Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators and Mavericks Do to Win at Life. Dave Asprey

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СКАЧАТЬ Titans, appeared on Bulletproof Radio twice. Tim talked about his experience using ibogaine, an African psychedelic, in a microdosing protocol.

      Ibogaine is used by some people as a very mild stimulant. In fact, it was sold in France many years ago for precisely that purpose. Ibogaine has a poor safety record compared to other psychedelics, mostly related to cardiac events. Tim estimates that somewhere between one in a hundred and one in three hundred people who use ibogaine will experience a fatal cardiac event and recommends doing so only under proper medical supervision while hooked up to machines that track your pulse and heart rate. Tim microdosed ibogaine at very low dosages—a range of 2 to 4 milligrams, which is about one-hundredth of a full dose. He experienced a mild prefrontal headache and had a slightly buzzy, very mildly anxious feeling for the first three to four hours. But in that period of time, he did experience heightened attention.

      What was most interesting, though, was not what happened on that first day but what happened subsequently. For the next two to three days, Tim reports, his happiness set point was about 15 to 20 percent higher than usual. He also felt highly nonreactive: He was cool and dispassionate and didn’t react emotionally. This is a state he says would normally take him two to three weeks of daily meditation to reach.

      Am I suggesting that you microdose ibogaine to increase your performance? Absolutely not. I haven’t tried it and am not planning to because the risk isn’t worth the reward for me. I have young kids. My happiness set point is consistently higher than it ever has been. My flow state comes from service to others, public speaking, EEG neurofeedback, and writing. But again, I believe everyone should have the right to weigh the risks and choose for themselves.

      Tim made sure to have medical personnel in attendance when he tried ibogaine, in part because he has witnessed the negative effects of hallucinogens firsthand. When he was much younger, he experimented with LSD, decided to go for a walk, and stepped right into the street. He “came to” standing in the middle of the road at night with headlights bearing down on him. Tim’s cousin, who had a family history of schizophrenia, went from being a super-high-functioning chess whiz to being barely communicative after using LSD. Some medical experts believe that psychedelics can exacerbate or even trigger mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Yet there are many applications for these drugs, and Tim and I are both glad that many game changers are initiating a responsible conversation about them.

      In service of my own growth, I traveled to Amsterdam nineteen years ago to try medical mushrooms, which were legal there. That single experience profoundly changed my brain, drawing my attention to hard-to-find patterns. It taught me to look at the world more closely, and I believe it helped me process some of my own fears that were holding me back and to see the stories I was telling myself so I could start editing them. That’s the real value of this type of medicine. Did taking mushrooms help in my success, and would I do it again? Absolutely, and without reservation.

      Note that I was in a country where I could legally use mushrooms. As a biohacker, I make it a point to try everything that might help me raise my limits, but I don’t want to go to jail, either. In 2013, I microdosed LSD for thirty days straight and found the effect to be similar to that of other entirely legal nootropics you’ll read about later in the chapter. I found it’s not worth the legal risk because the rewards weren’t that high for me. If it were free of legal risk, I’d add it to my nootropic stack some of the time.

      Even microdosing isn’t without career risk. During my thirty-day experiment, I accidentally took a slightly higher dose than planned one morning. I felt mild elation right before I went onstage in front of a room of about 150 influential executives in Los Angeles to be interviewed about biohacking. Not good. I made it through the interview mostly unscathed, although I cracked a couple jokes that weren’t funny to anyone except me. If the dose had been even a little bit higher, who knows what else I would have said? Even when you’re far from high, your judgment may be altered when microdosing, and you won’t know it until later.

      And yes, I go to Burning Man and greatly value my experiences there, some of which may include full-dose psychedelics. When they do, it’s always with people who are there to make it safe (including medical professionals), and I walk away better off. More on full-dose experiences later. The bottom line is that microdosing psychedelics is neither a panacea for personal growth and performance nor entirely useless and dangerous. Psychedelics can heal. They can harm. At very low doses, they can increase your performance. If you decide to use them, start slowly, do so with a trusted person, do so for the first time when you’re not planning a big day at work, and do so in a legal jurisdiction. These aren’t party drugs.

      You also can’t expect to pop a pill and suddenly possess new levels of self-awareness. When used appropriately, these drugs can activate an elevated consciousness that triggers new insights, but to truly cultivate self-awareness, you still have to do the work. In other words, drugs in and of themselves won’t make you more aware, but they can give you the opportunity to see the things you need to work on. It’s up to you to then take action and work on them!

      But microdosing psychedelics is far from the only way to benefit from certain drugs. I have actively benefited from another class of drugs, nootropics, since 1997, when I was grappling with a steep decline in my cognitive performance at work. When my doctor was ill equipped to help, I took matters into my own hands and ordered almost $1,000 worth of smart drugs from Europe (the only place where you could get them at the time). I remember opening the unmarked brown package and wondering whether the contents would actually improve my brain. They did, and I’ve been a big fan of certain cognitive enhancers ever since.

      Like psychedelics, smart drugs won’t automatically blanket you in self-awareness. Finding self-awareness takes energy. Anytime you can give yourself better cellular function, more energy, increased neuroplasticity, and improved learning abilities (which many of these drugs do), it makes gaining self-awareness easier. You can progress more quickly if you’re running on high power.

      The trouble with using a blanket term such as nootropics is that it lumps all kinds of substances together. Technically, you could argue that caffeine and cocaine are both nootropics, but they’re hardly equal. With so many ways to enhance your brain function, many of which have significant risks, it’s most valuable to look at nootropics on a case-by-case basis. Below are just a few of the nootropics I’ve had the most success with over the years.

       RACETAMS

      Perhaps the biggest supporter of the racetam family is Steve Fowkes, a biochemist who wrote and edited a newsletter called Smart Drug News starting in the 1980s. It was his early work that brought nootropics to my attention and inspired me to order that umarked brown package of smart drugs. Imagine my delight when he ended up becoming a guest on Bulletproof Radio twenty years later! Steve explains that the racetam family of pharmaceuticals contains dozens of related compounds, including a few well-known nootropics. The best studied one is piracetam, but the most effective racetam nootropics I’ve found are aniracetam and phenylpiracetam. I like aniracetam more than piracetam because it is fast acting, reduces stress, and increases your ability to get things into and out of your memory. Phenylpiracetam is highly energizing and stimulating, which helps with some tasks but hinders some others. It is also a banned substance in some sports.

      When I take 800 milligrams of aniracetam, I find I speak more fluently and don’t ever grasp for words. This effect is likely due to the fact that the racetam family improves mitochondrial function and sends extra oxygen to the brain. Most of the research has been done on people with neurological problems (with amazing results), but there is plenty of good evidence to support its use in healthy individuals. In studies, 400 milligrams of phenylpiracetam taken daily for a year significantly improved brain function and cognition in people recovering from a stroke;¹² 200 milligrams of phenylpiracetam taken for thirty days improved neurological function by 7 percent in people with brain damageСКАЧАТЬ