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sleep / food deprivation compared to psychedelics

Leg

Leg

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so i didn't sleep at all last night and i'm hella stressed with homework + shit...

and it's funny...like...ya know how when you're on no sleep you sometimes enter this blissfully happy zone? where everything is good...and...you're kinda manic, but you don't really care too deeply about anything so it doesn't concern you?

i was thinking today...this state is similar to psychedelics in a way...

Psychedelics turn up your sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight...that's why you get the huge pupils...you're very "awake" or on-edge, let's say)

Sleep deprivation also stresses your body (although i don't get dilated pupils, but if i am freaking out about something when i'm real tired, my mind is liable to run in circles just like when i'm tripping, albeit my thoughts are less fantastical, perhaps)

But ya know when you are having a really "good trip" (ie. you are feeling very mellow on psychedelics)...how it feels amazing?

Well...I am thinking there is some kinda parallel between that and this happy-slightly-manic-carefree state you (or me, anyhow, and a few other people i know, too) get when you're sleep (or food...i think) deprived?

Like...it seems that all of these things put more stress on your body than usual. And at some point your body just cracks and says "i've had enough" and then it just proceeds along the most straight path it can find to feeling good. And disregards all other bullshit that you might otherwise worry about when you are in a less stressed state because the negative consequences of doing so are not as obvious to you as when you are really tired or tripping or haven't eaten in a day.

I guess this isn't an entirely new topic, of course, but I am rather interested in neuroscience...I am thinking...maybe sleep has something to do with serotonin production...I mean, well, I think the two questions I am interested in the most are "why do we die?" and "why do we sleep?"

(i'm not sure if this post makes incredible sense, but i'd like to hear any interesting thoughts about this)
 
I had something similar happen to had. It was something like 14 - 16 hours since my last meal which was a tiny meal and before that it was not much and I've been on as little as 2 - 3 hours of sleep per night and while listening to music I was abit more into more then usual, got goosebumps everyone but only with songs I was listening to on 2C-E the previous week.

Quite a bizarre state indeed.
 
I had something similar in May of last year.

I was supposed to throw a bachelor party for my best friend, who was having a wedding the next day.

I worked a 12 hour shift in Santa Claus Indiana, and then immediate drove home.. this was around 7 AM. I was about 4 hours from home, and the bachelor party had to be that night. I had yet to buy him a gift, and had yet to even get any plans finalized (leave it to me)...

So I drove back, the long way, through the town where I used to go to school.. I was going to buy him somethign from one of the nice shops there...... all I ended up doing there was buying some 'nessecary' suppliments from an herbal shop. GABA and a Kava extract, and some (calm) suppliment that contained a variety of things. I was stressed.

So I got home, and tried to get his bachelor party planned, and tried to sleep... but none of it worked because nothing was working for his party plan...

The place I was gonna have it turned me down... which was unexpected (we were gonna take a boat out on the lake, at night, and party, I used to work at the place in High school, so I figured I'd get a deal)....

anyways, long story short. I didn't sleep that day... after working 12 hours...

I calculate the number of hours awake as ~40, probably closer to two full days... since I was stressed the day before working, as well.. I don't think I slept that much.

We ended up getting drunk as hell around my friends campfire. It turned out to be a pretty good night.. good bachelor party/minus strippers.

Reality broke down in the exact (close to) same way as if I had taken a psychedelic. I hadn't ate either, on top of 12 hours of over-100 degrees working in a factory, sweating like crazy... then driving and trying to get shit together in one day with no sleep.. no proper food.

It was a good night, after it came down to just our immediate group of friends.. we walked around the golf course, like we used to play on when we were little.. we all grew up in the same neighborhood.

Then the wedding day I had slept around 4 hours. so I had had 4 hours within 72 hours at that point.. or something like that. I decided to take some Kava.

That sucked.


But i know what you mean about sleep deprivation.. it's definately interesting.
 
sleep deprivation sux. it's basically the same as amphetamine/coke-psychosis except you don't have the stimulant high. i usually feel really sick after staying up for more than 2 days. to me it's completely different from indole/catechole psychedelics because you're just delusional and become more and more detatched from reality when you're sleep deprived whereas most psychedelics reveal a diff. aspect of reality to you.
 
food deprivation and sleep deprivation have been used by indigenous tribes for a long long time. a vision quest is basically that, where you are watched over, but basically sit for days on end, not eating, not really sleeping. it induces an altered state.

however to do this it takes a healthy body, and someone there for you. i'm sure it's quite intense. sometimes cacti or something is involved in such things to intensify the experience...

but altered states can be obtained in other ways too...
there's drumming workshops where part of the key is to keep the BPM above 180 or so while drumming and it can induce an altered state(or psychedilic type experience)

the thing is as well is that you're more clear headed and you *didn't* take something, so it's that much more intense...you slowly get to a point of visions/hallucinations...i'm sure it fucks with your head alot. but again unless done with great care it can be bad for you....

...ya...
 
if you're so food or sleep deprived that you're hallucinating, that's called psychosis. you're not clear headed at all although you may think you are. that's how a lot of meth addicts fuck themselves up.
 
