electrolytes:

[especially not edited]

Not medical or nutritional advice, etc., etc.; definitely talk with your doctor about weird gotchas and blood pressure and kidney stuff. But it is said that lots of people don't get enough potassium, magnesium, even sodium. (Calcium? More?) This is a very personal thing, as some people maybe do fine with less, and some foods or supplements agree with some people and not others. And some electrolytes aren't safe to supplement longterm and others aren't safe for people with kidney disease. For what it's worth, I've found that meditation "gets stuck" less (whatever that means---I sort of don't believe in meditation getting "stuck," though "jamming" or "coiling" or "it seems like nothing's happening," yes, so I'm using "stuck" here in a really weird way, see creativity protocol and other places for like "when nothing seems to be happening for days, weeks, or months"), again gets stuck less, when my body is "loaded" with plenty of potassium, magnesium, and sodium (and etc.). So if you're "stuck in a weird rut," (again, "stuck?" "rut?"---I don't mean "nonmonotoncity" but "rut") you may find you're eating way less sodium than you could be, or almost no potassium, and so on. Careful with your blood pressure with sodium, but maybe consider really trying to meet something around 100% of like the USA RDA (maybe try to work up to it over a week and see what happens). Careful with your kidneys with potassium, ditto, here, too, and so on. You could try to hit like 60% with supplements and get the rest from food, modulo fast food re sodium, and so on. Careful to balance electrolytes, in general, as one makes another safer or taste better, or something.

The following is very personal speculation and not medical or nutritional advice: this is sort of cliche I guess, and I kind of knew this, but recent personal experience has driven home that even if something is somewhere in the "reference range," via a blood test, it might, for some things where this matters, and not other things, be low in the body tissues (because the tissues are a storage tank to tightly control blood levels), and something being on the low end of a reference range can be mild-moderate evidence for low in the tissues. And if something gets low in the tissues, the body might pull all sorts of horrible-feeling tricks to try to continue to keep things tightly controlled in the blood. I think sodium is especially an important upstream enabler, to keep an eye on and to make sure you have plenty of (and, well potassium too and other things) because sodium increases fluid retention, which means there's a larger interstitial and intercellular "storage tank" for just about everything, including water soluble stuff that especially doesn't have a good way to stay in the body long. As long as your blood pressure is ok or good, you want a "big tank," I think--not 100% sure on that, though. And there could be blood pressure nonmonotonicities on the way to expanding your tank size, or something. You might talk to your doctor about whether temporary increases in blood pressure, if any, are safe for you, and how to properly monitor, and etc. Wild speculation on my part, not medical advice, etc.

Notes:

• I still do it a bit to taste anyway, but multiple people, including myself, have independently found that potassium supplementation can cause insomnia: https://gwern.net/zeo/potassium [Last accessed: 2023-03-23]
• Potassium might generally increase sympathetic tone. Maybe just for some people in some regimes.
• Sodiuim seems to maybe generally increase parasympathetic tone and might facilitate sleep. Maybe just for some people in some regimes.
• After a few days of much more sodium, for my part (again still somewhere within USA RDA) I'm also noticing I want quite a bit less potassium and magnesium now that I have a lot more sodium in my system. It's possible I was overloaded with them, somehow, and things are correcting. This might be a very transient and noisy observation but I'll just stick it here.
• [Update 20230410 (xposted in a couple places): I'm becoming more distrustful of one-shot (at least) taste stuff because I think my body is saying no to things, but if I put it in my stomach anyway, my body is like "oh, huh, interesting" after a few hours. Or like "no, what?!" but after a couple days (or even longer) my body is more on board. Gotta do outside view stuff too, which of course I was, but I'm more outside view than I was.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolyte#Physiological_importance [last accessed: 2023-03-23]

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2023-03-24 Speculation: ok so by rut above, I meant in part---I had really bad muscle tension from pre-wayfinding, pre-meta-protocol, pre-main-practice-p2 dumb things I was doing, plus some really bad trauma mixed into that and desperately layered and tangled over, understatement, and that plus maybe not getting enough sodium, and it's like the muscle tension and tangles I'd gotten myself into, plus again maybe low sodium, almost like deflated me like a balloon. And it's almost like I've needed to re-inflate like a balloon, increased tissue and blood volume, slowly, over weeks in order to finally completely untangle. Possibly some blood pressure non-monotonicity in here, too, though confounded by post-acute covid sequelae stuff. Still ongoing. In retrospect I'm going to judge whether more sodium was actually necessary or if it just helped. I would like to think that, like with many other structural situations, there can be large body changes (like losing a limb or losing mobility in a joint) that don't necessarily preclude fully untangling---of course, technical buddha nature always in principle (as best I personally and meta-personally can tell, for my part, fwiw) but things can be harder in practice. Anyway, this is a weird maybe-thing with electrolytes and a (hopefully) rather extreme and unusual circumstance. I will report back.