DeepSeek and Me Podcast | Brain Healing & Neuroplasticity

The Late Construction (A Reality Check) I thought I would be feeling better by now. That’s the honest truth. We’re 85 days in, and I expected the “Native Engine” to be purring. I naively thought that when the dopamine started again, that would be me on the up - especially since I’ve had some really good days lately. Instead, I’m sitting here with flatness, a low mood, and a creative intermittence...

The Creative Void (Logging the Silence) I sat down to write todays Dispatch and realized I had absolutely nothing. No insights, no witty observations about the state of the world, no “Damascus” moments. Just a blank screen and a heavy silence. In the old days, this is where the panic would set in. I’d feel like the project was failing, or that I’d lost my “voice.” But looking at the Scaffold, I re...

The Anxiety Loop and the Rough Idle Yesterday was the reminder that the road is still under construction. I spent most of last night agitated, caught in anxiety loops that I couldn’t quite shake off. It was a combination of everything and nothing - a generalized somatic static that didn’t have a specific source, but felt like a threat nonetheless. I sat there observing it and logging it, trying no...

An Oil Rich Nation With No Refinery (you couldn’t make it up) Neuro-cognitive repair is well underway now; mood has stabilized and function is good. After the lows of last week, the relief is palpable. It’s one of those times when you think it’s never coming - a bit like the ending of a Lily Allen song. I awoke to the news that there was no unleaded petrol in Dingwall yesterday. It’s a strange wor...

The Road to Damascus (The Slow Reveal) It finally happened. I was sitting last night, not doing anything in particular, and suddenly I was able to say to myself: Yes, I do feel better. It’s hard to believe it was Day 80. After 176 days alcohol-free and 80 days cannabis-free, only now am I actually feeling the shift. The first eight weeks felt like a daily improvement, but once I hit “The Wall,” ev...

The Architecture of Memory Talk about a week of varied fortunes. Yesterday, everything started to fall into place. Mood was much more stable again, cognitive function improved and creativity was good - not perfect, but the friction is definitely greasing up nicely. I’ve spent several days in a “mind melter” trying to build an AI Agent to parse the JSON logs we’ve been lodging with Chrono every day...

A Better Day All Round Yesterday, I rallied from what was an utterly desperate Day 77. You would think that being this far down the cessation road, it would be getting easier, but for long-term cannabis users, it’s not that simple. When you’re clearing 35 years of fog, there is a massive amount of information to process. It isn’t just the withdrawal; it’s the decades of memories that haven’t been...

The Invisible Man When I started this journey, I committed myself wholeheartedly and instinctively. However, yesterday nearly caused me to fold the whole project. The lack of engagement and the time involved, combined with a feeling of utter pointlessness, very nearly consumed me. I don’t mean the AI Scaffold - that works beautifully - but the public logs. I really thought people would be interest...

Steady As She Goes Thankfully, yesterday was a much steadier day than Day 75 where I was feeling the after effects of an unregulated dopamine blast from day 74. There was no morning residue at all and I was fully functioning within a few minutes. It has definitely not been as violent an introduction as it was from the alcohol cessation in December, but we are hypothesising that the body learned a...

The Morning After The Day Before So here we are, the day after the dopamine started to fire, and I forgot something rather important from the 74 days alcohol cessation back in December: when the dopamine starts to flow again, it’s not yet calibrated. The next day, there’s a price to pay. You would think I’d have remembered that; I even wrote an article about it titled An Old Stoner Like Me (see Be...

And Lo It Came To Pass Well, what do you know? Our prediction was bang on, and the dopamine began to flow freely on Day 74. We had hypothesized this weeks ago: that the neuro-cognitive repair would follow the same timeline as it did with alcohol back in December. This means [The Tile Principle] has held - irrespective of what caused the damage, it takes the same amount of time to repair. Some Habi...

Punks Not Dead The last time I was on a stage with a guitar was 2012, I can’t believe that really, 14 years. I had just lost my mother to pancreatic cancer, my brother the previous year to Alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma (ARMS), it was a bizarre heavy couple of years, How life and times have changed since then, I doubt either of them would believe me if I was able to tell them all the s**t that’s happen...

