Right now, there are people in the nootropic community who are using experimental compounds that haven't yet passed clinical trials and in some cases have no prior history of human use at all. A large portion of the data used by communities like this (even "self-experimenters") -- use cargo cult pseudo-science to justify their drug use -- something that can go horribly wrong in inexperienced hands.
The majority of these people aren't even testing their compounds. They take them blindly or rely on the reputation of other people to tell them that its safe - mostly because they're ignorant, lazy, cheap, impatient or some combination thereof. They also have very little understanding of pharmacology or basic science, and I've seen first hand accounts from drug enthusiasts who go on to describe how they can "feel" the actions at various receptors in their brains based on something they've poorly understood from reading Wikipedia for 5 minutes (which is just complete nonsense.) And what's worse, is that there’s no easy way for the average person to tell what information is good since so much of the Internet is written to seem authoritative.
Suppose I Google a question and find a well-written blog post on serotonin interactions between various drugs that answers my question. Am I really going to know that the article is inaccurate, bias, or incomplete? Or am I going to walk away feeling like I've learned something, because I hate to say it but -- that's largely what the web is these days. None of the real information is on the surface because that would be far too boring for the average reader and boring content doesn't sell. Now combine this with drug use and you have a toxic mix of ignorance that can literally kill people.
I could go on about this subject but I won't rant any more. Just keep in mind that a lot of what’s written about nootropics (and other drugs) is no where near as clean or as simple as the Internet makes it seem, and that most people aren't even in a position to use caffeine therapeutically - let alone safely negotiate complex, poorly understood, and potentially unknown compounds they bought from the Internet (so try not to take Gwern at face value.)
While individuals that are ignorant, lazy, cheap, and impatient exist in all communities, Gwern(the author) does not possess any of those qualities. He is probably one of the least lazy, ignorant, and impatient people I have read online.(I didn't mention cheap because his writing doesn't give me any illumination into his spending habits)
I am afraid of sounding like a shill, but the fact is I'm 30 engineer, who has been trying to feel better my whole life through experiments with: ketamine, CBD, various nutrients, various dietary changes, exercise, being more social, meditation. None of them made lasting improvement like sertraline has, I wish I had been open-minded enough to try it years ago.
In retrospect, maybe it was ridiculous to try to find happiness with all methods other than the ones there are best medical evidence for... I guess I was afraid that somehow I'd be conceding there was something "wrong" with me (which is wonk). I was wondering why nobody had ever mentioned this before, and I realized people who use prescription medications are probably afraid to admit it. So I'm just putting out my sincere recommendation out there, as I wish somehow had done for me.
I'd like to offer a story of caution, and I do so with some hesitation because it sounds like it's been good for you so far. A friend of mine lost his life after committing suicide a month after starting Zoloft. His last messages to me were a discussion of what serotonin syndrome was like. He was excited and curious as always, which after reading online is common. I know I shouldn't blame the drug since he was depressed before... but it sucks to lose someone when it seems like their life was on the upward climb. Anyways, stay safe and be careful.
This is a well documented reaction to the beginning of treatment for depression. Essentially the reason is that before they started treatment, they had no motivation to do anything. After they start the treatment, but before they've waited long enough to realize the benefits, they have enough motivation to end their lives.
> Essentially the reason is that before they started treatment, they had no motivation to do anything. After they start the treatment, but before they've waited long enough to realize the benefits, they have enough motivation to end their lives.
Which is why in the UK they've experimented with giving patients MDMA for an instant seratonin rush needed to curb depressive symptoms until the antidepressants kick in.
I started taking Prozac and not long after I got on it, things started to seem a little better. I recall, one day, actually having the thought, Hey, maybe suicide isn't such a bad idea after all. Consider the fact that still having a good bit of depression yet feeling relief from anxiety actually made suicide seem like a viable option. I still get chills when I think about it.
The problem with SSRIs is that they can have wildly different effects on different people. Compounding that issue is clinicians misdiagnosing patients quite frequently because it's all subjective. You take a few questionnaires and they score them and say "this number means you're mildly/moderately/severely depressed."
In my case, as with many others with bipolar, Zoloft sent me into a hypomanic episode where I didn't sleep for 3 days and was severely agitated. I had never been diagnosed with bipolar in the ~15 years I had been in treatment. A change in my medication resulted in serious complications.
Recommending specific medications without experience is dangerous. Even doctors with years of experience can't get it right. It turns out for me SSRIs are a poor choice. I was prescribed lamotrigine and it changed my life. I no longer feel depressed for months at time, I sleep well, my libido is normal and I can ejaculate whenever I want.
True that, lamotrigine has been life changing as well, it took the edge off the depressive features. I initially dismissed lithium, but with long-term use, it has reduced episodes, agitation, with mild emotional blunting that I have learned to deal with. I've had to cycle off lamotrigine three times so far due to poopout, they call the protocol a washout, and it gets reintroduced at a starting dose until it is effective again, with a typical dose around 100 mg after washout.
I'd be careful recommending any specific anti-depressant. The overall advice to seek a doctor about depression is solid though, as the right medication can literally be life saving. The thing with anti-depressants is you kind of need to experiment at first to find the one that works best for your body and mind. There are some types that will either not work at all, or even make you feel significantly worse - this doesn't mean it's not still the right avenue to pursue, you just need to find the medication that's effective for you. There's really no transient high that is going to change your overall mood and pull you out of depression. It's a topical cure for a systemic issue, but it sure can be fun.
I've tested a couple of the mentioned drugs myself and thought i'd chip in with my results and learnings
Modafinil/Armodafinil
Definitely works and the side effects are neglectable. It's much as he describes it but im not sure why he can't feel it some of the time as the effect on me is really strong, especially with armodafinil which was almost too much to be hanging around other people :) You feel very awake like a mild cocaine high but have an easy time focusing on the task you are doing, i can definitely recommend it for all nighters and situations where you have to get something out the door !
Melatonin
I've experienced quite a bit with this, since i have really really hard time falling asleep. It's actually a huge issue for me. i've found that "microdosing" works even better than taking the "normal dose" of 2-3mg. I found a supplier in the Netherlands who sells 300ug pills and they have worked wonders for me ! works just as well as the stronger dose but it seems that the lower dose makes you sleep better.
> i've found that "microdosing" works even better than taking the "normal dose" of 2-3mg. I found a supplier in the Netherlands who sells 300ug pills and they have worked wonders for me ! works just as well as the stronger dose but it seems that the lower dose makes you sleep better.
You're not alone in this; in fact, I think it's pretty widely accepted among melatonin users that "<1mg doses work better" is just fact. The 2-3 mg dosage contained by most available supplements seems to be motivated by a misguided belief that more melatonin is more effective, in opposition to all the evidence that I've seen.
Agreed on the smaller doses of melatonin. A full tablet (5 or 10mg) tends to have the opposite effect and make me even wider awake after an hour or so of sleepiness. Someone told me once that most tablets are dosed too strong simply because it's an inexpensive supplement, and in the manufacturing process, it's cheaper to use the production templates used for other supplements that are dosed in higher amounts.
Not sure that makes much sense; tablets are mostly a binding agent that's mixed with a fairly small amount of active ingredient. In most cases, you simply have to change the ratio of binder to achieve the desired dose. Even a 10mg tablet would be very small indeed.
More likely it's demand from people that generally think 'more = better'.
It's the cost to change the factory line processes. If you're set to pump out 10mg tablets, and it's cheaper to just use more product than recalibrate your machines, then . . . there you go.
If I take the normal dose of >3mg, I'll experience incredible irritability the following day. I become sensitive to sound and anything that isn't entirely perfect. Things make me feel unreasonably furious. This is bad. These days I always microdose melatonin.
If I don't fall asleep with the first tiredness crash that happens 20-30 minutes after taking melatonin, I find myself restless and unable to sleep for another 4 or 5 hours. The more melatonin I take, the more intense the initial crash will be, but the harder it is to sleep if I miss that crash.
So you're telling me you alter your biochemistry to become more productive without a care for how it affects your overall (mostly mental) health? Hell, I started smoking cigarettes at 16, which I rank near the top of my worst decisions ever, despite the fact that it helped me hack my brain chemistry as I powered through numerous difficult math and CS classes with top scores. As a result, I spent years thrashing, kicking the insane habit and returning to baseline healthiness.
To me, the entire idea of performance-enhancing chemicals is the essence of Moloch (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) - the supposed optimization that we choose to "gain an edge" and end up worse off than if everyone had just been a bit more cynical and abstained. To what ends? Eventually this kind of thing ends up costing you $50 a month and keeping you on par with everyone else in the office (who also happen to brain-chemistry-hack), side-effects be damned.
Luckily, I can fall back on my experience and relative skill at programming. Many cannot - as a late-aughts college student and "yuppie", I saw "the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" induced by incessant Adderall use in a futile attempt to either "keep up" or "get ahead". To what ends? Some sped their way through upper-levels or toiled through back-breaking entry level jobs only to develop near psychosis, emotional numbness, apathy, and a resume piece that I too gained with considerably less strife.
Don't get me wrong, I drink a cup of coffee (or two) in the mornings to get going, but it's usually an break from my workday, not an essential part of it. More than that, it's enjoyable - added focus and clarity be damned. Silly as it may sound, I've even seen coffee become a problem for the hopelessly driven and chronically sleep-deprived - reducing them to diarrhea-ridden, jittery maniacs!
Maybe the TL;DR here is: sleep more, bike hard, and have some fun struggling instead of constantly grinding for carrots on sticks. It is true, after all, that many people (men, in particular) say their greatest regret was working so hard - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
> So you're telling me you alter your biochemistry to become more productive without a care for how it affects your overall (mostly mental) health?
Uh? Did you read Gwern? This is literally the opposite of what he does. He is ALL ABOUT weighing risks to overall health. Did you miss the fact that half of his articles detail the potential bad effects of the drugs he's trying?
>Hell, I started smoking cigarettes at 16, which I rank near the top of my worst decisions ever, despite the fact that it helped me hack my brain chemistry
He has an article on non-tobacco nicotine (nicotine gum, patches). His conclusions are, IIRC, 'kinda useful, but has some risks'. He doesn't have a page on cigarettes. You know why? Because cigarettes are THE WORSE. Everyone knows this. It's silly to write off all performance enhancing drugs on the grounds that you once made the bad decision to use possibly the very worse one, from a risk/benefit perspective."
I grant you that brain chemistry hacking may be one step towards em-world, which is as Moloch as it gets, but if you're working on important problems it the edge may be worth it.
Fair point. My point wasn't "hur hur cigs are bad ergo caffeine is bad" - rather that there are costs and benefits to everything (adderall, cigs, coffee, probably this modafinil shit) and that I don't think the benefits to being able to work around the close really exceed the costs, especially on a personal level. Like I said, becoming a diarrhea-ridden coffee maniac isn't a great fate either, especially when a good night of sleep solves the same problem.
To me, the entire idea of performance-enhancing chemicals is the essence of Moloch
Moloch specifically refers to zero-sum games. Intelligence enhancement is not that; if everyone in the world gained 10 IQ points we would almost certainly be far better off.
To what ends?
Curing cancer and Alzheimer's, getting self-driving cars on the road by 2025 instead of 2030, colonizing Mars, figuring out how to fix our diets without requiring infinite willpower, etc, etc.
I pointed this out in another comment - most work actually carries negative externalities and side effects that you're not accounting for. Disagree on Moloch, I defer to the fish pond example. It's not zero-sum, it's negative sum (everyone ends up worse off).
Ever met someone who has burned out? It's not pretty. Did you know that work-related-stress is amongst the largest threats to (particularly men's) health? Have you seen workaholism, stress-induced alcoholism, general-burnt-out-ness ruin relationships? What makes you think nootropics won't cause these problems as well? After all, ex nihilo nihil fit.
Ever think about how much gas you burn getting to work, how much plastic trash you create at lunch or coffee, how much coal it takes to keep the lights and the AC on for you to do what you do? Ever think about how many people died of weird lung diseases to produce that coal? Again, nothing comes from nothing.
Unless your work really is curing cancer, de-acidifying the oceans, or colonizing Mars, it's likely that your work is actually a negative sum game. You're worse off for it, and so is everyone else.
you need only a bit of willpower to fix your own diet, nothing more. many people are unwilling to get into any form of unpleasant state (ie abstaining from sweet stuff, workouts etc), they are 'too soft' and avoid hardships. that's all.
and none of what you mentioned could be magically achieved by one person popping a pill to gain some short term effect, and probably lose something in longer run. feel free to experiment on yourself, just please don't force anyhow this pitiful activity on others.
