I've tried Chameleon and Valyrian root tea blends before thinking they might make good sleep aids, but I've never had any luck with them. A lot people say they find those very relaxing, but I wasn't even catching a placebo effect.
So for a while I just assumed all this herbal tea bullshit I see in stores and pharmacies must be just a step above homeopathic products. They're probably pretty good if you like the taste of the herbal blends and find sipping a warm beverage relaxing in itself, but otherwise a waste of time. Clearly if they really worked they wouldn't be sold in large supermarket chains. Instead they'd be relegated to the weird, near grey market status that Kratom seems to exist in, right?
Today at the store I just happened to notice something very alarming. A box of Kava blend tea was the absolute one and only herbal tea variety on the shelf to include a warning asking you to consult your doctor before use, and stating that minors and pregnant women should not consume this product.
Well, that warning instantaneously lit up the junkie addict center of my brain like a Christmas tree, and I impulse bought two boxes. This might have major negative health consequences? Wow, must be the fucking good stuff. I got home and brewed six of them into a single mug of tea, and yep, this shit is psychoactive all right. Subtle, but definitely not placebo subtle. It quite honestly feels similar to a moderate dose of Gabapentin, and it's making me sleepy.
I sure wish I knew this before I most likely took 15 years off the lifespan of my kidneys by using 200mg of Diphenhydramine every night for years just to have a fighting chance at falling asleep more often than every two days.
Banned on bad island
in 2003 for "potential liver damage". Damn shame there aren't any other substances that cause liver damage 
terf island is such a fucking pathetically cucked country lmao, gotta get a special loiscense to buy whipped cream and sleepy time tea is considered a hard drug
luv me a pint, luv ingerland, 'ate herbal tea, simple as
We have DougDoug emotes?? Every day I learn something new lol
What do you mean?
me gently dipping a lizard into a hot cup of water a few times before putting it back in its terrarium
Also it's valerian.
Valyrian is the civilization from Game of Thrones lol
Sorry I'm a botany nerd.
GoT would've had a very different vibe with a bit of Herbie Hancock on the soundtrack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava
Kava Kava extract is the one thing I found to moderate extreme highs and lows. It is a natural neuro-inhibitor. Helps keep me level. Only a particular brand for me cultivated in Vanuatu. It's somewhat difficult to find so I buy in bulk when I can. A 1 oz bottle is good for a month or two and used as needed.
It is from a pepper plant and has been used for thousands of years in Polynesia / Pacific Islanders. They used it before negotiation meetings and such to maintain peace.
The reason there is a warning on all things Kava is because being a plant, a very small fraction of people are incompatible with it. As in it shuts down their liver, which blind sighted, obviously made some famlies upset. So they lobbied to outlaw it, and Big Pharma doesn't like affordable natural solutions so it became outlawed in areas and sitgmatized. Vast majority of people it's perfectly fine in reasonable quantities.
Is there a way to test if you're one of those people without shutting down your liver?
Ah nvm I read more
Yeah, its a GABA enhancer, similar to how alcohol works on that system. It also binds to different GABA receptors than drugs like xanax. Tends to be a bit expensive for the effect you get, imo, but it's kinda nice.
I never tried the tea, but they just came out with instant dehydrated kava mix you can get from various online stores, too. Specifically look for dehydrated, not micronized. The gastro-intestinal system generally doesn't like any of the plant fibers that are hard to filter out with more traditional methods of making it, on top of those methods being a pain in the ass.
There were reports in the early 2000's of liver damage associated with Kava but those reports seem to have been of low quality, and nothing like that has been found since, and it hasn't been found among cultures that have been consuming it for thousands of years.
I like the effect of mixing kratom and kava, but I can't vouch for the safety of doing that.
Taking magnesium at night has been amazing for me. Best consistent sleep I’ve had in a long time
Just magnesium or magnesium glycinate? Asking because I suffer from poor sleep very frequently and have been recommended magnesium supplements but buying any vitamins is like a minefield. You look them up and there's dozens of different kinds and glycinate in particular seems to be one only sold by random brands.