Being up for between about 24 and 48 hours can be an interesting novelty if you don't do that kind of thing very often, but I'd hardly say it compares to psychedelics... It can potentially be quite dangerous too. Psychedelics can take you somewhere at least ten times as good, with probably about 100 times less potential risk....

Dan
 
thursday said:
if you're so food or sleep deprived that you're hallucinating, that's called psychosis. you're not clear headed at all although you may think you are. that's how a lot of meth addicts fuck themselves up.
Click to expand...

Sleep Deprivation can cause "Sleep Deprivation Psychosis," but that is not true about fasting. Fasting has been shown to have positive benefits.
 
controlled fasting relying on liquid diets like herbal teas and stuff can purge the body of toxins if done correctly. but food and sleep deprivation are not good for the body in general. food deprivation can cause psychosis just like sleep deprivation can. that's why a lot of cults use it as a form of mind control. food deprivation causes one to become mentally feeble, highly suggestive, and even delusional. if your idea of "spiritual visions" is food/sleep deprivation induced delusions, then you need to rethink your idea of spiritual exploration.

imho, to discover any kind of truth, even spiritual truth, you need to be in good mental health. depriving your body of its basic needs causes your mental health to deteriorate. in such an impaired state, you won't have the mental perceptiveness to discern truth from falsehood. you may think you are enlightened because you become highly suggestable to any thought which pops up in your mind, but without being able to critically analyze these so-called "visions" it's unlikely you will be able to derive anything close to deep spiritual or universal truths from such an experience. heck, people have a hard enough time penetrating the mysteries of the universe without being mentally impaired, even after years and years to honing their mind and expanding their intellectual capacity.

might as well eat a roll of dramamines and talk to the wall for 6 hours.
 
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http://www.lila.info/document_view.phtml?document_id=62
In normal states of balance within the autonomous nervous system, increased activity in one division (say the sympathetic nervous system) is balanced by a response in the other (parasympathetic). However, under intense stimulation of the sympathetic system, reciprocity breaks down and a collapse of the system into a state of parasympathetic dominance occurs. Sargant (1974) noted this pattern of parasympathetic rebound or collapse can lead to erasure of previously conditioned responses, changes of beliefs, loss of memory, and increased suggestibility.
Click to expand...

(and yes, thursday, I definitely get the picture that you don't like food/sleep deprivation and meth, thank you for your input ;) )
 
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well thay are many natural way of expanding your consciousness and achieving psychedelic states:

-entering a trance state by dancing (for instance at psytrance parties but it's the same for voodoo ceremonies where the dancer enter a trance by dancing with percussions instruments)...once I was dancing into a trance at home (psytrance music) and then ate some shrooms, but I was already so high because of the dancing trance that I almost didn't feel the shroom effect.

-hypnosis, meditation, contemplation, special respiration technics, astral projection, dreams technics, kundalini things, shamanism & sorcery practices (these ones you must becareful with because they can make you completely creazy if you don't know what you're doing) ...and so on and so on

-playing didgeridoo or diphonic chanting for half an hour (It's a kind of respiration practice that make you high, and your own music/chant lead you into a trance, the more you're into the trance state, the more the music becomes psychedelic and makes you high....I love it, you can achieve incredibly deep trance states with such simple respiration work)

-food/sleep deprivation and also some kind of stress (for instance, insomnia can quicly lead you to very strange mind states and though process or even to some kind of psychosis in very extreme cases)

-and magic visionnary plants of course


to stick on the subject I would say that food/sleep deprivation (diet...) can lead to mind "travelling" states, and I noticed that these factors would incredibly increase a psychedelic drug effect (taking psychedelics when no sleep and no food since 24-48h make me very unstable and somewhat deliriant during the trip)
But I avoid doing it as I know it's much better for me to trip when in good conditions, set & settings (if I'm exhausted or stressed, I will get stronger effects for sure, but there is also greater possibility of a bad trip).

Also, I once entered a trance state by letting my mind flow and writing all down during several days without eating/sleeping (or just very very little).
The trance state quickly became incredibly deep & psychedelic.
Unfortunately it finally got uncontrolable (I was so exhausted that I experienced a kind of "bad comedown" with huge fear/paranoia and I ended up at the psychatric hospital for a month). Note that a friend of mine had exactly the same experience from extended sleep deprivation, deep thinking/writing & marijuana smoking over a several weeks period (he didn't had any "bad come down" but he also ended up at the hospital completely deliriant and hallucinating).
Sleep/food deprivation are powerful trance tools.

I think the important point in such a state is to deal with these factors (sleep/food) so the trance state keeps going but doesn't gets uncontrolable.
Because once it gets uncontrolable, you enter a deliriant state and you end up forgetting most of what you did learn during this state, and worse, you have lost the point/ the direction of your trance:
when finally down from it you just remember the experience as a kind of confused dream that has little reality, you somewhat forget the point/the direction of your trance (which is too bad because as long as you keep it under control, you're clear minded and there is nothing more obvious that the great though direction you're pursuing)
If you loose the mind direction then you loose the sense of what you did write so you couldn't even understand the point of what you've been writing with such a clear mind when reading it again after coming down (you can't understand what an alien did write if you're not on the same mind wave that he was in when writing: you cannot decode the message because you think much too much differently from him so what you read has some sense but doesn't make no sense to you, for instance someone who never heard of maths couldn't make any sense of a mathematic equation, when loosing the direction it's just like if you had forgotten what is maths: equation becomes non-sense to you)

If you loose the control and direction, you become no more than a mad deliriant person (there's no point/sense in what you're doing), but as long as you keep it under control you're into "controlled madness" which is a great psychedelic tool for learning.