The vast majority of diets fail in the long run. Fat people forced to lose weight develop the symptoms of starving people and obsess about food, and always quickly return to their previous weights after release. During diets their metabolisms slow down to keep them at the same body weight despite the decreased calories.
that's because people are 'lazy' - they don't want to do the hard work, rather they spend significant amount of time, energy and cash to chase pure dietary solutions. they expect that some 30-day dietary course will change their life, especially when right after they go back to their old eating habits. obviously, it doesn't work, ever. so they try another diet and so on...
I believe massive changes in life can be done just by permanently altering diet, but best, fastest and most durable results are in combination of diet and exercise. proper workout stimulates metabolism, makes people more happy and the feeling of strength and endurance coming from your own body is just priceless. oh and it prolongs life too on top of adding massive quality to it.
did I laid out a massive change in somebody's life? yes. so what? great rewards come after great hardships, naturally. but many people will keep throwing money at their problems, refusing to change, instead of pouring sweat for free and keep wondering why it doesn't work.
People don't have infinite willpower. There is no magical distinction between minds and bodies. We are just animals and we are genetically programmed to strongly desire to eat food. The vast majority of people who attempt to diet fail.
When diets work, they require pushing the body to the point of starvation and keeping it there, which is just not sustainable. The body goes into starvation mode and tells the brain to do everything it can to sustain food. No amount of willpower can overcome that.
> fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
>The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.
>Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.
Also, "working hard" is pretty meaningless without context, especially if we're going to talk about regretting it.
For example, carving out some time at night for your side projects that might pay your rent one day vs. staying longer at work to get a leg up on imminent deadlines that were too aggressive vs. working hard to be Employee of the Month vs. working hard to learn programming.
> Eventually this kind of thing ends up costing you $50 a month and keeping you on par with everyone else in the office (who also happen to brain-chemistry-hack)
If it makes the entire office more productive, wouldn't that be positive-sum, not zero-sum?
No, your own health, sanity and money are costs in the equation.
And let's be honest: it's highly improbable that your work is doing anything for the good of humanity. In fact, it's actually very likely that your work (or some constituent part of it) carries negative environmental externalities, e.g. it's bad to do, even worse to do more of. My work certainly isn't essential to the arc of history. So what good is my productivity, especially at these costs?
Its concerning to see Modafinil on the same list of "defaults" as caffeine and vitamin D. They are on a different scale when it comes to the effect on your brain.
That aside, my anecdotal experience of mod is its basically a waste of time. Sure you stay awake longer but we can all easily procrastinate a day away regardless, it wont make you any more focused or any smarter. If you for some reason need to improve your focus for a period then dexamphetamines are the way to go, of course you should not pop them every day.
My experience with modafinil was quite distinct. If I started a task I could stick with it for a long time. However it was indiscriminate as to the task importance.
It gave me a much narrower focus - when I was playing pinball at a local bar my scores dropped because I was narrowly focused on where the ball was, rather than where it would be, and I had to consciously force myself into using my peripheral vision.
Another example: I was practicing hand-writing a different (non-Latin) alphabet and had a practice book. Usually I could do one or two pages and then stop for the day, wanting to do something else. On modafinil I did about ten pages' worth.
You suggest that it does work, but that procrastination is still possible. fair enough. But if it doesn't keep you awake, it's possible that you're one of the ~15% of the population who is a non responder due to:
rs4680(G;G) carriers deprived of sleep respond quite well to 2x 100mg modafinil in terms of improved vigor and well-being, and maintained baseline performance with respect to executive functioning, whereas rs4680(A;A) individuals barely responded to the drug at all.
via https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19037200
Two-time 100 mg modafinil potently improved vigor and well-being, and maintained baseline performance with respect to executive functioning and vigilant attention throughout sleep deprivation in Val/Val genotype subjects but was hardly effective in subjects with the Met/Met genotype.
I should mention that I no longer think Rs4680 has anything to do with modafinil response. It was a candidate-gene study, so it was always in considerable doubt, and when I asked about Rs4680 in my modafinil survey (draft: http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil%20survey ), 216 people had their Rs4680 status available and it did not correlate with their self-evaluations of how effective modafinil was for them (slightly the opposite, actually). This is ~10x bigger than the original study which was also based on self-report and if anything, you would expect a survey to be biased towards finding an effect since people know about the earlier report...
I really want to get my DNA tested, because I'm almost certain that I have the AA variant. rs4680 is also known as the worrier/warrior gene; those with the AA variant tend to handle stress poorly, have high anxiety, and are neurotic. Seeing as how I fall apart with the slightest bit of stress in my life and score 100% on every neuroticism test I take, I would be very surprised if I didn't have this variant of the gene.
Also, my psychiatrist prescribed me Modafinil at 100 mg. I felt nothing and fell asleep shortly after taking it. He bumped it up to 200 mg -- still felt nothing. At 400 mg I just decided to quit taking it, because it literally had no effect whatsoever. Bit of a bummer, because I had high hopes for its effect on my ability to stay awake and focus. (Adderall, on the other hand, does produce a noticeable difference.)
If you take a consistent low dose of Adderall at least, there should be nothing wrong with taking it every day and might actually be preferable that way, otherwise you're in for a rollercoaster effect.
The longer you're on though, up to a point at least I imagine, assuming the dose is consistent, you will have a greater withdrawal period that will really suck compared to if you only use them recreationally, which I consider to include situations where you take them only when you need them, such as all nighters; that definitely falls under recreational usage.
Different drugs affect people differently. I was rendered incapable of driving safely with a moderate dose of Addreall (30mg), and still felt somewhat unsafe with a low dose of Adderall(15mg). The main effect was that I could no longer subconsciously distinguish moving objects from non-moving objects (I had to think "is that car parked or moving" rather than being able to just tell by looking). My weight is 105kg.
Well someone should tell my Psychiatrist that as it's the dose she started me at (actually 2x 30mg, once in the morning and once in the afternoon). The side effects were quite severe so I only took that dose once.
30mg in a single dose is fairly high. It's not so bad if you split that into two doses over the course of a day, but still kind of high for the average person.
That's pretty interesting, though like the other replies, I don't think I would call 30mg (in a single dose) moderate, but that's neither here nor there with your situation.
Like you said, drugs like this affect people differently and it all depends on the neurochemistry of the individual, which to the best of my knowledge they don't (can't?) test for when they prescribe this stuff.
I was taking 30mg / day (15mg twice a day) and was pretty functional, though I think the dose might have been too high. Later on I would drop down to 15mg / day (7.5mg twice / day) and that was the sweet spot.
If the 30mg was not MR ('modified release', essentially this will release half right away, then the other half over the next few hours; I'm not sure there is 'MR' Adderall in every country or even if it's officially called 'MR' at all), then 30mg is a very high dose, even for someone as heavy as yourself. 20mg MR or 10mg 'straight up' is 'moderate' and will be noticeable by most people.
I think there are some studies that show modafinil leads to a boost in IQ by a couple of points (although it sounds like that effect tapers off if you're already very intelligent).
What makes you say the effect on the brain of modafinil is "on a different scale" than caffeine?
A summary would be awesome - I appreciate the amount of work and details that went into this, but a list of what worked and didn't would be a great start - interested readers could then dive into details
The standard stuff is L-Theanine + Caffeine. For cognitive enhancement any of the "racetams" are considered proven, and you branch out into untested army drugs when you take modafinil.
I've tried each of these and stick with L-Theanine and Caffeine daily. Piracetam had no visible effect on me. Modafinil got me through 36 to 50 hour work days straight, at crunch time when deadlines were needed for an old job. Work was probably at about 60% of its best at the time – easy to get into the zone but also not quite my best. I know it's not healthy but I was also curious and happy to try it out of personal curiosity. YMMV :)
> you branch out into untested army drugs when you take modafinil.
What on earth are you talking about? Modafinil is very much _not_ an "untested army drug". It's pretty well-studied, approved for use by the FDA, and available for sale (with prescription) under multiple names in the US, and by prescription with no other legal restrictions in most other countries. It has a freaking WebMD page[1]!
I totally thought it was untested back when I did it, though that was 6 years ago. And one of the few things I read about it in terms of studies was its effects on army pilots during 12+ hour training sessions here: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA533725, hence why I thought it was an army drug.
In regards to modafinil, it is a schedule IV drug in the US. It's a bit difficult to get and quite expensive. I've done well with adrafinil, which is a prodrug of moda and relatively easy to get.
It's absurdly easy to get. There are even dedicated online sites like ModafinilCat that make the whole experience like buying on Amazon. It is a bit pricey since it's coming through customs from India typically, but still affordable if you just need some to take during crunch times.
Melatonin has worked wonders for me as well. However it's worth mentioning that the 3mg capsules I bought are WAAAY too strong and cause me to wake up with a dry mouth and a headache after a couple of hours of intense dreaming and nightmares. Instead now I split the caps open and take a tiny fraction of the melatonin every night. It takes me a few weeks to go through a single capsule.
Interesting, I take 3 or 6 mg per night about an hour before sleep, I've never experienced that but it does make my dreams more vivid and memorable and I wake up from the occasional nightmare as well.
Interesting how different doses affect different people differently.
Melatonin works great for me as well. I take 5mg. Not sure if my dreams are any more vivid than without it, as I've been taking it every night for years. I think I've always had vivid dreams, though I no longer get recurring nightmares (which I had years prior to taking melatonin; not sure when they ended).
I split the 3mg sublingual tabs into quarters. I often split them again and take part when I go to bed and the other part after reading and getting a bit drowsy. Seems to do some good (N=1 and all that).
I definitely think that if you're taking them under the tongue the doses they sell them in are much too high. Probably make more sense if you're swallowing them.
Melatonin definitely works for me too. I can take 3/4 mg and have an effect. 3mg and I feel groggy in the morning. Of course, melatonin has been well known for decades.
You should switch to valerian root if you can. It isn't habit forming in the way that melatonin is.
edit: since everybody is asking the same question about habit forming. I am just passing on the information that I got from my doctor. She made this suggestion to me, and it was beneficial to me. Once I had started using melatonin, I would have trouble falling asleep without it. Valarian root didn't cause that issue for me.
I've been on (legally, with a prescription) Modafinil (4 straight days of nausea), Armodafinil (made me really sleepy), Dextroamphetamine (3 times including right now), Adderall (constantly felt sick), Adderall XR (even worse than Adderall), Ritalin SR (about the same as Adderall), Bupropion twice (Wellbutrin, no noticeable effect). Pretty much everything other than Dextroamphetamine either made me feel sick or strangely for Nuvigil made me sleepy. All of them, except Wellbutrin, Provigil (which I didn't take long enough to notice it's primary effect) and Nuvigil could keep me awake. At least at first.
The first few times you take it or you go up a dose it feels pretty amazing. For some reason I want to say it feels like your head is full of light, but don't even know what that's supposed to mean. There's some extra energy and a little more motivation, but if you're looking for a pill that will turn you into a super-productive maniac look elsewhere. It mostly just keeps you awake and what little extra motivation you gain will be offset in part or in full by being more more easily distracted. I've never noticed any sort of increase in cognitive function. What I have noticed is that I get exhausted from physical effort very quickly.
When I take it long enough I start to pick off all of my facial hair (there was maybe a year where I never shaved, but had no facial hair), and lose a lot a weight quickly. Recently I dropped around 40 pounds in a few months.
Like you, I once was on a roller-coaster of cognition enhancing drugs. I did find that I was more productive, but only if I planned out what exactly I wanted to do beforehand and removed all distractions from my workspace. (Phone on airplane mode in another room, email/chat closed, websites blocked, etc.) However, the side effects made it rarely worth it.
However, I started going to see a new doctor. He recommended to Selegiline. I had some reservations, as it is officially classified as a MAOI, but he had some impressive credentials (PhD in neurobiology and MD, Postdoc in psychopharmacology and neuronal regeneration, APA President, wrote APA Textbook of Psychopharmacology) and seemed personally familiar with it.
It has been a revelation for me. It provides similar benefits without the tunnel-vision or distractibility. Most importantly, it doesn't have a noticeable narcotic/stimulant effect, nor does it have the dietary restrictions of MAOI. It does partly metabolize into Levoamphetamine and levomethamphetamine, but it's a minimal amount and you don't feel it. I'm still young, so I cannot attest to its supposed anti-aging/neuroprotective qualities.