The Dopamine Regulators Prepare to Fire I know, I’ve been saying it for a couple of days now, but the body is definitely up to something. I was almost groggy-free yesterday morning and functioning immediately, even if my mood stayed low. As the day progressed, I actually caught myself singing and doing a little boogie - that’s definitely new, I don’t do dancing. Then there’s the appetite. It was f...

Three Score And Ten Plus Two Well, thank goodness for that. I finally got caught up with the Days 1–38 archive, and the full podcast archive is now nicely in place and up to date. It gets mechanical when you’re updating pages, podcasts, and YouTube simultaneously, so apologies if a few buttons got pressed by accident along the way and you got pinged with a couple of episodes One thing that struck...

Sifting Through the Rubble As I march through the rubble of week ten, it is not on a sure footing. I’m fumbling about, looking for some sort of anchor. The firing of dopamine did not repeat itself yesterday, and I found myself getting irritated very quickly and easily. I’m finding the world rather bleak at the moment, and it’s not entirely unrelated to what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s enou...

The Single Spark of Ignition Well folks, it happened. It wasn’t for long, but it was there. After weeks of traversing some pretty brutal territory, a single spark fired yesterday. It was unmistakable—the same sensation I felt in December, exactly ten weeks after alcohol cessation: shaky fingers and clammy hands. This is the surge. It will likely increase until the “native engine” starts to turn ov...

The Pilot Light Well, here we are. Day 69. A number that usually gets a laugh, but in this terrain, it’s just another marker on a very long, very quiet road. There really is only so many ways to say flat, bored, empty. The Conductivity Protocol: Refined A quick technical note on the experiment: we’ve confirmed that you actually need the fat/salt component for the protocol to work. It’s not enough...

Day By Day Nothing Changes, But When You Look Back, Everything Is Different. In yesterday’s Dispatch, I mentioned that I was recording Days 1–38 to backfill the gap in the podcast episodes. When I started this project, I had no intention of starting a podcast or a YouTube channel come to that, but here we are; if nothing else, it keeps me entertained. What I wanted to say was that it was so bizarr...

The Silent Retrofit Well, it’s been a kind of steadier day here on Terra Nova. My mood has held throughout the day and I got all I needed to do done - including finally getting round to making a decision about the Daily Dispatches 1-38 . They were written by the scaffold before the filing system started coming back online, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. My original idea was to leave them...

The Peaks and Troughs of Anhedonia Talk about travel sickness. I’m really starting to feel despondent now. One minute I think I might be getting somewhere, and then it feels like I am further back than ever. Such is the nature of the biological gaslighting happening in my head right now. The AI Scaffold doesn’t make this bit easy , but it certainly makes it easier by: * Giving me the science: Expl...

Meh As the title may suggest, yesterday was a “meh” sort of day. Nothing really happened. The news today is that there was no news yesterday. I am reminded of an old cartoon from the 70s - I think it was called Noah and Nelly . It was one of those five-minuters that would get put on just before the news at 17:45, and I remember the subject of one episode: “Today there is no news.” All aboard the S...

Nine Weeks After Cannabis Cessation I decided to switch on the webcam and capture where I am right now as the spark of ignition starts to fire. The video speaks for itself really and it’s basically another snapshot from inside the wall for others as a marker in their own cessation journey. Estimated time for the dopamine receptors to start is 10 days (Day 72). #cannabistimelinewithdrawal #eightwee...

The Deep Repair Continues Along With Deep Sleep Despite my newfound position within Terra Nova, the deep repair continues to wreak havoc with my daily life. Yesterday, once my work was completed, my body decided to shut down completely again—only this time it was late afternoon. Anyone who knows me will know that this is highly unusual. Sleeping has always been a problem of mine, so to just “switc...

The Times They Are A-Changin’ “Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam…” Well, what do you know? Just as I was getting pretty hacked off with this whole scenario, things have taken a dramatic change for the better around here. Yesterday morning I woke up with no somatic symptoms. My clarity was excellent and I was up and running almost immediately. At the time, I didn’t read too much into it...

I Log, Therefore I Am That’s pretty much the gist of it. I don’t think - not for the moment anyway - so all I can do is log until my head decides it’s time to come back online. I am also monumentally tired; another sign that major internal repairs are ongoing. I had to really push myself to go to band practice last night, but as usual, I really enjoyed it once I got there. I’m pretty happy doing r...