Good recent writing on the topic: https://dynomight.net/theanine-2/
Not sure why the nootropics people are always trying to come up with alternate theories for why something works when substances like caffeine are well studied and known to provide a mood boost.
That's... sad! I look forward to every day! I look forward to breathing when I wake up! I hope that changes for you soon.
It’s wild to me that the nootropics community evolved into a hybrid between the recreational drug community and supplement enthusiast communities while forgetting all of the lessons people learned in those communities long ago.
So much of the nootropics discourse is about compounds that have a moderate to high recreational value: The above post is talking about Kratom (an opioid) as if it was a nootropic, which would be unfathomable under the original description of nootropics.
The linked article also includes psilocybin, tianeptine (a compound that started out with some myths about serotonin but was later discovered to be an opioid), and phenibut (an extremely addictive substance, see /r/quittingphenibut )
The latter substance is known for temporarily reducing anxiety and giving a confidence boost, which is a common theme among substances cited as helpful. Something about calling them “nootropics” seems to reset people’s expectations and they forget that all recreational drugs make people feel some combination of euphoria, motivation, confidence boost, anxiety reduction, or stimulation at first, before tolerance takes in. People find themselves not only tolerant to these substances, but in withdrawal when they don’t take them (as mentioned above)
Phenibut is one of the most obvious recreational drugs that got pulled into the “nootropics” label for years. Nootropics Depot got caught importing large numbers of drums of this substance for resale. They deleted a lot of the discussion about their lawsuit on /r/nootropics (did you know they control the subreddit?) and have put forward a very selective version of the story that makes them look like the victims. Meanwhile it was one of the most common debilitating addiction stories coming out of supplement and nootropics communities until word spread that it was highly addictive and the withdrawals were very long.
Whatever meaning the word “nootropic” originally had is long lost. It’s now a blanket term for experimenting with powerful supplements or prescription drugs under a different name. I think that alternative name has left a lot of people blind to the reality of what they’re doing. They also frequently don’t realize that self-reported feelings of drug liking effect are not indicative of the drug’s objective positive effects.
Kraton I couldn't make the same argument and not familiar with tianeptine / gas station scag.
It doesn't help that I'm on Adderall, but if left to my own devices, would absolutely skip it. I'm assuming I benefit in the able to think way from it. Largely the only reason I know I missed a dose is if I find I lose my patience quickly with others.
That, historically, does not work well for neurochemistry. Large random trials are good for an average biological response of profitable chemicals, but it seems there are significant differences in neurochemistry, between people, that these don't capture. If you've ever had a prescription for most anything mental related, like ADHD, depression, etc, there's never just one drug, there's a panel that you just kinda go through until one works for your personal neurochemistry, with some having detrimental side effects for some people.
Unsurprisingly, it seems to be the same with many of these nootropics. I've had several very negative reactions to common nootropics at fractional doses, where others have positive experiences at many times the dose. A few resulted in migraines every day I took it, until I stopped, with one quickly resulting in depression and the only suicidal thoughts of my life, which went aways just as fast as I stopped. One hurt my short term memory so much I couldn't repeat a phone number (a very potent racetam like).
Some nootropics are precursors, which are mostly self regulating/supplements, but there are many out there that very actively poke low level neurochemicals, and your personal response will vary, just as is expected in the regulated drug world.
Min/maxing personal neurochemistry won't come from large random trials.
Controlled trials are actually very revealing of the placebo effect, which is a rampant confounded in nootropics communities. When people spend months reading about new nootropics, then a week waiting for it in the mail, then they take their first dose with excitement and anticipation they generally report feeling something.
The nice thing about trials is that they can start separating out this placebo effect.
Several people have done self-trials with different compounds with surprising results. Gwern is perhaps the most famous. Whenever people post about magnesium being a life altering substance or producing profound effects I also point them to his measured magnesium trials where the net effect over time was beginning to trend negative.
One of the myths in nootropics communities is that everything is a matter of neurochemistry and everyone is substantially different. In reality, RCTs are actually great at capturing enough people to see subgroups responding if you have enough people.