I had some excellent results with selegiline / Deprenyl in my 20's, Cyprenil (liquid) seemed to be the best. I had mad cash back then and could afford to spend money on life extension and cognitive enhancers. It certainly helped me focus.
Interesting. I just moved and my new doctor just recently suggested maybe trying MAOI's. I've found a medication that has been absolutely wonderful for depression, but I have yet to find anything that helps with anxiety other than Klonopin and that's definitely not a long-term solution (I'm tapering off of it for the second time right now). I haven't been taking stimulants for ADHD though, I've been taking them for narcolepsy.
I'll definitely look into Selegiline now, thanks!
Edit: Oh wait:
> it doesn't have a noticeable narcotic/stimulant effect
I kind of need the stimulant effect because of the narcolepsy.
Modern SSRI's are not more effective at treating depression or anxiety than drugs from the 1960's including MAOI's. In fact, MAOIS raise the level of 3 neurotransmitters (norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine) while SSRI's usually only effect serotonin. I believe effexor inhibits one more neurotransmitter. They fell out of favor because they required such a strict diet and had severe interactions with many OTC medications.
I've never heavily researched the exact pharmacology, but the patch version of Selegeiiline is completely safe as long as you don't gorge yourself on aged, aromatic cheeses or a bucket of miso soup. The only thing I've had to restrict is ingesting amino acid supplements as it's high in tyrosine.
I'd still check it out as I have recently discovered that Selegiline is the Holy Grail of nootropics. Medications for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's tend to have neuroprotective properties and there is even decent evidence of neurogenesis.
> I kind of need the stimulant effect because of the narcolepsy.
The first few days I was on the medication, I did feel an adderall-like effect. My doctor told me that the 10mg patch does metabolize to about a 5-10 mg dose of adderall. Perhaps your doctor will prescribe a higher dosage to counter that effect.
BTW, you have to be one of the few people I've talked to that took Provigil for it's intended effect.
I've been through so many anti-depressants, but I've found something really works well. It's actually an anti-psychotic. Not an S[S|N]RI combined with an anti-psychotic, just the anti-psychotic alone does the job really well.
When I looked up Selegiline I recognized the brand name and patch delivery mechanism. It sounds good, but I don't really need the anti-depressant effect. I went on to look at Moclobemide which looks like exactly what I need. Unfortunately it's not available in the United States, but if the only thing standing in my way of not feeling panicky and anxious all the time and not having any libido is buying something on the internet I think I need to research what are some good online pharmacies.
I tried a lot of different combos of medications and was lucky to have a doctor that let me very clearly experiment with what worked.
My dose: Adderall XR 30mg + Adderal 10mg (around 2pm)
I tried Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin and Concerta (long acting Ritalin)
Ritalin had the best cognitive effects but the worst side effects. I slept, but I didn't really sleep. Over time, I developed terrible atrophy as well as a deep sense of apathy.
Adderall has been my rock. Straight Adderall is "bad" for me – the side effects are very strong. Any nervous tick I have is amplified very intensely. I play with my hair, I fidget, I bite my lips etc...
Adderall XR is very stable, but not very strong. So I take it, and sometimes I supplement with direct Adderall.
The most functional combo I ever had was accidental, it was Concerta + Adderall (not XR) but my doctor said it was bad/questionable to mix the two kinds of stimulant (ritalin/adderall) so I abandoned it.
It really is about finding the sweet spot between cognitive benefits and side effects. I still have some side effects, but my invariant is sleep. If a medication fucks with my sleep, I don't take it. Adderall, if anything, helps me sleep better, so it works quite well for me.
A solution to picking off facial hair, if that's really the problem, is to shave it all off. Same with hair on your head. If then, you are doing great, then problem solved.
Also, it doesn't hurt to get a barrage of tests done, maybe you have more stuff going on than just ADHD, and other medications may have a more significant effect on your wellbeing.
Thankfully, I don't have any urge to pick off the hair on my head. It's just facial hair. I do shave from time to time, but the shave isn't close enough. In fact newly shaved hairs are the most satisfying to pull out. I might have to go back and try razors again. I stopped using them because I could never get a good close shave and I figured if I can't get a good shave I might as well have the convenience of an electric shaver.
I actually don't have ADHD, I have narcolepsy, but it comes and goes (hence this being the 3rd time I've been on Dextroamphetamine).
I think the point was revealed in the first line. "A record of nootropics I have tried, ..."
I don't think it's supposed to be looked at as a one shot article or blog post, but rather a collection of notes / anecdotal evidence / experimentation.
There is a huge, huge placebo effect when it comes to cognitive enhancement, and while I understand that this is intended as a series of anecdotes, it still seems that the author doesn't fully understand this. Most notably, for his attempts at blinding himself, he doesn't seem to have measured any actualcognitiveimprovement, just whether or not he could successfully distinguish drug and placebo. This is a large misunderstanding of experimental design and the placebo effect; most of these drugs definitely do cause physiological effects that can be detected, and the great worry with respect to Adderall etc. effectiveness is that people confuse rapid heartrate and quickly focusing vision with increased mental ability, without actually improving much.
I think Gwern understands many of the limits of his experimental design. He's has written extensively on a wide variety of statistical and scientific topics.
Most of us take drugs like caffeine and alcohol pretty often.
The person who made this site has been willing to test, meticulously document and analyse his results. He's pretty informed as to the side-effects, so no, I don't think he's "bat shit crazy", he's doing us a service.
His testing and analysis are not exactly rigorous. Even with an N=1 he comments about how he can smell the difference between the placebo and treatment.
In his most highly rated drug, modafinil, he took it on 8 different days and could tell which one it was 5/8 times.
8 days, couldn't tell the difference 3/8 times and it is his most highly recommended drug.
He definitely needs to try drug free, exercise and sleep over a month.
Seriously, there is a lot of research into many of these supplements. It's not like Gwern is our only source of information. I have nothing against the information he is giving, but it's far from the only source.
If you compare his rigor to that of a fully funded NIH experiment, yes it will be found lacking. But if you compare it to all of the personal the experimentation that any of us do on a regular basis i.e. trying out a low protein diet, a paleolithic diet, TDD, sleeping more, not being on the computer before bed etc... Then it is the height of rigor.
You must hangout with different people than I do because the extent of my friend's personal experimentation is "I tried Yoga, I feel better. I think I'll keep going." None of them have ever done testing, cross-over trials, or any attempt at blinding their personal experimentation.
Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting. (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.) Never underestimate the motivation to find a quick fix.
> Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting.
I used to think the same way but decided one day that I was going to walk/jog ~10km every day and eat healthy. Now, I really enjoy walking. It gives me a chance to think about the problems I've been trying to solve during the day, what I'm going to do tomorrow, etc. And at some point I actually started enjoying the _feeling_ of doing exercise. It's hard to describe, and I know that myself from 12 months ago would believe me but I definitely wouldn't want to stop exercising.
So my recommendation is to spend your time while exercising thinking about whatever was bothering you during the day. It's quite relaxing, frankly. To be fair, my exercise routine doesn't include the gym but the same logic applies there.
> (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.)
While true if you're using the strict physics definition of work, its not true if you use the common meaning of the word.
I get utterly bored with new sports within 3-6 months. This has happened with every sport I have tried, no matter how much I loved it at the beginning.
Some people enjoy repetition. Some... really don't.
For me the challenge is to keep finding new interesting sports.
I've been boxing almost every day for almost 6 years now. The more into it I get, the more there is to discover and the tougher my sparring partners get. It really doesn't feel like repetition at all.
So maybe you just haven't found a sport you liked yet. Or haven't given them enough time to reach a level of mastery where it doesn't feel so repetitive anymore.
On the other hand, sitting in a chair all day could be construed as physically insulting. Two counters:
1) There's no reason exercise by nature has to be boring or free of intellect. Physics greatly applies to freestyle snowboarding, for instance, and the adrenaline is top-shelf. Not to mention the scenery and vitamin D! Gymnastic and weightlifting activities in general encourage a practical understanding of leverage, torque, moment arms, etc.
2) Even without choosing exciting sports and applying your scientific knowledge to them, why not walk on a treadmill while you work, or sit on a recumbent bike as you watch that 3rd convolutional neural net video? It's an easy way to up your circulation while taking in knowledge and alleviates boredom.
As far as I can tell, typical snowboarding gear consists of a thick jacket, long trousers (or somesuch), with goggles and a snow hat. To produce Vitamin D the light has to actually come in contact with the skin.
there are much cooler activities than that, and ones you can actually do all year around, not just few weeks if weather/snowfall permits (realistically it shrinks to couple of weekends/a week for most people).
- sport climbing - you wouldn't believe how cool and stimulating the sport is, switch indoor/boulder when weather is bad. cool people in community too
- mix of backcountry skiing in winter and hiking anytime else will give you huge amounts of nature that is very relaxing on the mind (easy rule - the more mind works daily, the more body workout it needs to relax, and vice versa)
Another super fun, pretty intellectual form of sports/exercise is climbing. It always seeming like the physics and engineering types gravitate towards it, and I can attest it's another excellent way to get some exercise and to have some fun working on "problems".
As tech workers, I think I would even beyond sitting in a chair all day being physically insulting, to say that it's perhaps one of the greatest (and really a non-trivial one) occupational hazards we face.
While I agree that exercise can become repetitive and boring, it is far from an intellectually sterile endeavor.
You are literally hacking your own body. Also, since no two people have the same genetic code, determining a fitness regiment is a highly experimental process optimized for you. Since this is a highly quantifiable process, you can make the development as data-driven as you choose as there are all types of variables to measure. There was a popular HackerNews post about applying Machine Learning to a ketogenic diet. See https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss
this statement is both technically wrong, and stupid because of your inane try-hard elitism. with google you can calculate down to several sig figs how many joules of work was done by picking up a weight, and putting it down.
I agree that the statement is elitist, but since gravity is a conservative force I think that the strict definition of "work" from physics (W = \int_a^b{\vec{F} \dot d\vec{s}}) would mean you get as 0 a result.
The position doesn't matter, as gravity doesn't act along the surface of the Earth -- it only acts radially. So the work is only affected by the height above the ground (or radial distance from centre of the Earth if you prefer).
So if the person puts the weight on the floor where they picked it up from they will have done zero work on it. Your attempt at pedantry was misdirected -- I would've said that because of the change in density of the Earth's crust that technically the force of gravity does change and thus is not an entirely conservative force.
Also, I wasn't getting pedantic. I was quoting the definition of work, which I believe that GGP misunderstood.
The overall work done by a system is the integral of the force vector dot product the direction of movement. If you have a conservative force setup (no friction) then any motion that takes you back to where you started does no work. We did this in first year physics at university (we also did it in high school, but other school systems probably don't work the same way).
You're confusing work and energy. Energy is expended, but work is not. Work relates to the change in potential energy of a system -- which will not change in a conservative system (assuming you return to the original point). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)
however, you will never, ever, achieve a zero work vector in a weight room, whether you're off by a micron or a mile. give it a shot, tell me how it goes.
you're arguing for an impossible result using textbook definitions, pretty much what i would call 'useless pedantry'.
that's just sad approach to life... well your body will come back with receipt for this behavior later, it always does. what you will do then, take more pills?
and exercise can be anything physical that makes you sweat, why the need to take only weightlifting into account?
My guess is that you are very unimaginative with your exercise. I find the gym boring as anything, but I do some fairly extreme whitewater kayaking when I get the chance to and mountain biking with a fair bit of hard downhill. I cycle to work and around the city (as its the fastest way to get around - it doesn't even seem like exercise when you incorporate it into your routine like that).
Boring is definitely not the way I would describe the way I exercise.
>Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting.
The supreme irony of this thread is that the exact mindset you're describing here would probably be alleviated by the stimulants being debated as an alternative(?) to exercise.
I suspect this plays no small part in the historical use of just about every stimulant under the sun including cocaine, amphetamine and modafinil by athletes looking to get ahead. Said athletes were probably still literal leaps and bounds healthier than the average member of the population.
Of course, no drug is an alternative to exercise and good sleep, and nothing about those two things would preclude you from taking any drug I can think of. It's a false dichotomy that breeds silly arguments.
That said, the use of such things is probably not strictly healthy. However, rather than worrying about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster[0] I would consider how much one is really benefiting from use. The stimulant drug classes are infamous for their ability to persuade people that they're receiving much greater enhancements in ability than is really the case.
"Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme well being, and a soaring overconfidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip the heavyweight champion, and that you are smarter than anybody. There was also that feeling of timelessness. And there were intervals of ability to recall and review things that had happened years back with an astonishing clarity." - The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, pages 137-138
"Like their British counterparts, the American scientists evaluating amphetamine for the military consistently found that, by all but a few measures, amphetamine did not objectively improve or restore performance lost to physical exhaustion, lack of sleep, or low oxygen any better than caffeine. Users certainly felt that the drug boosted their performance, but subjective impressions seldom reflected objective performance. Even where measurable gains were occasionally produced these were largely or entirely due to increased optimism and persistence in the contrived test conditions." - On Speed: The Many Lives Of Amphetamines, Nicolas Rasmussen, pages 81-82.
You are after all paying quite a cost on multiple levels for whatever gains are alleged, so you had best be sure they're real.
[0]: It's important to keep in mind the order of magnitude(s) difference between therapeutic doses and the mega-doses used by tweakers. In the latter case you should definitely be worried about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster.
" Most of us take drugs like caffeine and alcohol pretty often."
Not to mention foods that people take to make themselves "feel better" (ie. modify mood), like chocolate or ice cream (or chocolate ice cream! mmmmmm).
I take alcohol and caffeine (and sugar!) but consider doing it batshit crazy, as most people do: there are very few articles explaining how these substances could be good for you. They are not. The fewest drugs the better, let's not try adding more.
Strange. I know now no one who thinks drinking coffee is batshit crazy. We must hang out/work with very different people...
Last I checked, caffeine in moderate doses has a mixed bag of positive and negative effects that's not clearly net negative.
There's controversy around whether moderate alcohol consumption (think 1 drink/day) has a positive effect. (Some studies say it does, but it's argued it's a statistical anomaly because people who don't drink at all are weird, e.g. former alcoholics, people with medical conditions that forbids them any alcohol, etc.)
I don't see why you couldn't eat healthy, exercise, and take melatonin (for example). He brought up an excellent point in his essay about melatonin that although being purely "natural" may be beneficial, we don't live in a natural world. We expose ourselves to blueish light far more than our ancestors.. so why wouldn't it make sense to counteract that artificial influence with something like melatonin? There's nothing to indicate it isn't safe, and it seems to have a measurable impact. I would feel crazy dismissing it purely because it's not "natural".
I've found melatonin best used not on a regular basis, but on nights you know it will take extra time to get to sleep, or when you have to wake early. Its more about keeping your sleep schedule in check.
"Conservatively, a bottle of melatonin pills will cost about 6 USD for 150 pills". This is the part I find interesting. I live in NZ, and melatonin isn't readily available - unlike most drugs here it's not government subsidized. It costs $20 for 10 pills, and you have to visit a doctor.
Exercise could be seen as a nootropic IMO. The ARAS system* activates which bombards your hippocampus with dopamine which improves memory for like 30 minutes. Utilize that memory at that moment and you will learn the topic at hand better.
Then ctr+f melatonin and shortly lower there is some good information about how melatonin is not that great. Highly recommend the general article - incredible amount of information.
Why? There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with using external catalysts to alter your brain function. We are biological computers and we can alter our programming for better or worse.
We may be biological computers, but that position still advises against nootropics. Or would you install some random patch on your computer just because someone else said that it worked on their computer with probably vastly different software?
> I may be of the minority here but I am definitely not the minority in the real world.
I disagree. I think huge numbers of people take nootropics frequently if not daily (caffeine and prescribed mood-altering drugs) and I'd bet that you'd consider these completely normal and non-crazy. But that belief is based in normativity, not logic. All of these substances have negative side effects, and the industry around prescription drugs is very much at odds with the actual research around prescription drugs. In fact, the only substances on the list which I think probably don't have negative side effects are ones that most people probably don't take (Fish Oil and Vitamin D3).
> If you care about health why not exercise and eat healthy and never take any type of drug for any reason unless you are sick.
What's a drug? What's sick?
Arguably, refined sugar is a drug, or the dopamine that you get from surfing news sources like HN. And things like caffeine, which are entirely normative, aren't even arguable: they're just obviously drugs.
Arguably, being inflicted with a need to work 40 hours a week on tasks that don't fulfill our emotional or social needs is a horrible chronic illness. It certainly has affected my life more negatively than my chronic allergies (which I live with, untreated).
Choosing to take a nootropic should be about the tradeoffs, and health definitely is not the only factor.
But it is the biggest factor; without your health, you have nothing. When I'm weighing alternatives and tradeoffs, I tend to think in a sort of "three laws" mode:
1) If it's good for my long-term health, do it.
2) If it increases my athletic performance and doesn't conflict with 1), do it.
3) If it makes me look or feel better and doesn't conflict with 1) or 2), do it.
> But it is the biggest factor; without your health, you have nothing.
That's simply not true. That may be your priority, but it's not everyone's, and the assertion that "you have nothing" is ridiculous.
If I could live to the age of 50, make a major positive change in the world in that time, and then die, I'd make that trade. Of course, you don't get a guarantee that solid, everything is probabilistic. But there are definitely cases where you can trade health for some other value, and many of us are willing to make that trade.
> 1) If it's good for my long-term health, do it.
> 2) If it increases my athletic performance and doesn't conflict with 1), do it.
> 3) If it makes me look or feel better and doesn't conflict with 1) or 2), do it.
This is laughably simplistic. For example, according to this, money never comes into your considerations. Cool story, bro.
If you believe drugs can improve sick people, why is it so implausible that drugs could improve healthy people?
Plenty of people take e.g. extra calcium (or even just make sure they eat/drink plenty of high-calcium food/drink) to help their bones remain strong. Is taking extra chlorine (or again just eating high-chlorine foods) to help your brain remain clever really so different?
> Trying to improve on nature is the foundation of science.
This is an interesting statement. I would say, trying to improve on nature is one particular notion that was instrumental in the history of science. Specifically, we can trace this back to alchemical beliefs in the notion of perfecting the human soul/body/etc. via aqua regia and so on, which were about achieving an "art" which would exceed the limits of what we are given by Nature.
Much of what is "science", however, does not come from this school of thought. The quiet life of a naturalist, delighting in the observation of an ant colony or the nesting habits of a bird species, seems to have little to do with trying to improve on nature and is much more of a piece with simply enjoying being close to it.
I'd say, s/science/engineering/, or even s/science/technology/. A big motivator for the progress we've made as a species is that the natural state of life generally sucks, and we'd like to have it better than it is by default.
Gwern gives disclaimers, and indeed I agree with them that there is no reason to think that any of these tests should have any external validity. So, this is a series of anecdotes like Erowid - interesting to some, perhaps, but hopefully recognized as not being medical advice (since it would run far afoul of medical norms to recommend these drugs).
That combined with exercise, sleep and eating well is pretty much my "stack."
Personally I would rather not risk the possibility of destroying my brain with something unproven. However, for things with proven benefits and little chance of side-effects, well, why not?
So, while I would prefer to avoid self-experimentation personally, I am glad others are working to establish what works, what is safe, etc.
You should check out the research cited on Vitamin D in the first link: "vitamin D supplementation decreases all-cause mortality in adults and older people"
While it certainly is possible to "get vitamin D" by going outside, that doesn't mean it's enough.
The leading theory as to the advantage of having white skin is that it assists in providing more vitamin D in latitudes without as much direct sunlight. This means the amount you get by "going outside once in a while" is not sufficient (otherwise we wouldn't need the advantage of getting as much as possible)
Likewise, drinking coffee removes calcium and vitamin d from your body, so it is wise to replace them, especially if you drink a lot of coffee.
Also, while I might not "need" to supplement them because I am getting "enough" that doesn't mean I won't benefit by taking more. Indeed, we're talking about Nootropics here, not just staying alive.
what "normal" food contains caffeine? brewed coffee is a drug preparation. the trace quantities of it you find in things like chocolate are largely below the level of being noticeable or effectual. chocolate itself is essentially a drug preparation also. you aren't eating chocolate purely for nourishment. you eat it because it makes you feel good.
so I ask again, what is "normal" food? where do you get your ideas of normal from?
Have you ever met really anxious people? Some of the items listed here, such as L-Theanine (tea extract) are weak relaxants that help with reducing anxiety and related issues. Thus help anxious people to get work done. There are a lot of plant based nootropics that help with overall brain function and mood and focus. While they are still considered drugs, together with exercise and good night sleep, nootropics help you with getting that focus and calm mind.
I put "nootropics" in the same mental category as fetishistic adherence to taking heaps of dietary suppliments (with no QA), or homeopathy (woo), or tDCS (neuro-woo).
I agree 100%. That's exactly what I do and it's been working out great for me.
Eat a healthy balanced diet, get intense physical exercise for at least 30 minutes every day, and sleep an adequate amount. It's really not too difficult. It does require discipline, but discipline is only difficult if you make it difficult.
I've never really understood the whole concept of brain enhancement drugs. What are they really doing for you? Is it at all possible they are effective only due to the placebo effect? What are the long term risks of using so many different substances?
Different people have different risk:reward ratios.
You've seen what gwern has written. He makes clear the monetary trade off. He also explains how some of the drugs are well studied, and most probably safe.
These people aren't crazy. You just don't understand...
Quick, let's ban everything except alcohol & cigerettes! They only kill a combined ~7.5 million people per year. Nice and sane.
How is this compilation of anecdotal evidence even a thing on HN?
I performed well on the Cambridge mental rotations test. An anecdote, of course, and it may be due to the vitamin D I simultaneously started. Or another day, I was slumped under apathy after a promising start to the day; a dose of fish & coconut oil, and 1 last vitamin D, and I was back to feeling chipper and optimist.
I see a lot of dense experimental designs on this page - is any of this abstracted into a simple tool/methodology for use for self-testing (I've noticed some big differences when taking Vitamin D (I'm usually deficient), B-Complexes, etc but don't have a great way to isolate/correlate especially against other factors like sleep or travel...
I sleep like a babe most of the time (in my late 40's). I attribute this to three main factors:
- little/no caffeine everyday (I do love chocolate, but I don't eat it everyday)
- exercise, both strength and conditioning (not just HIIT, but also LSD)
- and importantly, ability to mentally box up and put aside highly stressful or critical issues (I mull over them and rigorously tear them apart, then decide on the first step - how to eat an elephant? one small bite at a time. If my subconscious then processes it further, all the better the next morning after a good night's sleep).
I used a stack this summer, noopept, l-theanine, aceytl-l-carnitine (alcar), caffeine, taurine, huperzine-a, l-tyrosine, modafinil, DHEA. I did a year's worth of work in a month and a half. . . My employer benefited, became proficient in PowerShell in two weeks with little coding experience, worked 16 hour days (it was that busy), but lost out on life, although they offered me a development position after the project. Dropped out of road biking as I wasn't eating enough to do group rides, dropped 15 pounds in a month and a half (which isn't a terrible outcome).
At the end of the day, my employer could care less about the hours and outcomes of the project, it was a total waste of time. Stay normal, have good relationships in life, routine, exercise, diet. It didn't result in any net happiness gains, analytical mind took over and I became good at doing things for other people, but not living.
Pretty impressive work. I personally use nicotine gum (as does President Obama, a health nut) as I'm allergic to caffeine. I have used melatonin in the past, though given this I will use it more now.
The key I find is to only use them when you have already outlined in a detailed way a significant set of tasks that need to be performed or a particularly critical meeting where you already have a very strong background.
For learning, general creative process I don't use them.
The biggest problem is managing the physical addiction (ie, you feel very tired) when you're not taking them.
Also there is some evidence that nicotine increases incidence of cancer. Not to mention what it does to my blood pressure, though I find constant exercise helps manage that.
I don't know if I'd call President Obama a health nut; maybe Michelle, but not sure about Barack, unless he quit smoking and switched permanently to the gum.
Do you have a source for the first assertion? I can't find any studies on google.
I'm skeptical because people so often attribute many of the negative effects of other chemicals in tobacco to nicotine with no evidence (a point the OP hammers home at https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine). Even the FDA seems comfortable with this conflation, as evidenced by their disposition toward e-cigs.
It would be pretty hard to separate the effects of nicotine from the effects of a lifetime of smoking + potentially poor dental hygiene (gum disease is rampant https://www.perio.org/consumer/cdc-study.htm) + aging.
Per wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine) the general medical consensus is that nicotine poses few risks on its own for nonpregnant adults, besides vasoconstriction and dependence.
Perhaps, and I wouldn't know from first hand experience trying it myself, but I imagine it is almost guaranteed to be safer than smoking. For reference on that matter, my mother passed away a while back from lung cancer induced by smoking (small cell lung cancer).
