Too much sodium / low potassium are common in most diets. Low magnesium (sleep issues), low zinc, low fiber etc are a few others - a common remedy being nutrition supplements. Better tracking allowed me to eliminate additional supplements from my diet (except Vit D, which is hard to find in natural sources).

Famnom suggests FDA RDI defaults, but users are free to choose what they would like to track.

Note that I specifically wrote "Of course one should work with a health professional when considering taking dietary supplements".

That's what I do - I have multiple practitioners, and have my levels tested periodically (blood testing is of limited value with magnesium, whilst hair testing can give a better indication, though it has its own pitfalls regarding the testing procedure and the interpretation of the data, which need to be well understood by the practitioner).

You've also focused on the risk of "megadosing", which I don't practice or advocate for any nutrient.

Indeed, the real point of my comment is that supplementing any single nutrient by itself is likely to have consequences that you'll be unaware of without really doing your research. This article focuses on the risks of "megadosing" vitamin D. I'm not sure how you interpreted my pointing out that vitamin D supplementation can lead to magnesium deficiency as a recommendation to "megadose" magnesium. I've certainly never taken magnesium in any quantity that gets close to toxicity and I'd never advocate anyone else do that.

(Incidentally, I've felt before that Gwern's approach of experimenting with supplementation of a single nutrient and looking for a single change is of limited value, as it doesn't take into account the complexity effects of that supplementation. His list of self-experiments includes a magnesium/sleep trial and a vitamin D/sleep trial, with negative results in both cases. But for the reasons discussed above, a trial involving both magnesium and vit D, and perhaps other nutrients as well would likely yield very different results, and probably ones that are far more useful).

Your comments about the efficacy/cost of higher bioavailability supplements are worthy of consideration. Though it seems contradictory to warn against "megadosing" in one paragraph but then recommending increasing the dose in another.

The particular benefit I'm interested in is passing the blood brain barrier, as the biggest issues for me are mental - e.g., anxiety and memory, for which magnesium l-threonate is said to be particularly beneficial. I would expect that increasing the dosage of a different form, which doesn't cross the BBB so effectively, would potentially lead to an excess elsewhere in the body.

To be clear, I'm not primarily focusing on magnesium; the main target of my approach to healing is currently the thyroid, and I'm cautiously taking tyrosine and iodine for that, as well as working on gut/microbiome health to improve uptake so that ultimately all nutrients can be attained from the diet so and no supplementation is needed, which is ideal as you point out. But I'm not there yet; several years of testing and work has confirmed that.

I also believe I have an underlying kidney disorder that was causing all sorts of subtle problems and after researching for years decided to try potassium supplements and it relieved the acute symptoms I was having (daytime sleepiness after meals) and also a whole slew of symptoms I didn’t realize I was having (poor workout performance and recovery, constant thirst from sodium/potassium imbalance, heart palpitations, especially at night when lying in bed, temperature regulation when trying to sleep, restless legs at night, and sleep quality).

Sleep was the most surprising. I used to wake at around 3am and just couldn’t get back to sleep. I still wake up to pee, but I get right back to sleep.

The single most surprising thing is the quality of my sleep. I now sleep like a rock. So unbelievably hard. And when I wake I feel so rested and more clear headed. I don’t need to sleep as many hours anymore and feel better than when i would sleep 9 hours.

Recently several sleep studies started talking about how sleep is not a passive activity, but a ‘washing’ of CSF over your brain. I could get some details wrong since I am going off of memory, but I believe the amount of CSF movement and production basically triples when you sleep. I hypothesize that this is simply your bodies way of cleaning the waste products out of your brain. Do you know what precursors are to create CSF? Electrolytes like sodium, potassium, chloride, and bicarbonate. It is my hypothesis that I was ‘using up’ all the potassium available with the first couple of sleep cycles and once it was gone I was unable to effectively create more CSF, rendering my sleep ineffective.

All I need to take is a couple of 99mg tablets right before bed (along with some magnesium chloride) and I sleep like I did when I was 10. I am 57. To say it has transformed my life would be an understatement.

Yes, blue light disrupts melatonin and makes it harder to get to bed. But magnesium disrupts sleep quality and deregulates melatonin production in the first place and makes one particularly sensitive to blue light.

D-Vitamin supplements, ZMA (Zinc, Magnesium), Enough sleep, No coffeein after 3-4, lifting weights and endurance training (crossfit), eat whole food which you prepare yourself with focus on proteins and fats from animals.

