Took ibuprofen for a headache and accidentally had the clearest, most present day of my life — is this how "normal" feels for other people?

Question

So this happened a few days ago and I can't stop thinking about it.

Around noon I wasn't feeling great — headache, stomach ache, just generally off. My wife handed me a 400mg ibuprofen. Twenty or so minutes later, something shifted that had nothing to do with the pain going away.

I felt zen. Focused. Like my thoughts had actual space around them instead of running into each other. I sat down to eat and found myself really looking at the food before each bite — noticing it, tasting it, actually there for it instead of just shoveling it in while thinking about ten other things.

Then I looked up and there were birds messing around outside, and my kids were in the pool laughing, and I just felt this wave of... happiness? Presence? It's hard to describe. It didn't feel like being high. It felt like someone had wiped a layer of dust off my brain that I didn't even know was there.

It lasted a day give or take, but it's left me with a weird question I can't shake: is that how other people feel most of the time? Is my normal, day-to-day baseline actually kind of degraded compared to that? Because once the fog lifted, I started seeing a lot of things in my own life — and in people around me — way more clearly than I usually do.

Has anyone else had a moment like this from something as mundane as ibuprofen? Trying to figure out if this was a fluke (relief from feeling sick, placebo, coincidence) or something worth paying more attention to.

Posted Aug 28, 2026, 7:46 AM UTC

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