I maintain that much of this still comes down to the individual.
I don't about anyone else's experiences, but Modafinil seems to have a positive effect on me in terms of the way I work. I use it maybe once a week if I feel I need to focus.
Placebo? Who knows. Same effect as living a healthy lifestyle? Probably not, but then again I've never tested it. Does it have the same effect on everyone I know? Some say yes, others say it does nothing for them. But that's not strange at all. Some people just have different experiences with different things.
Of which there are surprisingly few. Big pharma has trouble marketing those, typical attempts include Alzheimer, stroke management, ADD and narcolepsy, which are pretty hard to run a trial for. These are good enough to establish safety at least.
There are even fewer in people without disorders.
Funny timing of this article. Just 3 days ago I was sitting at my desk and had this awesome calm come over me, something I've only ever experienced at the end of a long day when a hangover finally breaks. I looked at the ingredients in the two "Just Chill" drinks on my desk and noticed each had 150Mg of "Suntheanine" which was one of the listed nootropics in this article.
Suntheanine is a brand of synthetic L-theanine. It is considered the highest grade L-theanine you can get, but not sufficiently better enough than the others to pay extra for it.
300mg of L-theanine is equivalent to about 12 to 38 cups of tea (tea naturally has a wide range of L-theanine content, depending on the tea and how it is processed). Up to 1,200mg daily is considered safe, however, like with all drugs, you should only take as much as needed to get the effect you want.
I've experimented with nootropics about 10 years ago. I was on a regimen of Piracetam, Hydergine and several others, the names of which I don't remember now, plus the usual vitamins, fish oil, etc.
I did the nootropics for about 2 months or so.
Short term I've felt improvement to my memory, my thinking has changed, I had more mental energy and sharpness.
However, it also changed my personality and the way I was seeing other people, which resulted in me gathering the courage to separate from my wife.
In retrospect, this was a very good move for both of us, but at that time it wasn't that peachy.
I've stopped taking those nootropics because I didn't like the robot that I've become.
However I still like the idea of chemically tuning your consciousness.
10-15 micrograms of LSD is the solution for me, because it opens me up emotionally, increases enjoyment of music and art, while also allowing me to tackle complexity with ease.
personal experience with add meds and the like: there is no such thing as a free lunch. could be different for other people, but i would always pay the piper in the end.
A shame no info on testosterone - that's the one I'm most interested in both from physical and psychological perspective, I know a few people who used it but they are in physical/service jobs, I wonder how it would affect programming productivity.
Any throwaways here willing to share their experiences ?
I've also been self-prescribing testosterone for years, dosage ranging from 200mg/week to 3,000mg/week. I find the sweet spot to be around 200mg-500mg/week. Anything higher makes me lethargic, at 3000mg/week I would sleep 15 hours and get almost nothing done, of course at 3000mg the physical results were dramatic. I could sit on my ass and eat a gallon of ice cream all day and still lose body fat. In my experience negative effects are most prominent when there is fluctuations of hormone levels, such as when changing the dosage dramatically. Of course it isn't a magic drug, the effects are slow and gradual. How it will affect programming productivity, I would say is subjective, but it will give you an overall better sense of well being.
I have been self prescribing testosterone for 2 years. My levels were 250 ng/dl, at 20 years old. No Dr. would prescribe due to my age, but I felt, and looked like crap.
Testosterone has been life changing. The amount of focus and drive I get running high normal levels is insane. The only time problems crop up that cause issues at work, is when estrogen gets out of line. Estrogen that is out of range, high or low, causes severe issues. I only have issues when running supra-physiological doses of testosterone though.
For more info, check out /r/steroids[0]. Fantastic wiki with tons of info on running safe cycles, or long term usage.
...if caffeine were a new drug, I wonder what
Schedule it would be in and if people might
be even more leery of it than modafinil.
...
So I eventually got around to ordering another
thing of nicotine gum...
A second dose was similar, and the third dose
was at 10 PM before playing Ninja Gaiden II
seemed to stop the usual exhaustion I feel after
playing through a level or so.
Okay, I'm no longer part of the gwern fanclub. I could pick apart other aspects of this article, but I'll refrain, since it's not without a modicum of practical utility.
Yes, he writes very lengthy, detailed articles. Lovely. But they are anecdotes. And artisanal anecdotes at best.
To summarize gwern: A layman tries some stuff that is innately accessible to any layman, and writes haughtily aloof essays.
I've been on modafinil for a number of years now (prescribed by a doctor in relation to a real medical condition). It is indeed a very interesting drug. There's a reason it's the brand names are Provigil and Nivigil. "Vigilant" is indeed a very good way to describe how it makes you feel. Like caffeine but cleaner (no jitters, etc.).
The downside is that you build up tolerance pretty quickly and that feeling dissipates. At this point, I really only notice if I don't take it (as you might with your daily cup of coffee). I honestly don't know if I continue to get on-going benefit, but I'm don't have any side effects, it may have some neuroprotective effects and getting off would be hard.
I took Modafinil for a year after reading Gwern, 100mg twice a week on average. It relieves a lot of anxiety for me and also acted as a great appetite suppresant, but I also worry it has caused me some cognitive decline. I feel like a bit of a zombie sometimes, kind of dead emotionally, not talking as much, feeling generally dumber. Can't say for sure as I've had a lot of stress in the last few months too, but people should be very careful with these things.
In my experiments with noots my technical cognition didn't shoot up like i was hoping.... But my emotional intelligence did. In many cases for me, similar to yours, I realized the smartest thing in many situations for me was simply to keep quiet! It gave me a neutral place where I could validate peoples' emotions or listen without saying dumb things.
No mention of methylene blue? :O It's the best one!
Below is a post I wrote on a Ray Peat Facebook group that I think fellow coders and behind-a-desk workers might fight interesting. I've been a serious procrastinator and slacker, and it was a long journey of trial and error in getting diet and lifestyle right. I'm thankful to the amazing work of Dr. Ray Peat, which isn't mentioned enough around Hacker News.
⁂
Some comments on maintaining high energy, productivity, creativity and noticeably faster rational thinking (System 2 in the dual process theory) in my day job as a programmer.
◈ Basics first. That is, salt, sugar, calcium, magnesium, A, D, C. If you're lacking any of these you'll have energy problems very quickly. Buy magnesium chloride, add eggshell powder to your mashed potatoes. Get 1g vitamin C pills. Take 5 times as much vitamin A as you take D.
◈ Meditation daily. The main goal of daily meditation for me is to reinforce a stoic mentality, mainly the principle of being indifferent to the external. This is paramount in learning to deal with all kinds of stress. A simple line of thinking that will slowly help you deal with psychological stress better.
◈ Coconut oil-fried eggs. The generally accepted notion around here is that an extremely low fat diet is best for metabolism, i.e., oxidative metabolism is about 15x times more efficient (paraphrasing RP). But saturated fats are extremely good for our brains, because they are used together with cholesterol to generate several hormones (including the wonderful progesterone and pregnenolone). So whatever your brain condition is, if you fry 5 eggs in about 3 tbsp coconut oil, you'll equip your body with the elements it needs to restore its full capacity.
◈ Fruits, Lysine, Juices, Niacinamide, Methylene Blue, Coffee. I mention all of these in a single sentence because I use them in sequence, hourly, to keep a long streak of productive hours. I drink some fruit juice (orange, grape, even serotonin-ladden pineapple) with 10gtt 2.3% methylene blue, then eat some fruits (I keep sliced guavas and papayas in the frigde) with 100mg niacinamide and 500mg lysine (serotonin antagonist), followed by 100ml sugared coffee. Rinse. Repeat. I think in total I have been consuming nearly 60gtt 2.3% methylene blue and 1.5L coffee in a stretch of programming work, all with maximum focus, energy, no tiredness (taking very short breaks).
Main benefit of MB is its effect as a NO and estrogen antagonist, which improves thyroid function and overall energy levels. Stay away from fish oil, polyunsaturated fats are extremely toxic yet you don't see it in the news -- that's because they're everywhere, it's a huge industry and it's not going to go away easily. But PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) are the #1 source of all kinds of metabolic disorders, including brain fog. Also avoid things that raise serotonin -- serotonin, contrary to decades of misinformation, does not make us happy -- its role in happines is only peripheral. High serotonin in reality is associated with aging, depression and anger. You should aim for high dopamine and low serotonin, in general -- that's why I take a lysine supplement, it competes with serotonin for entry in the brain.
So methylene blue actually does something? I was researching a lot of this stuff for my 60year old father. He recently experienced a psychotic episode. But now it turns out he actually has neurological damage (already sclerotic), most likely beginning of dementia. The doctor prescribed donepezil (aricept) and I give him some supplements: coconut oil, turmeric, alcar, b-vitamins, lecithin, omega 3. Now I'm trying to get my hands on Montelukast (asthma drug, needs prescription) and MB.
You sound like a follower of Ray Peat. He recommends MB, holds that position on fish oil, recommends K2 as a quinone, recommends aspirin, and recommends nicotinamide* (for the NAD+)
From what I can tell—and having experience with MB & his diet)—he's full of shit.
* You should look into that. Nicotinamide inhibits the sirtuins. You'd probably be better off with nicotinic acid or nicotinamide riboside (NR).
It's VERY easy to make up your mind following a comment like "he's full of shit", but for anyone reading, I suggest you look at at these two articles by pranarupa:
I was convinced by the advocates for Omega 3's. Then my dogs destroyed my cofffee grinder (used to make flax seed meal), I realized that I'd never noticed a benefit, and stopped.
The modern diet is overloaded with Soybean Oil, an oil which should only be used as biodiesel. It takes years of a low-PUFA diet to obtain all the benefits. Some degree of temporary relief may be provided by Omega-3 supplementation, but this intervention doesn't address the cause of any condition.
He's full of shit doesn't exactly convince me, when I look at his amazing coherence, all the wonderful books he's written, hundreds of articles, newsletters, and his general seriousness and disinterest in popularity. One or other thing he's recommended (always backing himself with references and studies) may not have worked for you, but dismissing him like that to me only shows short-sightedness. Would love to hear you elaborate on it. https://vimeo.com/135920003
"In the last couple of years there has been a lot of "noise" in the media about how the SIRT-family of genes can extend lifespan when activated by things like exercise or, preferably, by certain chemical compounds like resveratrol (which putatively acts on SIRT-1). Ray Peat has stated his opinion that activating those genes is not likely to lead to life extension and may even be implicated in some cancers. In one is his articles he talks about how niacinamice/nicotinamide (vitamin B3) acts in a way approximately opposite to resveratrol. Also, there are independent studies that found niacinamide silences SIRT-1 and SIRT-2 in high doses. An interesting study came out recently that seems to corroborate Ray's views. It looks like it's niacinamide that actually extends life while resveratrol so far has been a bust (several clinical trials halted due to resveratrol increasing mortality in patients)."
I heard that sirtuins are beneficial for a healthy organism, and could be detrimental to someone with cancer. The same goes for something like glutathione (since they make cells more robust, and you don't want robust cancers cells!).
I've read anti-agingfirewalls.com with great interest. Here's one of the articles:
"PART 3: Slaying Two Dragons with the Sound of Silence: – How to Keep Your Repetitive DNA Turned Off with “3 Songs”: Sirtuins, Polycomb Proteins, and DNMT3. And a Master List of Drugs and Natural Compounds for Cancer Chemoprevention"[0]
Anti-ageingfirewalls.com is a tour de force. And it's at least worth reading the earlier articles (some of the recent articles on NAD require significant knowledge).
As far as I can tell, Peat contradicts the consensus. I've tried his methods, and had terrible results. He also goes against the information I'm exposed to. He may be correct, but I assign a tiny probability to that. I wouldn't recommend anyone start with Ray Peat.
Honestly, I agree with the Slashdot comparison, except earlier in it's lifetime. However, that means HN is going to fall apart in about 2 years and turn into a toxic shithole.
I remember there was a blog post where they polled hundreds of people about nootropics they tried and then it had a list of the ones which had the highest self-reported subjective impact. I've been trying to find it but can't, anyone got a link?
There's an older one than that, whose name escapes me for the moment, but it features a man eating a sandwich that makes him smarter.
There's also the classic "Flowers for Algernon" from 1958.[1] I'd strongly recommend reading the short story (and avoid the book, unless you want to witness the ruining of a great story that was best left alone).
My takeaway from this article: Ingesting 38 different purported nootropics may cause you to write super long rambling blog posts and inadvisably apply statistics to poorly designed experiments.