- https://impossible.co/blogs/health/magnesium-and-sleep
- https://impossible.co/blogs/health/l-theanine-for-sleep

Keep in mind that this is not necessarily experimentally valid due to the small sample size of n = 1

This means tracking all nutrition including micro nutrients (such as magnesium), tracking sleep, tracking exercise with breaks load and warmup, tracking sleep and heart rate along with spo2

Literally track everything you can think of. After you have baseline data, start by making one small change at a time (while tracking it of course) and see what happens

Excess magnesium is eliminated very slowly, meaning overdose can happen after months of steady supplementation.

Anecdotally, gwern tracked some results after consistent magnesium supplementation and found a trend toward worsening after an initial boost: https://www.gwern.net/nootropics/Magnesium

I think we’re going to look back at this period of high-dose vitamin exuberance with a lot of regret. It’s relatively easy to hit optimal levels of all vitamins with basic attention to one’s diet. We already have several studies showing that multivitamin supplementation is slightly negatively correlated with longevity in elderly populations (or at least statistically insignificant). These people taking unnaturally large amounts of vitamins are in uncharted territory.

> As I’ve had evidence of Mg deficiency, I’ve been taking magnesium malate for a while, but am now looking at the more absorbable forms magnesium l-threonate and magnesium bisglycinate.

Two suggestions:

1) Don’t guess. Get a blood test to check for low magnesium levels. There are too many bad sources of information on the internet that attribute vague symptoms to magnesium deficiency with little supporting evidence. Getting a blood test is cheap.

2) Don’t bother with exotic higher bioavailability supplements. Just take more of the cheap stuff. If the cheap stuff has (example) 20% bioavailability and the expensive stuff has 40%, you’re almost always better off just taking twice as much of the cheap stuff.

Another complication is that the L-threonate and glycine in the more exotic formulations isn’t entirely inert. Glycine, for example, is well studied to improve sleep when taken on an empty stomach. A lot of those glowing reviews of “magnesium” for sleep are from people taking magnesium glycinate and then mis-attributing the effects of the glycine to the magnesium because they read glowing reviews of magnesium on the Internet. It’s a mess out there.

It can be your environment, some places are designed by people who don't care. Some places even are adversarial.

It can be you, either from lack of something (sleep, magnesium, ...). It can be you missing some understanding. Or you just don't getting that most people either don't have your attention to details, don't care, or don't want to do anything to improve their environment. It can be you not being the intended audience. It can be you not putting yourself into the intended usage.

But either way, you can choose to accept it or change it and be proactive about it and don't whine as it reinforce learned helplessness. Pick your battles. The environment is dynamic. For example try littering and see what happens. Or you can make some improvements to it. Or you can point and shame on the internet.

Giving feedback in the real world is quite easy. You can carry a pen and a stack of stickers, or a spray paint can to mark things. For example you see ambiguous handles just mark one red sticker/dot on the handle which is closed and a green dot on the handle which is open, (or do the opposite and set-up a live twitch :) )

You can write letters to the mayor. You can also notice the positive small details left by people who care, and reward them.

It works wonders for my sleep but I’ve never met anyone that shares that view.

I was supplementing with a lot of magnesium. Sleep returned very quickly, my need for supplementing magnesium also dropped in days.

I hope so too - alcohol is slandered for causing sedation rather than true high quality sleep, but the research is still uncertain about marijuana.

I've tried zinc, magnesium, melatonin, sleep masks, earplugs - many things. Cannabis is the only thing that works.

>I'm not really sure if I was happier, or more productive, I was definitely more relaxed, it was probably the pot not the sleep.

I'm inclined to believe that sleep is the key here and pot helps by inducing it. That's my gut feeling though.

In the fitness community ZMA is widely considered a sleep aid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMA_(supplement)

taking nutritional supplements without any evidence that they accomplish anything useful and without a physician's advice is generally a bad idea (the default mode is not 'take until suggested otherwise' but 'only take if necessary'), and trying to make money off it by marketing them on youtube is even more miserable.

I'm very much in favour of youtube taking a proactive stance here. As a related note on nootropics, most of the products advertised under that label don't actually do anything at all. There's two very well known nootropics, caffeine and nicotine. So the next time someone tries to sell you weird nutrition supplements, just get a good old cup of coffee.

First result: The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial.