I'm very sensitive to cross contamination (celiac disease) so I have to be very selective about my supplement brands. I use Pure Encapsulations, Thorne, Xymogen. And for magnesium specifically you might be interested in Xymogen's Optimag Neuro - it's what I take for RLS and sleep - it's got magnesium l-threonate, malate, and glycinate so you can see more easily if any forms work well for you.
Thank you for the recommendation! Not a USian so unfortunately it's not readily available for me and very, very expensive on the sites it is. I'll look around for that combination in readily available brands though!
Kava is really nice! Now that I'm off the booze, I'm asking my partner to grab me a bottle of a product called Kavahol I've been seeing advertised. Even if it isn't great on the kava front, it's ginger tumeric orange flavored so will probably taste nice.
$37 for 10 shots, seems a bit steep. Like not so bad if you're just trying out, but way back when, I used to buy powdered kava from nakamalathome.com for like $45 and get twice as many servings. Idk, maybe if it's super potent and hits you hard.💁♂️ Despite tasting like dirt it is a very social drink tho that you want to take slow, because if you do too much at once it'll just put you to sleep. It was a pretty nice warm cozy feel, made me very talkative like I'd been drinking. But still lucid and present with all my faculties, unlike alcohol.
I have fond memories of drinking myself halfway into a stupor with kava in my younger days which was no mean feat. I'm very keen on the stuff.
Just make sure that you take a few days break every week if you're consuming it regularly. Chronic consumers of kava can develop a (reversible) skin condition but you'd need to be drinking it like you're living on a Pacific island before that's likely to happen.
It's been a while since I've dug into the literature on kava but the risk of liver damage is completely overblown - it may cause an elevation in particular liver enzymes, especially with heavy or chronic consumption but there hasn't been any actual links to liver damage. In countries where kava consumption is commonplace, they tend not to consume the root whole but instead drink the extract from the root using water and so there's some hypotheses that consuming the root whole rather than just the extract may cause elevated liver enzymes and potentially lead to liver damage so if you're going to make it a regular thing then I'd veer on the safer side and make an extract the way that it's traditionally done rather than taking capsules of whole powdered root or something similar like that.
But, all in all, in regards to safety if you're consuming it occasionally for recreational purposes the risk is very minimal. We're talking like less risk than smoking cannabis here.
Real kava root tastes like dirt but makes you feel even better than the tea. You basically put a bunch of it in panty hose and kneed that in cold water for a few minutes.
sure wish I knew this before I most likely took 15 years off the lifespan of my kidneys by using 200mg of Diphenhydramine every night for years just to have a fighting chance at falling asleep more often than every two days.
oh shit. I take dimenhydrinate every single night too (usually only 50mg but I used to take 100mg per night sometimes)
does it really shorten the lifespan of your kidneys? or just at the dose you were taking?
If anything is tied to an elevated risk of dementia, from what I've heard
There's nothing concrete really, I was just being hyperbolic about it. More and more often the vasoconstriction manifests in this dull ache in my kidneys that has been scaring the shit out of me.
hey, fair, you know your body best, that's just what the doc told me when i was having kidney issues/stones and it fixed mine
yeah, it's definitely a good suggestion to toss out there in general, there really are a ton of people out there who genuinely do need to drink more water and just haven't realized yet that mild dehydration is directly causing some of their ailments
In this case though I'm pretty certain it's tied to the Diphenhydramine because the ache only comes on after I use it.
You should stop taking it tbh. It's not a clear link for young people but I'm pretty sure there is a link between dph and dementia
I'm not so sure but I don't feel like going back and reading about this, iirc it has something to do with dph affecting neutransmitters as it's mechanism of action, which over time can damage your brain. But also like, old people have lower neuroplasticity so medications like this affect them more
You should stop taking it tbh.
But then I can't sleep
I have been meaning to cut it out though, just so it's like $10 less I have to spend every 3 months, and one less thing to worry about in the back of my mind. The next time I have no obligations of being awake at any particular hours throughout the day for an extended period of time, I'll try learning to sleep without it again.
I switched to melatonin and it helped a lot. Kava and chamomile could also work.