Can you just get the nutrition supplements from the drug store or are those all no good? I want to supplement magnesium since I am sure I am not getting enough.
Yes most of these can be found in basic drug stores or health food stores, especially magnesium supplements or natural supplements such as ashwagandha. However, you won't find any finils or racetams except online.
The best nootropic is getting a good nights sleep.
It takes effort! Preparing for bed early and disciplining yourself to put the light out is not easy. Not nearly as easy as popping a pill. But it's so much more effective than any drug listed here.
And for a safe and provable quick cognitive boost, take some caffeine, preferable green tea with theanine.
It's hard for me to fall asleep. I haven't cracked it yet how to do it perfectly. What helps: view the problem as improving your likelihood to sleep. Before I viewed the problem as falling asleep 100% of the time, which is a really defeating view to have when I can't fall asleep.
Sleep tips that help me:
1. meditation: still experimenting with body-scan vs. breath meditation, they both help but have different effects.
2. magnesium: makes my body more relaxed.
3. sleeping less if needed: improves likelihood of falling asleep the next day, it's a tricky thing to do but applied sparingly and timed right it works really well. When I do this I prefer to sleep the 6 to 7 hour range.
4. reduce stress: sometimes hard to do but pretty essential for me.
5. flux.
6. opening your window for sunlight during the day: get vitamin D first thing in the morning.
7. buy quality decaffeinated tea: some green tea manufacturers say it's decaffeinated but it's not really. Or maybe it is but it still keeps me energized and awake.
8. no caffeine after 2: preferably not after 12, preferably not at all, use meditation and power naps as a first line of defence, only add caffeine when those 2 aren't enough. Preferably do the power nap + caffeine wombo combo (takes 20 min. for caffeine to reach your brain which is also the ideal power nap time).
I'm curious about other sleep tips that you guys have. I really want to improve this as much as possible.
Running works wonders for me: helps mood, sleep and energy right away.
I run 3-5 miles almost every day and the following morning I wake up refreshed and in a good mood. The effect wears out after a day or two so you have to do it often.
Distance is not that important - what matters is time and intensity: run at least 20m with 10 of them near your upper limit. Make sure you pick a sustainable pace that makes it hard but not impossible to breath.
Don't compare to others - your body needs to be challenged relative to itself. Run comfortably for 10 minutes then a little more than slightly uncomfortably for another 10.
You will feel better as soon as you stop. You will feel calmer, focused, confident and strong for hours after. You will feel better next day. When I had a bad funk it helped me get out of it.
I tried a lot of other forms of exercise from weights and swimming and HIIT and martial arts and yoga. They all help (in other ways) but not as well as running. If you can, complement it with weights 1-2 a week, and yoga 1-2 times as well.
^ this. Absolutely don't disagree with any of it. Big runner here.
I'll just add that many people are mentally exhausted, and frustrated they cannot sleep. But I bet they are not physically exhausted. HIIT, distance running, whatever works, etc. are all great ways to tire out your body.
Yes, cardio and anaerobic (weight lifting, etc) works wonders... but don't do it at the end of the day (10PM or even later) because you'll also have problems sleeping. Post-work out insomnia is a very common problem.
(IMO the best time for exercising is during the morning and afternoon)
"It's hard for me to fall asleep. I haven't cracked it yet how to do it perfectly. What helps: view the problem as improving your likelihood to sleep. Before I viewed the problem as falling asleep 100% of the time, which is a really defeating view to have when I can't fall asleep."
I did not respond to your sibling comment who speaks of anxiety. It sounds like a real pathology and something I have no business generalizing about.
You, however, mention no such thing so I am emboldened to encourage you to exercise - something not mentioned in your list.
I would experiment with both walking for 2-3 hours (on a day off, presumably) and also a 1.5 to 2 hour intense weightlifting workout (primarily focused on your thighs/legs[1][2], since they are the biggest muscles.
I'm not saying to do these things on the same day, just that they are both good candidates for an exercise activity which could influence your ability to go to sleep.
I like your list - especially getting out in the sun early and setting your circadian rhythms, but your list strikes me as it would somebody putting special air filters in their car when they've never taken it in for an oil change. Only reach for the specialized optimizations when you've exhausted the major factors.
[1] which implies squats and deadlifts, although a real leg press (the kind you load with plates, not select weight from the stack) would also do the trick.
> and also a 1.5 to 2 hour intense weightlifting workout (primarily focused on your thighs/legs[1][2], since they are the biggest muscles.
being nitpicky here but we shouldn't be promoting "time in the gym" as a measurement of a workout's success. frankly, if you're doing an "intense" workout for "2 hours" something's wrong.
"being nitpicky here but we shouldn't be promoting "time in the gym" as a measurement of a workout's success. frankly, if you're doing an "intense" workout for "2 hours" something's wrong."
Some background, and you can adjust to fit your personal situation ...
I am 39 years old and in order to do (relatively) heavy squats and deadlifts I require about 45 minutes of prehab, stretching, warmups and accessory exercises.
I also have 3 kids so I can't do two weight workouts per week.
Therefore, I "lift weights" for two hours each week, the first 45 minutes of which is a fairly intense and comprehensive lead-up to two (yes, just two) sets of squats, followed by the rest of my leg/back exercises, then 15 minutes of upper body prehab/stretching/warmup and 30 mins of actual lifting.
So yeah - 25 and no kids ? By all means, enjoy your hour long workout :)
"Intense" here means lifting weights close to the maximum you can lift for certain number of repetitions. This kind of workout can easily take 1.5 to 2 hours, and IMHO qualifies as intense.
If you are actually following set, repetition and rest period guidelines it should probably take quite a bit less, depending on how many exercises you can fit in. Since I never seem to be able to hit the 30 second rest period between sets, and I can't always get to the machine I want immediately after my last exercise because it's in use, I always seemed to average 10-15 minutes an exercise. I haven't been to the gym in months though. :/
3-5 minute rest periods are not unusual at heavy weights, although I personally try to keep it to two minutes to save time. With warm-up sets and some waiting for equipment I often find myself spending 1.5 hours at the gym. Super setting would help a lot but it's impractical at most gyms :(
That's great advice, but it's a pretty big task for someone who might not get a lot of exercise to do 2 hours of intense weightlifting. I lift regularly, and my gym sessions only take an hour.
The good news is that if you are sedentary, older, or sedentary and older, even a little bit of exercise will be extremely effective. Go for that long walk, or maybe a shorter jog, and do some pushups and un-weighted squats. You'll be exhausted, and you'll be less likely to injure yourself. :)
30 minutes? How come? You take a at least 1.5 minute break between every set. So for 5 sets of first exercise that's 7.5 minutes assuming you don't take longer breaks and that you didn't do any warmup and just went straight for proper weights. Now add exercise itself and it's easily 9 minutes. Times three (again, assuming you don't take longer breaks which is really hard to do when you start hitting heavier weights) and it's 27 minutes. Add warmup and stretching and it's easily around 40 minutes. I think my fastest stronglift session was around 50-60 minutes. The longest was easily over 2 hours. When I started hitting squats with weights around 1.4 my body mass just warmups and proper sets were 50 minutes in itself. That was about 11 sets of squats with some breaks being 3-5 minutes ones.
I think six sets of warmup (for your 11 sets) are a bit too many. Three should be enough, and you don't need a real break between warmup sets. That should help cut down. Mehdi even recommends skipping breaks when switching exercises. Indeed, with 1.4 BW it will be tough. But that's what deweighs are for, and at that level, you'll be going into 3x5 soon.
Stronglifts is amazingly high impact for the time it takes.
If you didn't take a look at stronglifts, you should give a try.
Actually, it's only one of a few beginner strength training (most focused to powerlifting, but you can mix with BB if you want to) available out there. I started lifting with stronglifts, today I do greyskull LP.
Also on the weight lifting / sleep connection, in 4 hr Body, Time Ferris states:
TAX THE NERVOUS SYSTEM WITH ISO-LATERAL MOVEMENTS. Exercise is commonly recommended to improve sleep. The problem for me was that results were unpredictable. I might exercise for 20 minutes and fall asleep in 10 minutes, or I might exercise for two hours and fall asleep in two hours. There was no repeatable cause and effect. It seemed like a coin toss. This changed when I began to incorporate iso-lateral (one-arm or one-leg) resistance training. I logged faster to-sleep times after 8 out of 10 training sessions. The more complex the stabilization required, the shorter the to-sleep time.
This is really interesting, I have hard time dealing with sleep since moving abroad, break-up, far from family, isolated small city. Before I could bet with someone that I can fall asleep in less that 5 minutes.
Now, I've done it all and nothing seem to help:
- tried medicine(benzodiazepam family, ugly stuff, addictive, stopped after just 1 week, fuck the doctor that prescribed this)
- tried removing everything with a lot of caffeine, everything in the vegetable world has it, impossible to eliminate, but no more: coffee, tea, sugary drinks
- adapter water drinking to maximum needed
- running 15 minutes HIIT style(4 minutes at 12.5 km/h, 1 minute 16 km/h, repeat)
- weightlifting for the rest 45 minutes - every day session
- meditation (stoping the mind, have a single thought, mandalas, matras, yantras ...)
- no lcd, led light before 23:00, no more tv before bed
- went back to the doctor, best clinic for this in Europe... got prescribed mirtazapine, anti-depresant, helps but the side effects are weired and dehumanizing(taking 1/4 of 30 mg pill, far below the reference amount that they say it has any effect)
- sleep settled to 5 h / d, not bad, but not perfect
- mirtazapine gave me a very long face in the morning, looking destroyed, feeling rested and calm, but face dropped, looking like droopy dog
- went back to doctor, started CBT, bought books on CBT, personal opinion: pile of crap(and I was very opened to them)
- f**k the doctor again(I trust doctors, not this one), he asked me money and go to have treatment at home, told me I am normal, not like the people in the waiting room
- tried melantonin, calming teas, etc etc, bullshit, money wates
- made a girlfriend, sex helps, but when you have it until 03:00 AM due to "crazy" girlfriend, prefer the pills
- broke up, back to 5 h sleep
- back to doctor
- recommended me THC, a liquid version, helped a bit but too expensive
- started smoking weed, cheaper, fuck lungs, need to sleep
- helped a lot for the first months until I became addicted without noticing(addiction is not easy to describe, that is why everybody seems to share a different opinion, bullshit, you become addicted of smoking to be normal, not for the high)
- had to unlearn the weed, waves of heat and cold and sleepless nights followed, catastrophic, need my freedom back, even with 4-5 h of sleep, don't want to depend on anything foreign of my body
- went back home, slept like a rock for the first days, next days awful, unstoppable mind
- back to computer programming until I get tired
- back to reading books until I collapse into sleep
- I collapse but then I wake up at 03:00 am if I start sleeping at 01:00
- change bed place/orientation(mythology of European people), helped a bit, but don't know if it is real or wishful thinking
Effects(personal) of lack of sleep over cognition:
- my mind still solves complex problems(I am a programmer), but the speed lacks to be desired
- entering the zone is almost impossible
- my hands feel like they have 3 tons when I lift them from desk
- I still love what I am doing
- If I find a challenge that is impossible to solve in one day work I get a bad mood
- bad mood gets solved upon second day
Even with all these, I still love life at maximum, would want to achieve and do more, but not whatever the costs, not becoming addicted of foreign stuff!
Guys, be grateful for your lives and go out and speak with people, one day this magic substance might be found, but I am more convinced that it will come from machine/human merger that from substances. Good or bad, that is the most likely future.
Melatonin, while not effective for everyone, should not be grouped together with "bullshit money wastes" in my opinion.
> Guys, be grateful for your lives and go out and speak with people, one day this magic substance might be found, but I am more convinced that it will come from machine/human merger that from substances. Good or bad, that is the most likely future.
This is a very positive outlook, but bear in mind how reality changes for people who are deprived of sleep. As I'm sure you know it becomes a state of desperation. So while you may not want foreign stuff / substances in your body, others are definitely willing to make the sacrifice, even if that doesn't mean good sleep indefinitely. Other people may be willing to be dependent on substances in order to feel rested, for example. Myself included.
> I am more convinced that it will come from machine/human merger that from substances. Good or bad, that is the most likely future.
Curious, what kind of machine/human concept are you thinking of?
You have 3.5-5 hours a day to work out? I want your job. Also, as a former competitive weightlifter, if you are lifting intense for 1.5-2 hours, you are doing it wrong.
