A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriag

Description: A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman "Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny." – The Washington Post"Genuinely brave and human." —The New York Times "Wildly brilliant." —ElleThe true story of how a renowned writers struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes.When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is ready to try anything. Her depression has become intolerable, severe and unmanageable; medication has failed to make a difference. Married with four children and a robust career, she "should" be happy, but instead her family and her work are suffering at the mercy of her mood disorder. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and becomes part of a burgeoning underground group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month, during which she achieved a newfound feeling of serenity, she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is candid, revealing and completely enthralling. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughters Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She was a federal public defender and taught at Loyola Law School and the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she developed and taught courses on the legal implications of the war on drugs. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children. Review "Genuinely brave and human… In normalizing the conversation about LSD, she may one day help others feel normal." —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "A wildly brilliant, radically candid, and rigorous daybook of [Waldmans] life-changing, last-resort journey." —Lisa Shea, Elle "Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny." —Sharon Peters, USA Today "An intriguing and thorough look at the therapeutic possibilities of an illegal drug... Engaging and deeply researched." —Nora Krug, The Washington Post "Smart, outspoken, provoking, and funny… Poignant, sometimes hilarious... Waldman calls for renewed research and drug-law reform in this informative, candid, altogether irresistible quest." —Donna Seaman, Booklist "Honest and intelligent… A humane, well-reasoned, and absolutely necessary argument for a major overhaul of Americas drug policy. The book triumphantly coheres in a lucid manifesto of how and why the racist, immoral undertaking called the War on Drugs has failed… Passionate, persuasive." —Claire Vaye Watkins, The New Republic Review Quote "Genuinely brave and human... In normalizing the conversation about LSD, she may one day help others feel normal." --Jennifer Senior, The New York Times "A wildly brilliant, radically candid, and rigorous daybook of [Waldmans] life-changing, last-resort journey." --Lisa Shea, Elle "Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny." --Sharon Peters, USA Today "An intriguing and thorough look at the therapeutic possibilities of an illegal drug... Engaging and deeply researched." -- Nora Krug, The Washington Post "Smart, outspoken, provoking, and funny... Poignant, sometimes hilarious... Waldman calls for renewed research and drug-law reform in this informative, candid, altogether irresistible quest." --Donna Seaman, Booklist "Honest and intelligent... A humane, well-reasoned, and absolutely necessary argument for a major overhaul of Americas drug policy. The book triumphantly coheres in a lucid manifesto of how and why the racist, immoral undertaking called the War on Drugs has failed... Passionate, persuasive." --Claire Vaye Watkins, The New Republic Excerpt from Book This morning I took LSD. The table Im sitting at right now is not breathing. My keyboard is not exploding in psychedelic fireworks, lightning bolts shooting from the letters "R" and "P." I am not giddy and frantic, or zoned out with bliss. I feel no transcendent sense of oneness with the universe or with the divine. On the contrary. I feel normal. Well, except for one thing: Im content and relaxed. Im busy, but not stressed. That might be normal for some people, but it isnt for me. I did not drop a tab of acid. What I took is known as a "microdose," a subtherapeutic dose of a drug administered at a quantity low enough to elicit no adverse side effects yet high enough for a measurable cellular response. A microdose of a psychedelic drug is approximately one-tenth of a typical dose. A recreational user of LSD looking for a trip complete with visual hallucinations might ingest between one hundred and one hundred and fifty micrograms of the drug. I took ten micrograms. Microdosing of psychedelics, so new and renegade a concept that I had to teach it to my computers spellcheck, was popularized by a psychologist and former psychedelic researcher named James Fadiman in a series of lectures and podcast interviews and in a book published in 2011 called The Psychedelic Explorers Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys . Since 2010, Dr. Fadiman has been collecting reports from individuals who experimented with regular microdosing of LSD and psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical found in a variety of different species of mushroom. Soon after his books publication, in a lecture at a conference on the potential therapeutic value of psychedelic drugs, Fadiman presented what he had learned from reading the dozens of reports mailed and e-mailed to him, some though by no means all of them anonymously. He said about microdosing, "What many people are reporting is, at the end of the day, they say, That was a really good day. A really good day. Predictably, regularly, unexceptionally. That is all I have ever wanted. For as long as I can remember, I have been held hostage by the vagaries of mood. When my mood is good, I am cheerful, productive, and affectionate. I sparkle at parties, I write decent sentences, I have what the kids call swag. When my mood swings, however, I am beset by self-loathing and knotted with guilt and shame. I am overtaken by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a grim pessimism about even the possibility of happiness. My symptoms have never been serious enough to require hospitalization, nor have they ever prevented me from functioning either personally or professionally, but they have made my life and the lives of the people whom I love much more difficult. I have sought many treatments for these moods and miseries. Though I managed to be one of the only neurotic Jewish children growing up in the seventies and eighties in the New York area to stay out of a shrinks office, I did eventually dip my toe. Or, to be more accurate, I waded into therapy with