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MDMA Recovery (Stories & Support - 4)

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HPPD (and tinnitus) can feel life ruining at first, but as time goes by you will learn to live with it, and as more time goes by it will start to decrease in severity. 4 months is really early on.

I really recommend mindfulness to try to keep yourself from focusing on the visuals instead of what you're actually trying to perceive visually, and if you're not trying to actually perceive or do anything (think waiting for a bus or riding the train type situations) try not to think too much - catch yourself when you're ruminating and lost in thought, especially if it's related to this. In that respect staying at home all day can sometimes put you in a waiting for a bus type situation. I personally would try to soldier on at work for a while, while practicing mindfulness in concentrated sessions and practicing applying that mindfulness throughout your day. Maybe have another little while so you can focus on meditation, especially if you're sleep deprived.

Headspace is a great app to learn mindfulness with, and there are guided mindfulness meditations on YouTube as well.

A gem of advice is do whatever you can to get your best nights sleep. This often involves mindfulness, but can be difficult because visuals tend to increase in strength as one starts to fall asleep or is in the dark, so very difficult for people who associate these visuals with negative things, or if it gives them anxiety. But many drug naive people report HPPD-like visuals as they are falling asleep - so try to welcome the visuals. Let them entrain you as you stare into your eyelids and relax your body and attempt to quiet your thoughts, listening to your breathing and counting to 10 over and over again in your head can help as well.

It seems the vast majority of us with HPPD learn to live with it just fine after some time, but others take a step further and have learned to appreciate the beauty of the visuals. I'm sure that's asking a lot right now, and I understand how HPPD can even make it very difficult to read when you have blobs of color floating in front of the text, but you may come around some day, especially as it gets better and better.

How is your sleep?
 
Have you given Piracetam a try? It has done miracles to me in the past. This time I just don't know with certainity if to do it or not since I am not sure if I was piped or just meth-bombed... Though I am guessing I had no hallucinations at all (no brighter colors neither) during my roll, and also BZP was a thing of about 2008-2012, am I right? Probably I was just meth-bombed and my body did not handle it well and I ended up having deliriums due to binging
 
Oh and btw, tinnitus... Just download apps for it, I was already born with it... It is annoying but it fades away just like some sort of pain, do not give it too much attention, use the apps, I use the one that generates noise and helps decrease it so you forget which frequency it is over. And even if that does not help, just do not think too much about it, some famous musicians do also suffer from it, such as Will.i.am.
 
I would be wary about piracetam, if you were itching to try something I would lean more towards noopept.

But yes. many musicians have tinnitus.
 
Cotcha Yankinov said:
HPPD (and tinnitus) can feel life ruining at first, but as time goes by you will learn to live with it, and as more time goes by it will start to decrease in severity. 4 months is really early on.

I really recommend mindfulness to try to keep yourself from focusing on the visuals instead of what you're actually trying to perceive visually, and if you're not trying to actually perceive or do anything (think waiting for a bus or riding the train type situations) try not to think too much - catch yourself when you're ruminating and lost in thought, especially if it's related to this. In that respect staying at home all day can sometimes put you in a waiting for a bus type situation. I personally would try to soldier on at work for a while, while practicing mindfulness in concentrated sessions and practicing applying that mindfulness throughout your day. Maybe have another little while so you can focus on meditation, especially if you're sleep deprived.

Headspace is a great app to learn mindfulness with, and there are guided mindfulness meditations on YouTube as well.

A gem of advice is do whatever you can to get your best nights sleep. This often involves mindfulness, but can be difficult because visuals tend to increase in strength as one starts to fall asleep or is in the dark, so very difficult for people who associate these visuals with negative things, or if it gives them anxiety. But many drug naive people report HPPD-like visuals as they are falling asleep - so try to welcome the visuals. Let them entrain you as you stare into your eyelids and relax your body and attempt to quiet your thoughts, listening to your breathing and counting to 10 over and over again in your head can help as well.

It seems the vast majority of us with HPPD learn to live with it just fine after some time, but others take a step further and have learned to appreciate the beauty of the visuals. I'm sure that's asking a lot right now, and I understand how HPPD can even make it very difficult to read when you have blobs of color floating in front of the text, but you may come around some day, especially as it gets better and better.

How is your sleep?
Click to expand...


Okay, I don't really have any big issues with sleeping. Sure sometimes it feels weird and floaters but I usually manage to think away from them. So each night I almost always get a 7hours+ of good sleep. So I don't really think my HPPD is getting worse at night time. Maybe because my biggest issues are not connected to the visual snow?