You missed part of the post - I wasn't suggesting doing both in a day, I was suggesting that each of them was a good candidate to try in a day.
Also, see my follow-up comment about lifting for 2 hours. tl;dr is that I'm 39 and it takes 45 mins just to prehab/stretch/warmup for heavy squats. YMMV.
Hmm... exercise does indeed reduce the chance. I exercise a little bit. Unfortunately, I can't notice how it is affecting my sleep, but it probably is affecting my sleep. So it should be on the list.
Thing that probably helped me and my wife to improve our sleep routine the best, is switching to ambient lights ~1 hour before sleep.
Because the sun sets usually some time between 17 00 and 21 00 depending on the season, and we usually go to sleep between 22 00 and 24 00, we usually switch of the main lamps around 21 00 and maybe even switch from ambient lamps to candles later on.
My wife introduced this because it should help with natural melatonin release and strengthen the circadian rhythm, and based on my anecdotal experience, it does help.
This became even more important once our baby-girl has been born, because the difference with trying to put her to bed when the lights have been dim for an hour vs. when we just switched of the main lamp is really noticable :-)
Interesting! I thought about having better light control, now I really think it's a good thing to do. I'll Google ambient lights and see what they are and what it means.
I like to read my Kindle for a while after going to bed, just using the backlight only - I find this is sufficiently dark to trigger my sleep reflex, and it feels much more efficient to spend 20 minutes or so reading rather than lying in bed waiting for sleep.
Try listening to podcasts. It completely cured my inability to get to sleep. In fact, there are podcasts aimed directly at people like you (and me): http://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/
Some other 'sleep favourites' of mine would be Skeptoid, Lore, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, 99% invisible. Give it a try. I use the Stitcher app and set the timer to turn off streaming at the end of an episode. I'm usually asleep within 10-15 minutes or listening.
Edit: Also try f.lux on your computer and Twilight on your phone. They work for me, but I'm more than willing to accept that the effects my be purely placebo.
I tried a few episodes of sleep with me, and it creeped me right the hell out. It was some guy talking in a pouty, condescending baby-voice about some nonsense or other. His voice especially threw me off.
Dan Carlin is great, but way too intense and interesting for me to sleep to. I pay attention to the podcast and want to hear "just another 20 minutes" instead. 99% invisible is perfect in this regard. Roman has a great voice, good editing and nice, mellow music in his production. I listen to it a lot.
I also like to listen to The Moth, Hello Internet, Radiolab and Benjamin Walker's theory of everything when I go to sleep.
I've struggled with falling asleep over the years. At first I couldn't cope with it at all and was mortified before bedtime each night. But nowadays sleep comes easily. I've noticed that:
- Whenever I'm in a relationship and sleep together with someone I have no sleeping issues at all.
- Having the pill Stilnoct prescribed helps immensely. I don't take them often. But just being aware that I have them reduces the stress around falling asleep.
- If I feel that it's one of those nights when I can't fall asleep I just treat it as any other sickness. I email my colleagues telling them that I'm working from home the next day and turn off my morning alarm.
- Journaling. Write down everything that has happened to you during the day before you go to bed. A lot of timea I can't fall asleep because my mind is obsessing/processing recent events. Spend 10 minutes to write them down. It's like running a database drop script.
- Get a spike mat. It'll be uncomfortable in the beginning but you'll slowly get used to lying on it. This has worked wonders for my friend and I was thinking of getting one, but that was before my sleep problems just disappeared.
* Melatonin -- get the low dose chewable kind from Trader Joes and take 30 minutes before you go to bed
* Keep the bedroom cool and completely dark -- there is research the connects insomnia with warm body temperatures in some people (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18603220)
You have to be careful with Melatonin, your body will produce less of it's own if you keep topping yourself up, which means diminished returns with continued use.
A study assessing 6 months (n=112) and 12 months (n=96) of melatonin treatment of 2mg in a controlled release capsule, taken 1-2 hours prior to sleep, people aged 20-80 with primary insomnia failed to show any tolerance to the treatment. The authors noted a slight sensitization to the effects of melatonin at the 3-4 month period, which was attributed to better entrainment of the circadian rhythm. These results have been replicated in another study, lasting 6 months, with a sample of 791 people. No melatonin tolerance due to usage was observed. Another study, lasting 6 months with a sample size of 421 people also replicated these results.
Thanks for linking that. I researched melatonin previously and found these same studies.
It appears that there's not much of a tolerance effect when taking melatonin. This is unusual, our experience tells us that most drugs have a tolerance effect. Extended use of caffeine causes the body to make more adenosine receptors, meaning that it takes a higher dose to have the same effect.
This does not appear to happen with melatonin. Less science and more anecdote from a lot of users: melatonin also has an amount where it is less effective. You'll find several reports of people that see no effect at the higher doses (10mg), yet a lower dose (3mg) has a good effect.
This is all moot if you're in the UK or Australia, since melatonin is a prescription drug.
It's fascinating how, in the US, Melatonin is sold in stores like a vitamin, whereas in Germany, they look at you strange if you ask for it in a pharmacy.
And autism is treated with nootropics in the Ukraine, but no the u.s. And phenibut is in Russian first aid kits and there's no codeine in American OTC painkillers. And magic mushrooms were only recently banned in Japan. And cannabis is legal in North Korea.
It won't work for everyone, but I had trouble getting to sleep quickly, figured out why, and "fixed" it.
My problem was thinking/working while trying to sleep, too much internal monologue. I also realized I am unable to have an internal monologue/actively "think" while listening to other people speaking (I'm a verbal thinker). So I started listening to audiobooks while trying to fall asleep. Now I'm off in about 5-10 minutes every night and take a couple of months to make it through a book.
The only sleep tip that's ever worked for me: don't go to bed before you're tired.
That means both physically and mentally. It's crazy how much even 1 hour of intense workout per day helps you sleep. And challenging your mind enough to actually run out of steam by the end of the day helps a lot too.
The implied trick is to arrange your life so it supports your natural rhythm. For me that means being at office no earlier than 10am and living so close that I can roll out of bed as late as 9:30am if needed.
Have a baby. Your sleeping less is my average night's sleep, split into two or three chunks. Amazing how easy it is to get to sleep when you've spent the last two and a half years in a low level state of exhaustion ;)
There's not much choice so you just don't sleep. Takes a bit of getting used to. After a while you jump into bed at 10pm when before you had children you'd go to sleep at 2am and become a 'normal person', sort of.
Split the night with the other parent (if not a single parent). Gets you ~5-6hrs/night even during the worst of it.
Trade sleep-in days on the weekend.
A combination of luck (definitely) and technique (maybe) can have 'em sleeping through the night in 2-3 months, so it's not necessarily a long-term problem.
I'll second baq here - I used to be someone who went to bed sometime between midnight and 1am, then rolled out of bed about 9am, and started work about 10. Now if I feel really daring I might go to bed at 11, knowing at the very latest I'll be getting up at 7am, more typically I'm in bed shortly after 10.
I've had sleep problems for years. Few simple things that usually helped me:
1) a glass of whisky.
2) sex.
3) relaxing, silent background music (Dead Can Dance is wonderful, but I guess it's a matter of taste).
Whiskey yes, but listening to Saltarello would have me floundering all over the place. I think a samadhi (isolation) tank would be nifty, but one might wake a bit pruned.
I've tried lots of different things and the most effective has been forcing myself to get up early (~6am for me). It was really difficult when I first started, but then I got into a routine. It's the only thing that consistently causes me to be feel tired earlier at night and be able to fall asleep more easily. I also combine that with reading in bed (with a orange filtered light bulb) until I nod off (~20 minutes).
Sometimes getting up so early makes me tired during the day (I'm not a natural morning person) so I'll take micro naps to mitigate.
And getting an early start to my day is fantastic. I can run, read, meditate, etc before I start my work day.
I'm a tradesman, at my work we always start at 7am for an 8hr day. If we're busy and doing overtime we start at 6am for a 10hr day. Im at a computer for a third to a half of my day, otherwise I'm walking and packing and on a forklift.
I'm at the gym by 5am for an hour or so for weights abd running.
There are no cool white fluoros or CFLs in my house, nor outside.
I find this regime thoroughly exhausts me physically and mentally, and I have no trouble falling asleep and staying alseep unless I get cold.
I'm of the opinion that stuff like f.lux and Apple's Night Shift are both products that exploit pseudoscience to take advantage of the placebo effect. They're a "gluten free" feature for contemporary software — for those suspicious of childhood vaccinations.
Macworld wrote a decent breakdown of the Night Shift quackery when it was introduced:
Who cares whether it is quackery or not: these tools have a self-evidently useful purpose which is to manage the white balance of a display as the ambient light shifts between daylight and artificial light. Whether it has any effect on sleep hygiene is entirely orthogonal.
A better analogy would be artisanal water: the touted benefits of their particular magical bottle of H₂0 may be quackery, but the benefits of hydration are irrefutable.
Purported sleep benefits aside, the reduced eye strain from warmer colors is invaluable to me. Sometimes I'm working on a ship's bridge where it's dark or under low reddish light. Turning on a bright, blue laptop screen is brutal. At home it's much more pleasant to look at than the colder daylight colors.
I don't know whether or not it helps me fall asleep, but I've been using f.lux or redshift for years now and it completely stopped my headaches from looking at the monitor at night.
All I know is turning the brightness control on my iPad all the way down to far left with lights out and in bed then just browsing boring stuff like news, Car and Driver, etc and it works like a sleeping pill for me. In about 15-20m of this and I can barely keep my eyes open.
Might be this minimized blue light effect as they suggest, or could just be a sort of recognized pattern/habit my brain now associates with bed. I don't know why, but it works for me. I'm getting sleepy now just thinking of it..
Wow, I can't believe someone else independently came up with this. I too try to come up with a complex storyline, my brain just says, "nope, that's enough" and falls asleep.
I just stopped drinking coffee. The first 2 weeks were awful. I was tired all the time and sleeping over 10 hours every night. After that I returned to my usual 7 hour sleep but I had no more issues getting to sleep. My performance is the same as it was when drinking coffee, I sleep well, and if I ever need a boost, a single ristretto will give me lots of energy! :D
Keeping a daily journal isn't for everyone - although I do recommend it - but I have found that by recording my day's thoughts it gets them out of my head, and by writing down my next day's planned tasks ahead of time, I am more likely to get a good nights sleep, wake up at the right time, and get to work on those tasks.
Can you explain your problem in more detail? Do you fall asleep late in the night and then feel tired all day, and then it repeats over several days? If you miss a whole night's sleep, surely the next evening you're so exhausted you fall asleep easily?
I have found that I sleep much much better with a total absence of noise and light, so I now use ear plugs and an eye mask. This has improved the quality of my sleep a lot.
Also, we all have a cycle that lasts approx. 90 minutes; you will fall asleep more easily at the end of that cycle; the time window is around 10 minutes. You need to be prepared to go to bed when that window starts; if you start preparing to go to bed when you feel sleepy, by the time you're in bed the moment's passed and you need to wait another 90 minutes.
If you rely on windows to get vitamin D I have bad news for you. Glass filters out most of UV spectrum of sunlight. It is really hard if not impossible to get a tan behind glass.
Physical exercises and outdoor activities are very helpful with sleep and overall well being.
The trick to sleeping is simple: make sure you are mentally and physically tired, and switch off your computer and dim the lights one hour before you want to sleep.
Many have suggested some form of physical exercise. My suggestion is swimming: it's usually relatively cheap, doesn't matter much if you're overweight, and physically very exhausting.
Also, you might consider getting some real data on your sleep and try to correlate that with your daily activities. I've used the Ōura ring for that to discover what helps me sleep better.
I was certain that I was living with a hard depression... until I read somewhere that lactose intolerance can lead to magnesium deficiency.
I started taking Magnesium and felt the effect immediately. All of my body is physically relaxed. I struggled with muscle cramps and spasms, they are gone thanks to increasing my magnesium intake.
I started listening to some history podcasts in bed with my eyes closed. The podcast app I use (podcast addict) has a timer feature so I set it to 15 or 20 minutes and by the time the podcast stops I'm ready to sleep. I also know a lot more history than I used to :)
I used to have problems falling asleep, but after I got on a strength training program known to be effective [1], the problem mostly went away. I turn off the lights, do some reading in bed (with flux on), and just drift off into sleep.
Sleep hygiene did it for me. If I'm not sleeping or fucking, I get out of bed. Also no f.lux on the computer and Night Shift on my iPhone in the evening does wonders.
