#518: Q&A with Tim Current Morning and Exercise Routines, Holotropic Breathwork, Ambition vs. Self-Compassion, Daily Practices for Joy, Ontological Shock, and More

A lot of people who compulsively focus on professional achievement have demons whipping them in their back ... Many of the people who achieve outsized financial success, success in any measurable way... have superpowers and equally super-deficits ... Many of them, after making millions of dollars or billions of dollars, remain quite tortured and unhappy.

The quarter life of caffeine is about 12 hours, which means, if you consume, say, 100 milligrams of caffeine.. a quarter of that will still be present 12 hours later. So, if you have 100 milligrams of caffeine... at noon, you will still have 25 milligrams of that caffeine in your system... at midnight.

If you allow everyone else's to-do list to become your to-do list, you will have a life replete of emergencies, and that just produces a daily experience and a life of cortisol.

We dramatically overestimate how much people are thinking about us.

For instance, if we consider a normal hit of LSD to be 100 micrograms, if you were to give someone 50 micrograms and then have them do the equivalent of Wim Hof or holotropic breathwork from, say, after the point of administration, minutes 30 to 60, my expectation would be that many people would subjectively feel it as if it were between 100 micrograms and 200 micrograms.

So, when in doubt, just get more exercise and sun exposure before lunch. And, without fail, that will increase my sleep quality in terms of percentage of restorative deep sleep and also speed to sleep—that is the onset of sleep.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so pick them very carefully, and prune very carefully over time.

You can use intense breathwork, such as holotropic breathwork, to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness—what some might call altered states of consciousness—without drugs.

If the secret to happiness is low expectations... then perhaps the key to overcoming the fear of being misunderstood is just to assume that everyone misunderstands everyone and that there is no point that it is pissing in the wind to try to prevent people from misunderstanding you.