies that say mindfulness can help people who suffer depression due to chronic pain such as people with fibromyalgia. My own mother has it and she is continuously fighting with her pain, what if we teach her mindfulness and make her accustomed to the pain and accept it? [I know it's not that simple, people suffer know the full extent of their misery] but at least this technique is able to help them at some level?
There is another example of clinically validated approach of using MBCT.
MBCT is used to manage relapse in depression patients. The studies confirm that mindfulness based therapy replaces antidepressant medication. That is powerful stuff, isn’t it?
All of that led us to think what if we come up with a hardware device that can quantify your mental health (even at the basic level) and then could quantify if you are doing homework every day? What can be the elements of that engagement?
Elements of mindfulness adoption
There are three key elements for making people achieve their flow state and then to maintain it:
1- Experience
2- Human connection
3- Behaviour change
You will not buy anything if you haven’t experienced these states? You are reading up to these lines most probably because you know what I am talking about. That is an experience. You can not activate anyone without experience. Their journey will obviously be different to yours but you need to activate them once!
Then maintaining it, it’s not easy as it sounds, a mindfulness course can give you that experience, or a drug can take you there, what’s next? You have to maintain it. I have seen strong meditators struggling, heard from countless teachers that they started teaching because they struggled to keep up with the practice. What are the key learnings here that make people stick?
Human connection and behaviour change.
As humans, we all need anchors, a teacher or a friend can become your anchor. A device can also do that but it should also connect you to someone or provide you the connection in the same way. We struggle doing workout on our own, why do we go to workout classes even after we have done that for years and can become trainers ourselves? That is the connection part.
Long-term benefits can only be achieved if we make a behaviour shift, they say it takes 40 days of doing something at the same time everyday to make it your habit. So, why not do it and make others do it? Negativity is a loop, somebody got to make you aware of it so you can break it!
Our startup and prototype
It was a long journey, we started alone but we are an amazing team now. We are learning, adapting, developing, testing everyday. Our hardware prototype is in R&D phase and it’s open for further experiments, development and outcome studies.
We are also working our approach as we meet and brainstorm with the people who have done a lot of clinically validated or not-validated work with mental health and mindfulness.
We are growing our knowledge base every day, personally, I have figured out a way to keep my flow state in check, at least an hour of daily physical exertion, meditation and yoga, all of them or either one of them, you have to stay on top of it. There is no other choice!
Onwards!