I guess mindfulness is the way to go. And well, worrying about the visuals do often make them appear worse. But some days they can be unbearable even though I did not focus on them at all. That's the tricky part :( How can I deal with this? Thoose days where you seem to do everything right by not worrying/being active/socializing but the visuals smack you in the face regardless. When the visuals are extreme, it feels like my head is one big mess, like I just wrote 50 large essays or something. Brain tired as fuck but body rested.


I think I have a hard time recognize my anxiety/depression. Even though I dont feel down I probably have the anxietyes underneath...
 
Kentan said:
Brain tired as fuck but body rested.

I think I have a hard time recognize my anxiety/depression. Even though I dont feel down I probably have the anxietyes underneath...
Click to expand...

I think people have a hard time recognizing un-mindfulness and non restorative sleep.

It's not a good thing to have the voice in your head going all the time, constantly lost in thought with the mind wandering - but the problem is that we can be so lost in thought sometimes that we don't often realize that we're lost in thought. Not that everyone has this issues, but it's certainly something for us to examine and investigate with mindfulness.

Regarding sleep, it's important to note that one person's 7 hours in bed may not be equal to another person's 7 hours. Some people may have excess wakefulness related brain waves during their time in bed and this correlates with reduced restoration with sleep. If you are having issues with excess wakefulness related brain activity, mindfulness could help you make better use of your time in bed.

These may not after all be very big issues for you, but it's something think about in case it might be an issue, I guess we have to focus on these few things that we can control. Mindfulness as a stress reduction and rumination reduction technique should benefit anybody on this planet though.
 
I'd say I'm lost in thought 70% of the time lol. I've always been this way but it's way worse now with this LTC. Ive made a commitment to get better about it though.
 
You will indeed get better and better at catching yourself, and you will also find yourself sustaining a period of mindfulness longer and longer. So you can essentially sit down for a concentrated session of audio guided meditation, and then when you get up, you attempt to draw out the mindfulness as long as you can after the concentrated session, essentially learning to apply the mindfulness throughout the day (therein is the actual benefit)
 
Tinnitus is permanent man... And by that I mean the only thing you can do is control it.Get this app called "Tinnitus" and the logo is a T on a blue background from the Appstore, use it at a moderate level with headphones and for a while and it may help you diminish your brain identifying the frequency the tinnitus is at. But that's the issue, Tinnitus won't fade completely away as I understand...
 
ADubbs said:
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/meditation-nation/

:-(
Click to expand...

At the risk of sounding like a mindfulness crusader, I'll say that I think that's a shitty meta-analysis and article. There are several things to consider.

Be very aware of separating the practices of Buddhism, mantra and transcendental meditations from mindfulness. The article itself is on a very Buddhist website written by a Buddhist practitioner. While Vipassana is essentially mindfulness using breathing as the anchor, who knows how the specific studies have taught it and in what contexts with what teachers (the authors of the meta-analysis, judging by names, appeared fairly ethnic and we should be open to the possibility that they were selecting studies done in a traditional Buddhist context outside of the western world - not mindfulness based CBT).

Mindfulness on the other hand doesn't require you to pre-suppose anything on insufficient evidence, and may not set off people's "bullshit detectors" as much when done by a psychologist in a particular setting. The studies were also selected from before 2012, a big deal with specifically mindfulness because a lot of the best research has been done very recently.

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1809754 - from the meta-analysis in question

"Mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence of improved anxiety, depression andpain and low evidence of improved stress/distress and mental health–related quality of life. We found low evidence of no effect or insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight."

Improved anxiety and depression is pretty much all the reason we need to practice mindfulness as an LTC sufferer, although I expect people who get frustrated with mindfulness and in general don't want to practice it are probably looking for reasons not to. That being said, there is certainly evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness in other arenas, including attention, substance use and sleep. But in many cases, take for example attention/reading with ADHD and dyslexia, there are studies that show benefit with mindfulness, but of course we do need better controlled studies.