CONCLUSION:

Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia such as ISI score, sleep efficiency, sleep time and sleep onset latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, insomnia objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, in elderly people.

btw I was a fan of Steve Cronin's channel and of reddit's nootropics subreddit. Steve's stuff was hardly experimental. Lots of this stuff is heavily researched. Youtube probably has input from Big Pharma. What's next, eliminating smoothy and juicing videos? Vegan recipes? Will they let themselves become a perfect shady of the corporate lifestyle?

Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.

A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_deficiency_(medicine...

Also, there is a correlation between potassium and magnesium levels, and they measured potassium intake, but no mention of magnesium. It is possible that the subjects with highest potassium intake also had higher magnesium levels.

I'm not saying the study is wrong, but it does make a good point to the people taking magnesium to help sleep, they should also be taking potassium. I'll be trying that over the next little bit.

Until last year, my doctor was a racist cunt (tho me not showing enough emotions on my face could have same effect). After begging for a year to get a MRI of my lower back (put myself in queue for a different doctor 3 months in, it still took almost a year to change), I paid for the MRI in Poland (expen$ive, but cheaper that private MRI in Norway) and found out I have serious issues with my back that got much worsened because of no treatment and continuing doing very heavy work on the killing line (cows).

Changing the doctor opened a different world to me, because before I felt treated as a N. Stupid outlander, here just to be exploited and to get minimum back. Sorry to people whom it offends. To defend my previous doctor gatekeeping me from any diagnostics for my back (and 6 years ago for autism, which I suspected, but didn't get accepted to see a psychologist), I have to say that a lot of Polish immigrants, with cutthroat post communist mentality of hostility towards the State and using any tricks possible to sit on paid leave and do as little work as possible. (Poland was occupied by Russia and Germany, and later only Russia for 250 out of last 300 years, so the State was never Us but Them).

New doctor pushed the things with my back, but also opened a possibility to try to get a green light for a public health system ADHD diagnosis.

I've already tried doing a rushed diagnosis during summer holidays in Poland, 3 or 4 years ago. I procrastrinated (and it was quite expensive, which added to hesitation) and ended up getting paired with my younger brother's (diagnosed with ADHD) psychologist. Not only I got a negative, but also lost the connection with my youngest brother (with whom I had best relations of all my 4 siblings), because he thought that I'm falsely appropriating the ADHD/Autism to excuse my laziness. Except for my sister, nobody believed (from 4 siblings) when I showed direct quotes from psychiatric books by Thomas Brown about why I'm in a group for a likely false negative from an inexperienced psyhologist. To mention them quickly, why in my case it could have been a false negative:
- high IQ (wish I was smart, I'm just good at solving IQ tests) individuals don't struggle with same things as regular and lower IQ, which makes it harder to spot for less experienced
- age - at 35 I've learned a lot of coping mechanisms and also found a niche in my life where it's not such an issue - f. ex. you can't be late with your work in the slaughterhouse - being distracted and not doing your job fast enough is instantly evident.
- very few issues before life got more complicated - first ADHD issues around age of 13, bigger in high school, even bigger on the University. In some diagnostic criterias, no issues before 6 completely disqualifies you.
- psychologist took a review of my 3 parents (stepdad), but refused to take one from my wife, who lives with me and knows me. My biological dad (obvious case of some form of executive function disorder) left my mom when I was 3. My stepdad thinks psychology is a fraud (even after his son committing suicide at 16y) and my mom has lot of guilt over the brother that killed himself and my "failed life" compared to other siblings who all have awesome jobs in IT at home.
- psychologist was just a couple years out of school, a hard NO for diagnosing adults (children are easy to diagnose, because they don't yet mask),
- psychologist only had 3h for diagnosis, not good in my case,
- psychologist said that biggest factor in negative diagnosis is my performance on the attention/memory/reasoning test, where I used memorizing techniques, brakes and managed to hack one very hard test that tries to bore you out.

Nontheless, my wife, book from my sister about ADHD (Dirty Laundry) and my wish and dire need to change jobs trough completing education pushed me to try to get a "refellal" for an ADHD diagnosis from my new family doctor.

In Norway you still pay for the public health service, but it's never more than 30-40$ for a visit, MRI/X-ray or a specialist visit. And all yearly expenses are capped at 300$.

The catch is that it's HARD to get sent to a psychologist, especially being seen as a foreigner whos trying to milk the state.

