Chugging dragon pills 🐉
A newsletter on emergency drugs for your brain.
What’s up man.
Today we’re going to talk about taking drugs. Specifically drugs for your brain when shit is about to hit the fan, or any event is about to raise your stress levels and require high quality thinking under pressure.
That can be the birth of your first child, a major work event, a natural disaster like a hurricane, etc.
The personal example I’m going to pull from for context is the 51 hour birth of my daughter Charlotte Dream Johnson.
The subject I’m focusing on is actually called nootropics specifically (or “biohacking” generally). This post is not intended as an introduction to those topics, it’s just a short list of useful stuff you can take that works well, costs little, is easy to find, and actually makes an impact.
Unlike say taking an uber expensive proprietary “super brain rocket fuel” thing off Amazon only to piss it out or have a negative reaction to it.
In this post I’m going to cover the “stack” I used for the birth of my daughter, and at the end for paid Dream Lounge cult members I’m going to expand on what I would do differently next time.
The birth of my first child took ~51 hours from start to finish. That doesn’t mean screaming and pushing for 51 hours like out of a movie - that only happens at the end.
Still this took an incredibly long time. From my research I figured our first baby would take up to 24 hours. Obviously I was wrong and it took more than double what I anticipated.
This removes the possibility of a home birth in Florida by the way, as licensed mid-wives won’t even deal with you after the 24 hour mark. They just dump you off at a hospital. Adios bucko.
This is how many first time “natural births” take place though. It’s a slow, careful process as the woman’s body prepares to shit out a watermelon. Modern hospital settings are slaves to intervention bias and through that rush to disrupt the natural birthing process to the maximum extent and speed possible.
I wish I was kidding. This is happening right now to mothers in labor in the city you live.
If you let them, hospitals will stick your wife and baby with a million drugs from the minute you step in the door. Now doctors are supposed to practice with a degree of caution.
The first rule of (good) medicine is “primum non nocere” or “first do no harm”. In real life most of them don’t give a shit though. That’s some abstract woo woo bullshit from medical school they barely remember.
Among a bunch of other drugs they will literally give your in labor wife IV fentanyl, which reaches the baby.
“No thanks. I don’t want my wife and baby on fentanyl today.”
I mention this because as an apex alpha male patriarch it’s your job to protect your wife and baby from the hospital doom goons. To understand and make all the best decisions possible for them, to the best of your ability. Women generally have no idea how to make good decisions without proper mansplaining, and this is 100x true when they are 9 months pregnant and about to shit out a watermelon.
To say that child birth is a major biological event is an understatement. It’s a life changing, life or death event for mom and baby.
Women then are basically in the worst cognitive position possible to make good decisions. Hospitals are aware of and prefer this, running over the women with their stupid plan of doom juice drugs, and any beta male slaves who try to meekly stand in the way.
As a proper patriarch you gotta walk in there with big dick energy, destroying all of their misguided delusions and plans. I gave you an example of that in action here when we self-discharged AMA from an emergency room 2 weeks before Charlotte’s eventual birth.
As I stressed to you there, doctors and nurses are *experts* at manipulating patients under emotional and biological stress to do what they want. They do this all the time like clockwork. If you go in unarmed you will get run over, every time, I promise.
These people have a plan and it is not in your best interest. It’s in their best interest financially, professionally, liability wise, etc.
All that shit is gay and should be a very distant second to optimizing the health outcomes for mom and baby.
With all this in mind, it’s absolutely critical that your brain is firing on all cylinders in a (potentially and probably) adversarial, high stress environment, where the health and wellness of your family is on the line and you are the last line of defense.
In my case with Allyssa that was legally explicit. I was both fiancée, baby daddy, patient advocate, and patient surrogate. Meaning I held a properly written, properly witnessed, and attorney reviewed medical power of attorney for Allyssa that was on file with the hospital (and a backup paper copy on me at all times).
In Florida this gave me 24/7 power to make all of her medical decisions, even when she was awake and fine. She could still override those decisions if awake, but they gave up on double checking with her pretty quick.
They did not like this - and eventually there was a major battle about it with a fat fuck Latina bitch social worker - yet they had no choice but to comply in the end.
Laws have consequences folks.
Allyssa like me is a fanatic for patriarchy. We are on the same team, and I am the leader of that team, end of story.
The last thing you want to do as a man is let yourself make bad decisions because your body is failing - when it otherwise doesn’t need to be failing.
Hence the dragon drugs to juice your brain up.
With all that out of the way, here is the simple stack I used for the ~51 hour birth of Charlotte. Variations of this have also been used at The 21 Convention over a longer period of time (4-5 days straight) to keep me in top shape for public speaking and event management.
1. L-theanine
About 800mg total across the two day birth, taken consistently in 100mg doses across that time. I normally take 100-200mg a day anyway. I basically doubled the high end range of what I take daily.
L-theanine is a remarkably safe and potent nootropic I discovered in 2019. I started taking it daily and never looked back. It’s an extract of (mostly green) tea that crosses the blood-brain barrier, promoting relaxation and focus without side effects like drowsiness.
IMO it is by far one of the most reliable, safe, and effective supplements you can take for your mind. It is the king of keeping you calm, focused, and clear. I can’t stress enough how useful this stuff is. Mixes well with caffeine.
This is the brand I usually take.
100mg is like drinking two cups of green tea. You can read more about it here. Trouble sleeping? Start here.
2. Aspirin
Low (half) dose, infrequent. I’m not a fan of taking aspirin consistently for anything. But once or twice a year for a major event like child birth or The 21 Convention? Sure thing.
The main reason I took this (along with the next drug) is mild pain management. Over those 51 hours I got maybe 90 minutes of sleep. On your feet that much, your joints and feet start to ache a bit.
Sure you can suck it up. You’re a tough guy. Not that big of a deal.
The issue is that even little aches and pains like this slowly eat away at your focus, inch by inch. Even a 2% draw on my attention is something I wanted to nix out. One of my knees is also severely arthritic from five dislocation events, and prone to pain from overuse (like standing 20 hours a day). This helped nick that in the bud, keeping it off my mind.
Finally low dose aspirin has potential nootropic benefits on it’s own.
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