When the meta-analysis says something like " We found low evidence of no effect or insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight" that doesn't necessarily mean that there was evidence against using mindfulness for insomnia, but rather there isn't conclusive high quality evidence for it (in their eyes).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4153063/ - here is a randomized controlled trial for the use of mindfulness in chronic insomnia partially from Stanford.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26390335 - From the veteran's affairs. "Both mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based therapy for insomnia (MBTI) have been studied in the treatment of insomnia. Randomized controlled studies of MBSR and MBTI have shown overall reduction in sleep latency and total wake time and increase in total sleep time after mindfulness therapy using both patient reported outcome and quantitative measures of sleep. Mindfulness techniques have been shown to be well accepted by patients with long-lasting effects. A three-arm randomized study with MBSR, MBTI, and self-monitoring showed similar improvement in insomnia between the MBSR and MBTI groups, with possibly longer duration of efficacy in the MBTI group. Recent data show that MBTI is also an effective and accepted treatment for insomnia in older patients.[h=4]Summary:[/h]Increasing evidence shows that mindfulness meditation, delivered either via MBSR or MBTI, can be successfully used for the treatment of insomnia with good patient acceptance and durable results."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466342/ - "Improving Sleep with Mindfulness and Acceptance: A Metacognitive Model of Insomnia"

"~This model proposes that increasing awareness of the mental and physical states that are present when experiencing insomnia symptoms and then learning how to shift mental processes can promote an adaptive stance to one’s response to these symptoms."

At the end of the day, trying to do a meta-analysis on an arena of research where there is limited research sucks because the scientific conclusion is to say "there is limited and insufficient" blah blah blah, but realistically we can still look the at the limited evidence carefully (especially newer evidence with neuroimaging) and we may place our bets appropriately.
 
registor said:
Tinnitus is permanent man... And by that I mean the only thing you can do is control it.Get this app called "Tinnitus" and the logo is a T on a blue background from the Appstore, use it at a moderate level with headphones and for a while and it may help you diminish your brain identifying the frequency the tinnitus is at. But that's the issue, Tinnitus won't fade completely away as I understand...
Click to expand...

Personally my tinnitus is 90% better after 6-7 years, and many people with tinnitus from various drugs (cocaine is a common one) report improvement over time. People with noise induced hearing loss related tinnitus typically take about 10-15 years to improve on the other hand.

But to this day, if I focus on the ringing it gets louder and louder, until it is quite loud.
 
Tbh I don't think its necessary to look at all these studies.

Just try it yourself and if it works great if not look for other non mindfulness things. No treatment will ever work for 100% of people. And who knows if the people in the studies have some degree of self selection.

Like would somebody who really hates it choose to participate in these studies? If not then aren't they missing crucial data on the people who it doesn't necessarily work for?
 
I'm certainly not of the opinion that's it's a miracle cure-all, although I think when practiced proficiently it can be very helpful with anxiety/insomnia/depression, the issue is that if it takes a fair amount of practice (took me many months, and I'm still horrible at it) then it's good for clinicians to have data regarding efficacy.

In other words, if SSRIs make some people worse for 8 weeks, then we better have data on people showing improvement after the 8 weeks, instead of having people waste 8 weeks seeing if it works for them when we have no idea if it will work. So the studies are useful to look at before one pledges whatever amount of time a day of concentrated mindfulness with then applying it throughout the day for 3 months. I guess the bottom line is that science is useful to us because it has predictive value.

But regarding study participant recruitment, it certainly is an issue in terms of measuring success of a therapy in those willing to try it vs. those unwilling to try it, because maybe people who are unwilling to try mindfulness for example have a hard time with acceptance or are oppositional-defiant/anti-establishment or whatever, so by definition mindfulness is going to be harder for them to *succeed* at. That being said, those people might have a lower rate of enrollment, but it's still up in the air whether or not it works for them, or if because they have acceptance issues, whether or not it can be of even greater benefit to them. So I wouldn't necessarily say that the trial is leaving out the people who wouldn't respond to mindfulness, but rather leaving out the people who don't want to try it. But I've struggled with that inner war issue as well, and still do.

Same concept can be applied to diet and exercise for obesity, but the people who don't want to exercise aren't necessarily going to be non responders, it could be that they don't want to exercise because they're out of shape and it's difficult for them. Which really means they need it more than usual compared to regular people.

As far as people with chronic insomnia responding to the recruitment methods used in an above study, it could also be that the more severe and long standing insomnia patients are more likely to respond to the recruitment methods because they are at their wit's end and are willing to try anything.
 
Cotcha Yankinov said:
Personally my tinnitus is 90% better after 6-7 years, and many people with tinnitus from various drugs (cocaine is a common one) report improvement over time. People with noise induced hearing loss related tinnitus typically take about 10-15 years to improve on the other hand.

But to this day, if I focus on the ringing it gets louder and louder, until it is quite loud.
Click to expand...
Well probably drug-induced Tinnitus may be temporary, idk, but I personally was born with it. As young as 5 I remember having that ringing on my ear at times, I just learned to handle it but I may trigger it some times or just get too focused on it to remember and feel it again
 
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