I prepared a lot, read diagnostic criteria and about ADHD in general. Understood that I have to prove that I struggle in 2 or more domains in life to get help. Was cued by my wife to avoid my tendency to whitewashing myself and sugaring up my situation. I stopped taking my supplements (vit D & fishoil for mood, magnesium lactate for sleep) and meditating a week before the visit to get a "referal" and the psychologist visit too. It felt very dishonest doing that at first, but when I read my notes, realizing that it's all truth, just underscoring elements showing issues with work, academic performance, mental health and family life, I thought that not doing it is dishonest towards my wife, my family and myself.

After 2 months the Psychological Centre replied to my doctor's note (he makes a note during the visit and sends it to them). This time my doctor was rooting for me, don't know how the note looked, but it was enough. I got the first visit in 6 months.

So far there has been 8 1-2h vists. Psychologist I'm working with is very competent and experienced. Added bonus is that she is Polish. I thought it wouldn't be an issue, but I did struggle a bit with spoken Norwegian when the language was diametrally different than what I use day to day.

Diet wise, I avoid sugar like the plague. About an hour before going to bed I take L-Theanine, B1 benfotiamine, D3, K2, chelated magnesium taurate and "Sleep Better" capsules which are just Organic Ashwagandha root (Withania somnifera), Organic Skullcap tops (Scutellaria lateriflora), Organic Valerian root (Valeriana officinalis), Organic Passionflower tops (Passiflora incarnata), Organic Hops strobiles (Humulus lupulus), pullulan. These are "adaptogens".

I keep my room dark and cool which is easy this time of year. I have a HEPA filter that adds a constant but quiet noise to reduce the chances of coyotes or deer waking me up.

What you should do about it: fix it, obviously!

I'll tell you my personal story to inspire you.

I've had brain fog for the longest time. I'm 19, and my whole life is a huge weird fog. I don't think that I will ever find out why I am like this. Allergy, psychological trauma, complicated birth, lost electron causing a short-circuit... I don't know, and doctors don't seem to either.

However, over the course of the last year, I have found simple interventions that made my mind way clearer.

Those are the following:

- Modafinil (stimulant)
- Semax (promotes neuron growth at the expense of loosing your hair)
- occasional DMT (there might be no basis for this, but I've found that it's making me more mature)
- good sleep (Zinc, Magnesium, Melatonin, basic good habits)
- Beeminder for accountability and Complice for goal-setting - this made me way faster about gaining ground against my brain fog and other areas in my life.

My point is that while you may not be able to truly fix your condition yet, you can improve it by consistently trying out interventions.
Of course, don't blindly copy mines; do your own research.

Researching interventions with brain fog is hard; I suggest that you make a list and pick something that fits your benefit-risk balance.

Getting a good sleep schedule is a no-brainer. Meds are more complicated. Personally, I've just copied them from other people and stuck with what worked. You can get a good idea of risks involved by taking notes on studies from PubMed and anecdotes from Reddit.

> Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/vrxr4k/the_sec...

but obviously nobody can make a fortune with these simple advices.

After doing this for a while I started developing stomach problems (unrelated to my change in diet), and I needed to ensure that I was meeting my minimum requirements for fibre too. All of a sudden you end up with quite a tricky multi-dimensional optimisation problem, and it was actually quite a fun intellectual exercise trying to meet all the constraints, obviously without hating what I ate.

There are all sorts of reasons that you might want to minimise or maximise some micro- or macro-nutrient. Any athlete will want some sort of control of what they eat. Perhaps you want more magnesium for better sleep, and you'd like to get it from actual food rather than supplements. Calorie restriction while keeping protein high is a common one for losing weight. Almost no-one eating a western diet gets anywhere near enough fibre, and any one of various health scares might make you aware of that. Tracking what you eat permanently is a serious commitment that is probably unnecessary for most people, but I think it's a good thing to try, at least for a while. I tend to go back to tracking periodically when I want to get some aspect of my diet under control, but I don't do it all the time.

But at a high level.

You BOTH look at recommended daily values AND listen to your body. NIH has a decent starting point. I.e. potassium is 4,700mg: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...

There's also a fair amount of margin for error. A low effort is a salt supplement like this: https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Forza-Electrolytes-Flavoring-Un... + B complex + C vitamins like this: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Bounty-B-Complex-Vitamin-Cell... - I don't particularly endorse any one supplement - just look up what are the essential vitamins and minerals on NIH (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/vitamins-and-minerals) and supplement the recommended daily amounts for the non-fat soluble ones. You can probably do without the vitamins on a short fast but you will feel miserable without the salts.

