a few days in the fast lane

I'm unusually busy these days. For a while my sense of how I've been doing, both in terms of my mood and in terms of developing my mental abilities, has been based on living in the slow lane. I've been taking time for long walks, waiting for obscure memories to pop into my mind, languidly connecting my experiences and ideas through daydreams. Now I'm dealing with stress of travel and deadlines. Now I'm working directly with other people, and I have to adjust the healthy routines I've developed during my period of idleness.

So now I can observe myself under my ashwagandha and bacopa regimen in more demanding situations. To the extent they are nootropics, I think it's clear that they're not giving me the kind of clear advantage that, say, steroids would give someone who was competing in physical sports. I'm also drinking lots of caffeine, which is both good and bad, but something as ordinary as caffeine seems to give roughly the level of external substance improvement one can expect from state of the art nootropics. For one, intelligence is a much more multi-faceted thing than strength or athletic performance. And of course even though steroids may increase sports performance, they aren't general health enhancers. These "adaptogens" I'm taking are, I hope, general health enhancers.