One thing most nootropics people don’t acknowledge enough is how often placebo effect appears in RCTs. Perform an RCT for depression and the placebo group will get better. It happens in every study. Give college students Adderall before an exam and they will report performing better, despite no statistical improvement in their grades. Now consider these facts in light of all of the scattered nootropics forum reports from people claiming different substances cured their depression or made them smarter. Not surprisingly, if you check their post history more recent comments will show them off on a new tangent trying a new substance, the old one long forgotten as a short trial that didn’t work out.
There is an argument that people should treat their own lives as an experiment. Where you track the things you do and see if you can find patterns on mood and productivity and such. If you want to know what generally works, though, there is no counter to effectiveness in RCTs, though?
Put differently, when has evidence ever gone counter to RCTs? Not just are there some questions that an RCT hasn't covered, but times it has been counter to the results?
The difference is that you’ve taken it medicinally for years, whereas most nootropics users are early users who are experimenting with high placebo priming.
Stimulant prescriptions have a high churn rate because many people take their first few doses and feel euphoric, then think it’s going to be like that forever. Fast forward a couple years and the fun is long gone so it’s a different story.
Nootropics forums are dominated by posts from people saying “Just took my first dose of $substance and I feel amazing!” which is the least useful measure of how well it will treat someone long term.
That said, sounds like we are largely in agreement? I have gotten where I assume everything is dominated by noise.
And before you say I appeal to authority, I understand people don't respect doctors or their country's healthcare system, but I suggest they should acquire formal medical education themselves before starting to put random shit in their body. And no, reading the entire body of blogs by Scott Alexander does not count.
1. Apart from ADHD medications, which are very powerful, most drugs and weird obscure supplements have little effect (there are some intriguing but noisy results about peptides).
2. Exercise— especially weightlifting and HIIT— is also very powerful. There's evidence of a dose-response curve where light exercise is good but intense is better.
Arguably this is pretty unsurprising, from an evolutionary perspective. It would be strange if our brains had "one weird trick" to perform a lot better with no downsides, since if it existed evolution should've found it. But being in good shape confers large benefits.
It would not be strange at all. We are constantly evolving and so is our environment. This argument is very similar to the "efficient market fallacy", if the market was perfectly efficient there would be no opportunity to create value, but in reality it is highly imperfect.
Also a blind study with these would be hard, as Modafinil has a noticeable effect on heart rate and blood pressure, and general response to stress (at least in my case), and also causes a distinct chemical smell of one's urine.
I wish! If you're lucky (or not particularly unlucky) that might be true.
I don't feel any mental benefits, nor do I sleep better. Fun kinds of exercise (badminton, football, BJJ) always seem to injure me me over longer time periods (and it takes months, or even years, to heal when you're in your forties). And they are not very forgiving, schedule-wise.
Lifting weights or rowing on a machine is painfully boring, but it does make me feel better physically. It's a great upside, but the downsides are real too.
At first I thought the mispelling was intentional irony. But the leak to the guide shows that it's just unintentional irony
Also, regarding weightlifting... there was no mention about the risk of continuous muscle trauma, scar tissue build-up, nerve damage, and ligament damage.
Modafinil, Racetams, Noopept, Phenibut
Noopept seems to be curiously missing from this list?
Very fun substance also nasty as fuck and undoubtably bad for your brain. (I got weird neurological "withdrawal" symptoms after like 3 days of taking it)
Spent 8 continuous hours vomiting with the worst nausea I've ever felt in my life.
Lesson hard learned. I've been using Phenibut for nearly 10 years, I only take it on the weekends.
I quite enjoy high doses, feels much better than drinking without negative physical side effects. I don't drink alcohol in general, to be honest.
It’s impossible for anyone to say this convincingly about their own experience. If it were easy to tell whether an effect was due to placebo, we wouldn’t need blinded trials!
Like...nobody could ever take a macro dose of LSD or mushrooms and not know it.
But it is evidence. Think of this as more observational science rather than experimental science; we have to do some work to determine whether it is worth trying to do blinded experiments to validate an effective, and this is that work.
It's crazy to me how many people have miserable health, complain about their body and mental state endlessly, but still put up any roadblock they can think of to avoid exercising of any form.
The exercise is important for my general health but it isn't positively correlated with my cognitive functioning. Quite the opposite.
It's a ton of work at first but it's completely worth it -- post-exertional malaise sucks.