Your body is still "eating" - you're still having bowel movements for instance - but it's just eating your own fat stores which include some fat soluable vitamins. NB I did not look to see if I was getting enough from this - but when I did my blood work a few times the only thing I was consistently low on was sodium and potassium because I was under supplementing on those because drinking salt water is gross (like I said, I did this imperfectly.)

One shouldn't eat salt in pill form. I didn't try. But supposedly it burns your intestinal lining. Rather I'd mix a scoop of that into my black coffee, 4 times a day. If I had muscle fatigue I'd have more potassium. If I couldn't sleep, more magnesium. Light headed when standing? More sodium. This is the listening to your body part and if you're short on salts after two weeks you absolutely will know it. But, mixing salt in water is gross and drinking too much salt in too short of time period will give you the runs. Getting enough salt is the only "hard" part. You're still doing what one normally does as a human, just less.

I think I got it down to 2L of water. Some casual cups of decaffeinated black coffee or tea. 4 thimble sized supplements of various salts.

This is well-researched problem. All it means you don't have diet balanced enough to provide everything necessary for proper recovery. For me it was magnesium deficiency, now I take magnesium every night and sleep just fine even after muscle-intense exercise. Before this "miracle" (<= joke) OTC supplement I had tense muscles and crumps and wasn't getting good sleep.

(Magnesium comes in many forms, it takes time to find one which is not disturbing for the stomach, I use magnesium glycenate in capsules).

I thought i would share for others benefit too... (formatting is messed up, my notes are in MD format, i lost the sub-indentation on these notes, i can just add a new line )

--

- paper over laptop

- SRS, anki

- you can use it to learn a mathematical formula, but not to learn how to apply it.

- write notes, summarize it down to pages at end of session; called as 'making cheat sheets'

- a few days down, summarize it further down and more, till you have it like a card.

- study above your level, and read the history of the subject.

- If an undergraduate read graduate level textbooks, especially overviews.

- This gives one a sense of the context of the subject, an appreciation of "where it's going", a hint of why the subject is still interesting and under active development, and makes the undergraduate material seem almost innocent by comparison.

- It's much harder, of course, and you'll often find that the entire semester's material is covered in a couple of chapters at the beginning, but the feeling of "how the professionals really talk/think about the subject" is hugely important for getting a feel of the thing.

- The history of a subject is great for giving the human context, which is hugely useful for grokking how things developed organically, as well as the personalities involved. It can really help remembering stuff.

- just keep at it, hour after hour, without comparing yourself or your efforts to anyone else.

- Take frequent breaks, even holidays, and remember, above all, that exams are perhaps the worst test of learning we have yet devised apart from all the others.

- understand proofs over memorizing them

- as little memorization in math. Memorizing without understanding is useless. Memorizing with understanding is much better than merely understanding.

- Read the textbook before attending the lecture

- if you find yourself unable to take proper notes, and seems like the lecture moves too fast, this is the issue.

- Even if lecturer provides notes, some self-written ones BY HAND are useful for retention

- Sleep more important than cramming on exam night

- All nighter is never worth it no matter how little material you think you know.

- If you're semi confident in the exam, prioritize getting a full sleep over a little sleep.

- If you're not confident in the exam, definitely still aim for at least 5-6 hours of sleep.

- Sleep early, wake up early -- study notes before exam

- make sure you the study session is light to medium; brain has limited stamina that will be depleted little by little, either during exam or while studying

- all-nighters actually make you worse

- even intelligent people have less than smart answers to simple questions

- Magnesium supplement to help sleep routine

- Magnesium Glycinate, .Chelated, specifically doctors best brand.

- Z12 -https://www.reddit.com/r/quittingphenibut/comments/d8vazr/z1...

- Woodpecker method - , a modified version of spaced repetition.

- Book : Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley

- A well structured course that will leave you with effective tools to maximize your learning potential.

- Feynman technique

- write questions of what you still don't understand recursively until you have understood it all.

- begins by understanding what you don't understand.

- Once you understand something after spending time trying to understand it and writing down your understandings and non-understandings, you typically have little problem memorizing it.

- Duration of class (1 yr ) over intense study

- longer the duration, the better

- katas - japanese - making a repetitive movement, so that you can make the movement naturally, without thinking.

- repetitve study like anki

- physical - a run on threadmill or cold showers