Here's my experience (with more details & advices):

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=185878&highlight=trance
 
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Genaro, that's a pretty informative post on altered states. Have you ever read "Dreaming as Delirium" by Dr. Alan Hobson? Dr. Hobson despises drugs of all types with a passion, but he does try and link dreaming at night with what many psychotic and schizophrenic people experience while waking. He then goes into detail about the neuro behind all this.

In a nutshell, the nerotransmitter acetylcholine plays a big role in us "seeing what's really there". Unlike seratonin, whose levels can be tweaked to a point without risk, acetylcholine is not to be fucked with. Unless you'd like to experience some of the scariest hallucinations conceivable, and throw off many bodily functions like muscle tension so much that your life is in danger.

Dr. Hobson says that your brain is like a country with two monetary currencies, one for trading during the day and the other for trading at night. Using primarily norepinephrine and dopamine to send messages during the day, the brain needs to replenish its supplies of these neurotransmitters. So messages during sleep are sent with acetylcholine, which is largely responsible for our dreams. If we run short on norepinephrine and dopamine and surpress acetylcholine (i.e. don't sleep, eat strangely, or take an anticholinergic deleriant drug like datura), acetylcholine seeps out during waking times, and we may hallucinate, that is, dream while awake. As Hobson puts it, we dream at night SO THAT WE DON'T HALLUCINATE during the day.

I've had mild, split second long hallucinations (and very odd thoughts) after pulling exhausting all-nighters during my college days. The first time I ever pulled an all nighter was in junior high, and that morning as I ate my breakfast, my bleary eyes thought they saw a rat running around inside the heating duct in my kitchen. It made no sound though. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, and it was gone. These kind of allucinations are not particularly enjoyable, and I could imagine they could range all the way up to terrifying.
 
to stick on the subject I would say that food/sleep deprivation (diet...) can lead to mind "travelling" states, and I noticed that these factors would incredibly increase a psychedelic drug effect
Click to expand...

Hmm, every time I've taken mushrooms after extended periods being awake, I've either not tripped much or fallen asleep and missed out on the trip.

Dan
 
well it can "alter" the trip, but as your mind is weak because of the sleep/food deprivation, I noticed that the mind trip was much more intense (& unstable)...probably bacause your mind/logic fences are disminished by the tiredness.

-if you don't sleep, eat strangely you're messing with your body& mind rythms, so it is also the simple fact that your habits are confused that makes your mind confused (and not only the deprivation itself, this is what I noticed when having long term insomnia, living at night and sleeping at day: makes your mind very confused and gives a weird way of thinking/looking at life, not only because of the lack of sleep but also because your mind rythms are in a mess, so your mind sort of loose the marks & habits that keep it centered onto everydaylife reality)
Sleep deprivation doesn't only give me weird thoughts & strange perceptions, it also makes me laugh stupidly for no reasons.


-about food deprivation,a friend told me that anorexic people are often full of energy as the lack of alimentation makes your body release more adranaline, this needs confirmation.
Also, when food deprivation, your body starts relying on the liver's ressources, and if you're often using drugs, and especially if you did use drugs recently like the previous day, it is very possible that the remaining drug metabolites in the liver would pass in the blood producing a little effect as your body starts "pomping" on the liver.
 
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Food and sleep deprivation is also a big training tool used by the US military. I myself have gone 3 days with about an hour of sleep, one and a half MREs and humped over 50 miles with 45 pounds of gear on my back.

Sitting on top of a building, while food and sleep deprived in the middle of the night waiting for the enemy to make contact with you can really fuck with your head.

As I peered down from my position on the roof of a building I could see figures moving into the opening through a tree covered road. I heard voices and what not but the closer they got, they just disappeared. Strange experience.
 
I went for 6 days with no "real" sleep (as in I took quick power naps but with no REM cycle, therefore not real sleep) and during that entire time I ate nothing but a cup ramen and some sherbert. Oh yeah and a fruit cup.

On the 6th day, I began to get this really intense body high, stronger than meth, stronger than ecstasy. It felt like I was dissociated from my body, like my inside was pushing my chest outwards or something. I felt drowsy so I thought maybe my shit was bunked with heroin. And my mind felt all clouded like I was stoned. It was easily stronger than any psychoactive I've ever done.
 
Yes I was on a binge, but it had been at least 20 hours since my last bump, so by the time I got that high I was sober for at least 12 hours or so.

Another time me and my friend stayed up for 4 days together, and we started hallucinating the same thing. We chased the same shadow people for like 5 blocks, and we both hallucinated the clock was 5:00AM even though it was really midnight. fuckin weird.
 
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