The Monday Muse - #2
Five things that tickled my fancy
Welcome to The Monday Muse, a quick post where I share 5 things I found noteworthy and interesting from the past week. I changed it from the “Monday Five” ‘cauz this sounds catchier.
Supplements I’ve Been Trying
Vitamin B12 deficiency is fairly common, especially amongst people who have anaemia, are vegetarian or are big on their alcohol. While that doesn’t describe me, I’ve been experimenting with different high-quality B vitamins to see if there’s any noticeable impact. These Vimergy Organic Vitamin B12 Droplets give you 104,000% of your daily value. That’s nuts, I know. They’re sublingual droplets and taste pretty good. The effect? Nothing extreme but I feel a noticeable increase in endurance during my cardio workout, that is, my legs don’t get tired as easily.
Cool Services I Found
Mindbloom is one of the top startups leading the psychedelic-assisted therapy revolution. They’re a 100% fully distributed company and provide ketamine therapy with experienced clinicians 100% online (you are diagnosed, prescribed the ketamine which is delivered to your home and conduct the sessions all online). If you have PTSD, depression or an anxiety disorder and live in the U.S., you might be eligible to try it out.
The largest study of ketamine therapy has been peer-reviewed and will be published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
89% of the participants reported improvement in their depression or anxiety symptoms, and 63% of participants experienced a greater than 50% reduction.
For both depression and anxiety, over 30% achieved remission (or virtually no symptoms) after 4 sessions.
62% of participants who reported suicidal ideation at baseline no longer reported any suicidal ideation after 4 sessions.
Depression response rates were significantly higher than those seen in studies of traditional treatments, such as antidepressants, 2,3 talk therapy.4 and also higher than those reported for IV ketamine 5.
Tea I’m Drinking
When I was living the Netherlands I used to go to a small meditation meetup down the street led by my friend Merijn. He’d brew his own ginger cloves tea for every meditation session which always really warmed up my stomach. It’s got a spicy kick thanks to the ginger. I asked him for the recipe recently and started making the same tea for my meditation meetup here in Tokyo! It’s non-caffeinated, of course. I can’t do caffeine right now and have actually stopped drinking coffee the last 2-3 months, with no apparent decrease in productivity, by the way.
Here it is:
What I’ve Been Up To
I started playing around with YouTube videos. My plan is to share everything from my burnout journey the last three years, to my meditation and psychedelic experiences. Here’s a quick video I made about meditation postures, and why there’s no magic in sitting cross-legged or in seiza, straight-back and no back support. In fact, it can be counter-productive!
Newsletters I Enjoyed
I’ve been enjoying Scott Brighton’s newsletter a lot. He’s a founder an exited his startup to Salesforce, and a couple of years ago he had a powerful “kundalini awakening” experience that completely shook him (quite literally, as there is a lot of shaking) to the core. He talks about his journey here.
In his most recent post he goes into the different levels of consciousness and the difference between creating something from the heart/soul vs. because you have some external goal attached to it. If you create anything for a living (or, at all!), it’s worth reading!
Read the newsletter here:
Comments? Would love to hear from you!
Thanks for your support Misha! I like the style of your roundup : )