Also, just out of curiosity, do you have like... bugs in your dreams? I had cockroaches all over my dreams after using benadryl to go to sleep every day. I stopped and I got way better sleep when I got used to just using melatonin, and stopped waking up literally like jumping out of my bed because there were a million cockroaches coming out of the ground in my dreams lol
Also, just out of curiosity, do you have like... bugs in your dreams?
No, I've ever had bug dreams. I thought that was only a hallucination you have if you overdose on the stuff.
I had them like crazy after a year of doing the stuff. I can't do any amount of dph without getting those dreams. It's awful
oh that's interesting. even if you only take like one 50mg dimenhydrinate pill?
Yep. And it has to be kinda close to bed time. I didn't notice what was happening but I would have these recurring dreams, where I was In a dingey house, with a bunch of old couches and stuff. I would sit down, and a roach would crawl over me, then I would look around and they would just be scuttling about, popping out of the ground. It was so awful. I would wake up jumping out of my bed. I did this for a while, then I stopped using it, and the dreams went away. So I was like oh shit, the benadryl is causing it
I thought liver damage from kava was a result of alcohol-based extraction techniques (in contrast to water based techniques) used to produce the powder from the root.
Best to listen to your body on it then. A very small percentage of people get liver issues with kava. Its also a natural neuro-inhibitor so if you are on any other medications, especially psycotropic or hormonal, it might screw with those.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava
Kava cannot reproduce sexually. Female flowers are especially rare
Fuck yeah dude.
Time to buy some and overdo it. Gang gang bro/sibling.
hell yeah, that's the spirit!
I used to be so fucking careful when it came to doing drugs the safe and responsible way. I'd read for hours about pharmacology and shit while taking in as many first hand accounts online as I could before agonizing over exactly how much I should use on my first go down to the mg and cut ratio.
Well, that mindset turned out to not be sufficient for all types of drugs, and I got addicted to opiates despite the utmost care in my initial experimentation. Things slowly fell off the rails from there. I've done so many absurd and horrendous things to get high and avoid the hell of opioid withdrawal. I've gone through so many sketchy batches of disgusting, stepped on street dope out of sheer desperation.
I've been clean from full agonist opioids for years now, but I think my brain is broken ,and I can no longer be arsed in the slightest on breaking my habit of doing stupid doses of a drug before I even know what it'll be like.
The person I would call my soulmate if I believed in that shit—who isn’t talking to me anymore—has been doing heroin since they were 18; sometimes I say, the silver lining to the heartbreaking fact that I’ll never really get to know them, is that I’ll never have to know the darkest depths of that iceberg. Because I know it’s there. I know what I don't know, and if I dwell on it for even a second I need to smoke until I’m half braindead.
And I also like to say them and I both are the type of person who, if you put some drugs out in front of us and say “Here’s some drugs,” we’ll just hork it down. That's kinda how I started doing meth.
“This isn’t cocaine.”
/snorts/
Also, I have been a very infrequent opioid user for two years now? Three. I’ll take a couple hits, then it’ll be weeks or months before I do it again. I’ve had a couple close calls because when I reach the absolute worst depths of my depression I’ll get excited about it, like oh boy I finally get to be a junkie! I’m finally getting addicted to opioids! That was how I was with meth at the beginning, like a form of self harm, or a cry for help.
Most of the time I’m fucking terrified by the thought of being dopesick, fetty is gross and my one source for black isn’t talking to me anymore (no relation).
But who knows.
I take.a half a 1mg melatonin gummy amd it knocks me out amd.gives me vivid dreams.
I want to like melatonin (I get a nice gentle sleepiness from it) but the quality control is terrible. You might be getting far more than 1 mg sometimes, and then not enough other times.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/crazy-variability-of-melatonin-in-sleep-aid-gummies-may-keep-you-up-at-night/
My doctor recommended valerian root instead which seems more subtle to me but seems to help similarly. YMMV of course.
I've generally been fine with gummies, but apparently sublingual tabs are better for accurate dosing.
Heat Lamp
Cup Hot Tub