the eagerness of a dehydrated camel sloshing into an oasis mud puddle. I wallowed in therapy of all kinds. My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus. I sat in my therapists office and sobbed. Once I stopped crying (two or three sessions in), we talked about my boyfriend and my ambivalence about the breakup. We talked about the guy (and the other guys, and the one or two girls) I cheated on him with. We talked about my mothers anger and my fathers emotional reserve, and about how hard it was to grow up in a home where two people spent so much time fighting. Since that first series of appointments, I have spent hundreds of hours in the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers and licensed family therapists, wearing my unique assprint into so many leather couches. Ive nattered on to Freudians and diligently filled out the workbooks assigned by cognitive behavioral therapists. I enjoy these sessions; Im analytical and an extrovert, so I enjoy picking apart my life and my feelings, especially with people Im paying for the privilege. I was a good student in elementary school, and I find workbooks soothing. Even though I am a cynic about all things countercultural (nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than a yogini pressing her lily-white palms together in a Namaste), I have on occasion even abandoned mainstream therapy for the decidedly alternative. In my eighth month of pregnancy with my second child, desperate to avoid another Caesarean section, I engaged in a series of sessions of hypnotherapy, during which I "rebirthed" my oldest child. This would, the hypnotist promised, guarantee a vaginal birth this time. I lay on her couch, my knees bent up around my ears, as she guided me in excruciating detail through the vaginal birth I did not have. Together we imagined every twisting contraction, the burn of crowning, the exertion of pushing. I panted, I moaned, I gritted my teeth and bore down. It turns out that the only thing one is guaranteed to produce by such efforts is a massive and propulsive fart. One month, two doulas, a midwife, and forty-four hours of nonimaginary contractions later, my son was delivered by an obstetrician who waited with surprising patience for me to finish futilely visualizing my cervix opening before he performed the second of what went on to be four C-sections. Ive done mindfulness-based therapy, which required me to spend torturous minutes meditating, and many more torturous hours discussing with my therapist why I hate meditating so much. I responded to a crisis in a friends marriage by forcing my long-suffering husband into an infuriating kind of couples therapy that involved repeating back each others words, theoretically in a tone not dripping with passive-aggressive fury. ("I hear that it upsets you when I criticize how you load the dishwasher, but I feel sad when you insist on putting the glasses on the bottom rack, and I feel rage because, despite your vaunted intelligence, you cant seem to learn that thats how they get broken." Oops.) We might still be frantically using "I" language with one another had my husband not pointed out that it was the therapy that was the most serious threat to our marriage. "I" had to agree.* Despite all of these hundreds of hours of talk therapy, I cant say that I have ever experienced much in the way of a change of either outlook or behavior. And then, one day, on my way home from giving a depressingly poorly attended reading in bucolic and beautiful Marin County,+ I found myself considering the possibility of steering my wheel hard to the right and hurtling off the Richmond Bridge. The thought was more than idle, less than concrete, and though I managed to make it across safely, I was so shaken by the experience that I called a psychiatrist. That psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. Though this diagnosis was a shock, it wasnt a surprise. Bipolar disorder runs in families, and my father and other members of my family have it. I suppose in the back of my mind I always feared that my shifting moods might be an expression of the disease. Bipolar disorder is characterized by changes in mood, energy, and activity levels. Most people experience these different emotional states, but in bipolar people they are intense, sometimes drastic and disturbing. Like "Maybe Ill spontaneously drive my car off this bridge!" disturbing. They can have a profound impact on daily functioning and relationships. Up to one in five people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and rates may even, paradoxically, be higher for those suffering from bipolar II. Psychiatrists posit that individuals with bipolar I, though their suffering is more intense, are less able either to formulate a desire to commit suicide, or to carry it out. People with bipolar II possess the competence necessary to end their suffering. Though these statistics scared me, having a diagnosis was also in many ways a profound relief. It explained so much! Like my tendency to overshare at dinner parties and on the Internet. Or the day I stood, trembling with rage, as the dry cleaner shrugged his shoulders at the ruin hed made of my expensive new shirt. The purchase itself was made in a period of overspending typical of bipolar disorder, and my reaction to the dry cleaners perfunctory apology was a symptom of whats known as "irritability." Irritability, or "irritable mood," is a clinical term, a piece of jargon, defined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as "a mood state in which apparently minimal stimulus or irritant produces excessive reaction, usually characterized by anger, aggressiveness or belligerence." It seems kind of an anodyne way to describe shrieking at ones local dry cleaner. My diagnosis gave me the language to understand the more positive aspects of what was happening to me as well. It shed light on experiences like the time I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania. So exhilarating and fruitful were these periods that I sometimes thought they were sufficient compensation for the other, dark side Details ISBN1101973722 Author Ayelet Waldman Pages 256 Language English Year 2018 ISBN-10 1101973722 ISBN-13 9781101973721 Format Paperback Publication Date 2018-01-09 Short Title A Really Good Day Subtitle How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2018-01-09 NZ Release Date 2018-01-09 US Release Date 2018-01-09 UK Release Date 2018-01-09 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Anchor Books DEWEY B Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137971858;

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