It took a few months to train my body and mind, but now I fall asleep in under 5 minutes after I go to bed.
Both of these sound very effective. May I also recommend using earplugs? There are many varieties available and they're inexpensive. I used to do the covering ears thing but it's not super comfortable.
don't think anyone mentioned ice baths yet, but that seems to come highly recommended from people like Tim Ferris and Kevin Rose. Think TF writes it up in 4hr body. Also Rhonda Patrick is a proponent of it and you can see her thoughts on https://www.foundmyfitness.com/ (videos and podcast).
Apparently it can be quite calming.
Another thing I have not see you mention is diet. Lots of factors there. All anecdotal but i've tried raw paleo diet in the past and eating raw meat has usually given me a happy buzz during sleep while eating fruits in the evening has usually caused me issues. Everyone is different so I can't say what will work for you but it should be something you experiment with a lot.
try running. Helps dissolve stress or whatever stuff that accumulated during the day - while it doesn't make problems disappear of course, it helps change your view on them a bit. Just did 3 miles and once i get to bed i'll be like dead.
Completely agree. I prefer to run at night, because running before work means I have some kind of timeline that has to occasionally be accounted for, like another thread running.
So after work is done, I love going on some kind of cardio adventure for 30-60 minutes. Running is my favorite but biking also works.
When I get home, all steam is blown off, and I manage to fall asleep in most cases.
Naturally, I am not really a great sleeper. Cardio helps a lot.
Since you're already taking magnesium, try getting magnesium glycinate. It has 6 times as much glycine as magnesium by weight and is readily available. Glycine may help you sleep.
Look up Delayed sleep phase disorder. It's basically night owl syndrome. The two things that have some evidence for their usage are melatonin and SAD lights.
I agree, but it's very difficult for me to fall asleep naturally. I have tried all the well-known advice and even tried long workouts late in the day so that it would help me to get tired and fall asleep. The only thing that works for me is melatonin and making sure I am away from all kinds of blue lights 2-3 hours before bed. I have been sleeping great for the last 6 months or so. I have tried to get off of melatonin pills, I would sleep normally for a couple of days then I would have trouble falling sleep again. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't seen any side effect from melatonin.
I also have random sudden panic attacks. I stopped drinking coffee (which helped a lot) and I would only drink 1 cup of green tea once a day in the morning. Instead, I take modafinil during the day to try to stay awake. The daytime tiredness has nothing to do with sleep or my food intake (I have done extensive research on nutrition), I am fairly physically active, currently training for my first 10k. If I drink coffee I will be fine in terms of alertness but it will make my anxiety crazy (not always but a lot more than not drinking any coffee). So I started taking modafinil which works great without making my anxiety/panic attack any worse.
Even with no coffee and good nights of sleep and being fairly physically active, and trying out all the self-help methods I could get my hands on in the last couple of years, I still couldn't fix my anxiety/panic attack issues. The only thing that works is benzo (clonazepam 0.5mg once a day). It works amazing - not only I am happiest when I am on it I am also the most productive (because of less anxiety and panic attack). I have been taking it for the last 3 months regularly (prescribed) and I am already addicted to it. If I try not to take a benzo for one day my anxiety is off the roof - the feeling is horrible and I can't get anything done the whole day.
At the moment I am trying to find the best way I can get off my dependencies on benzo but still keep my sanity.
The point of my post is that sometimes life is not as simple as "getting a good night's sleep" because even something as simple as "getting a good nights sleep" can be quite a bit struggle for some of us.
I admit I haven't done any therapy by any therapist. I have read some CBT book and tried to do it myself without any progress. Its also one of those things I probably should look in to (along with sleep apnea suggested by someone else). I just wish benzos didn't have so many issues with it, or it would be the perfect drug. I take such a low dose and I know people who are taking 2-5mg and they are happily chugging alone. I fear for them, if they ever needs to get off of benzos.
My dad has sleep apnea.
I don't think I have sleep apnea, because I don't have most of the symptoms/pre-requisite of sleep apnea. But this is self diagnosis, I reckon I probably should get a proper test done.
Assuming sleep works for everyone the same way is not very scientific. And such drugs help transition between an unhealthy lifestyle and a healthy one without having to give up productivity, focus and whatnot.
Try getting the Uvex S1933X glasses. They work for everything in your view (obviously) without messing around with software, and probably works better too.
I have them, and they're amazing. I have pretty cool LED lighting in my apartment and can make my whole living room any color I want at night. If I set in to pure blue and put on the glasses, it's like being in pitch blackness (except a couple of items glow brightly).
It's not like looking at things with an orange tint at all, even though the glasses are obviously orange.
That being said - the benefits I get by using them is amazing. It's weird how much of a difference it can make, I get tired quickly after putting them on in the evening. If I forget to put them on I usually end up staying up too late, getting too little sleep and often ruining the next day. Personally I find it way more effective than flux.
By the way - blue light isn't just a negative thing, but also a huge positive. In the morning I use a Philips goLITE BLU HF3332, and it really improves both my energy and mood quickly after just a few minutes of usage.
Those two simple items, a blue light and a pair of blue-blocking glasses, have improved my life significantly. Try it out (especially the glasses, it's just $9).
I just tried "meditation" last night. Not being ready to sleep, wishing to "read more on the web" ... 10 min of trying not to think and I was a lot more ready to sleep on schedule.
30 minute brisk walk morning and evening has helped me far more than any nootropics I tried.
I still try various 'stacks' that people suggest (often Tim Ferriss), and am currently on Ubiquinol, Creatine and Policosanol before bed.
If I don't perceive any benefit after a month or two though, I tend to move on, as there's a huge commercial market wrapped around all of this, so evidence is required for me to keep spending.
One thing to help with sleep that is https://freedom.to/, which you can use to make a list of websites to hard-block and then schedule them to be blocked either
I have a problem with all these website-blocking tools that I want them to behave differently than they do, perhaps you can suggest something?
The issue is that I want to block only the main, 'browsing' pages while allowing deep links to that same site. For example, I want to block reddit, when googling some question turns out an answer that's on a niche subreddit I've never seen, I need to be able to read it. However, the site blockers I've tried require me to unblock the whole site or turn them off, and thus become pointless.
If you have the patience to manually blacklist URLs, you can do this pretty easily with a regex-based site blocker. (My favorite for Chrome is Simple Blocker, which doesn't document that it uses regexes but in fact does: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple-blocker/akf...). For example, the following blacklist regex patterns block the Reddit front page and the main page of any subreddits and multireddits, but still let you navigate to individual threads:
I don't think that proof-of-work is needed - these are different models of operation; reading an article (which is ok) vs browsing for more articles (which is not).
I want to blacklist only the main site - Stayfocusd was a particular example, I got some google results on subreddits that I never knew existed and couldn't have been in a whitelist.
I'm rather going for the reading vs scanning distinction - even there I would want the particular subreddit main page to remain blocked to prevent the procrastinating pattern of checking an interesting place to see if there's something new interesting. Similarly, the main news.ycombinator.com should be blocked but visiting particular pages from e.g. a weekly digest email would be useful.
This is one of the side effects of ptsd that can make a big difference, since sleep really is so important. Mine is more of a hypervigilance (I can almost be asleep and then hear a sound and all senses are in overdrive, so usually I just get up and patrol the perimeter of the house and check locks/doors/camera systems), but many of my buddies drank themselves to sleep every night. Most of them have switched to MJ and swear it's the best thing ever for them vs alcohol.
As a side note, I also think MJ counts as a nootropic when used properly, and I often think about Carl Sagans Mr. X article about it in this light, in the sense that a different perspective can help you solve issues or think about issues in a different way than you might have otherwise. This is why I highly suggest that people trying MJ try to be productive while on it instead of just (read: only) vegging.
White noise? I find I fall asleep faster due to air conditioner and forced air furnace and occasional rain storms.
When I was a kid I could just barely hear my parents decompressing by watching Barney Miller and All in the Family (yes I am older) and that helped me sleep.
I find that white noise helps as long as I'm not in hyper-vigilance mode, because if I am, the white noise is something thats keeping me from hearing an enemy, which drives me insane (like when someone is snoring too loud, or the AC is squeaky )... so it works great lots of the time. (Classical music, newagey music, movie soundtracks, ancient music (greek/roman) and thunderstorms and a little bit of delta wave stuff are my go-tos.)
Exactly. The listed stimulants will solve a short-term need. But people here are looking for a long-term permanent solution that can be used every day.
Sleep isn't a nootropic. This happens quite a lot with noobs. They conflate nootropics with sleep/food/water/exercise. It wouldn't be that bad, but it derails the actual subject: I.e. nootropics.
Here's a concise definition[0]:
"(of a drug) used to enhance memory or other cognitive functions"
There are other definitions. All the ones I've seen have exogenous substances as a common denominator, however.
>Sleep isn't a nootropic. This happens quite a lot with noobs.
It's a figurative usage. The OP is not suggesting sleep is literally a nootropic, but that it is something that performs the same function. Like "the best defence is a good offence".
And I don't think it's derailing the topic to talk about relevant alternatives.
> The best nootropic is getting a good nights sleep.
The above is a direct quote from OP. Where's the metaphor? You're grossly mistaken!
> but that it is something that performs the same function
Can sleep gives one supranormal cognition? No.
Does sleep perform the same function as modafinil (a drug which gives you more time to work since you need less sleep)? They're nearly opposites.
Does sleep perform the same function as melatonin? A hormone that allows greater sleep "efficiency" than normal sleep. No.
You're grossly incorrect again.
> And I don't think it's derailing the topic to talk about relevant alternatives.
It's a category error.
The sleep conversation is above everything else. It takes focus from the subject at hand.
It happens a lot with noobs. They don't know anything about noots, but know something about sleep/exercise/whatever and decide that's a good topic to talk about.
It's like a conversation about Tesla, and then someone talking about walking—because it's an alternative. OK, the subject may be interesting per se, but it is of little relevance.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting personal attacks after we've asked you to stop. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll comment only civilly and substantively in the future.
> Does sleep perform the same function as melatonin? A hormone that allows greater sleep "efficiency" than normal sleep.
Melatonin is the hormone that regulates sleep normally. You're taking additional sleep hormone by taking it orally. So sleep is melatonin.
It's the hormone that is theorized to be involved in the "blue light" sleep effect. When the high-wavelength cones are stimulated, melatonin release is reduced, according to current theory. [0]
"You're taking additional sleep hormone by taking it orally. So sleep is melatonin."
Sleep, and sleep with additional sleep hormone aren't the same thing by definition.
> So sleep is melatonin.
By taking melatonin orally you can get levels which aren't possible endogenously. So melatonin supplements != "vanilla" sleep.
Melatonin is also a mitochondrial anti-oxidant, so may benefit people with "brain fog". Such people may well have to take a supplement to get the maximum benefit. A benefit which can't be reached with natural (what is natural?) sleep.
In older individuals, the endogenous production of melatonin is reduced (happens when people get older). They may also benefit for supplementation. A benefit they couldn't get without it! No matter if they wear blue light blocking glasses, or have f.lux on all their machines.
Sometimes people have to do things at night. Where there's light. It's modern life. They can't go back in time and not be exposed to that light. They may also benefit from supplementation.
The majority of these people aren't even testing their compounds. They take them blindly or rely on the reputation of other people to tell them that its safe - mostly because they're ignorant, lazy, cheap, impatient or some combination thereof. They also have very little understanding of pharmacology or basic science, and I've seen first hand accounts from drug enthusiasts who go on to describe how they can "feel" the actions at various receptors in their brains based on something they've poorly understood from reading Wikipedia for 5 minutes (which is just complete nonsense.) And what's worse, is that there’s no easy way for the average person to tell what information is good since so much of the Internet is written to seem authoritative.
Suppose I Google a question and find a well-written blog post on serotonin interactions between various drugs that answers my question. Am I really going to know that the article is inaccurate, bias, or incomplete? Or am I going to walk away feeling like I've learned something, because I hate to say it but -- that's largely what the web is these days. None of the real information is on the surface because that would be far too boring for the average reader and boring content doesn't sell. Now combine this with drug use and you have a toxic mix of ignorance that can literally kill people.
I could go on about this subject but I won't rant any more. Just keep in mind that a lot of what’s written about nootropics (and other drugs) is no where near as clean or as simple as the Internet makes it seem, and that most people aren't even in a position to use caffeine therapeutically - let alone safely negotiate complex, poorly understood, and potentially unknown compounds they bought from the Internet (so try not to take Gwern at face value.)