Other things that helped me personally: daily cold plunges up to the chin (so you feel it in your vagus nerve), HRV reset breathing exercises, and daily meditation. Wish you the best of luck.
Best sleep I’ve ever gotten.
You don’t know what you’re missing out on until you’ve experienced not good but GREAT sleep.
if that’s too extreme avoid too much water before bed if you’re getting up to pee you are ruining your sleep
Do you really not eat bread? We've got to come up with better ways to categorize foods. At face value such a term seems to imply you should only eat raw food.
I don't think it's that weird. Exercising, particularly cardio, for its own sake, without something you're trying to accomplish with your effort, feels very bad.
Look up the Regeneron COURAGE trial
I know that is a hurdle I have with my kids. They complain that jogging/running hurts. It is hard to convince people that that never really changes, and that it also hurts for the people that are doing it every day. Obviously acute pains are a different thing, but there is a reason recovery is a vital part of exercise. We all have to recover from pushing limits. You can't expand your limits without pushing, though.
Otherwise, you'll never stick with it.
I hate jogging, I have forced myself to do daily jogging for several month periods, but I never stick with it.
For me, incline treadmill at maximum incline and a moderate pace gets my heart-rate up and doesn't feel nearly as awful.
My suggestion is to stop your workout a little before you want to, almost as if you're disappointed it's over now, which will make you want to go to the gym the next day more consistently.
As I've gotten older, I've found other activities to fill the void such as rock climbing and mountain biking. Both can be strenuous when you want them to be, but you can also take it easy. Combined with low level weight training, I've found it a lot more enjoyable since both require your brain to be 100% engaged when doing it so there's also a mental boost as well.
There's no particular reason why running on asphalt, or even running on a treadmill, shouldn't hurt. It might! It's not a natural surface. And hard surface + modern shoes might not be a good enough combo to overcome the pain it creates.
I live near a beach and run on sand every other day; I don't have body pain problems. But change the surface and I think I would.
It's much easier on your joints, and you can adjust the difficulty gradually.
Maybe if you are underdoing it its possible but if you follow the muscle building theory, you are certainly going to get fucked eventually. Even the slightest position issue can make your tendons hurt for months... No wonder all athletes are on BPC 157, TB 500 and friends...
I talked to exercise professors and random people alike, and they all tell the same story. Professor said that I should get used to pain.
Too bad exercise seems to be a must after you are 50+ and no amount of good nutrition and vitamin megadosing will suffice for optimal health and particularly insuline resistance. Prior to that age though, you can get away without it.
What is the muscle building theory? Not everyone who does weightlifting is aiming for hypertrophy. Some are aiming for strength.
Honestly, it sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself not to do it. That’s okay. It’s difficult to know where to begin and avoid potential injury. It does take some time to learn. I like to recommend starting with a functional training class. This kind of class provides a guided session in building strength in everyday movements and provides a steady pace to really tune in to your body. It’s very difficult to injure yourself.
As a counterpoint, since you seem to like anecdata: I am around 50 and have been doing weightlifting for the last 8 years. No pain. No injury. Extreme positive effects on my entire life.
I would respectfully suggest that you need to a) know what you are doing, e.g. start with a trainer, and b) not try to be an olympic athlete, e.g. reach reasonable benchmarks and not try to be a weightlifting champ.
I don't know what "exercise professors" are, but you might want to talk to different people.
- Before I exercised regularly, I developed aches and pains in upper and lower back, also a shoulder for some reason. These all went away thanks to pull-ups and pushups. Lack of exercise will also wreck your body—if you have not experienced this I have to assume you are very young.
- Exercise also causes lots of random little injuries. For example basketball gave me an ankle and a knee that have never been quite the same. But, I find that exercise itself helps dampen the pain response and makes them more bearable. I have ankle and knee warmup routines that help a lot.
Among people I have met, exercisers with injuries have full lives who are able to live around their injuries. Non-exercisers also develop little pains over time of being sedentary, and end up being much more constrained in what they can do.
So, I disagree with you. If you take it slow and listen to your body and maintain good form youre golden.
I got muscle problems from _not_ doing resistance training, my bad posture caught up with me finally. And I was doing quite a bit of cardio (treadmill walking), so my general health was OK.
It took months to build up muscles enough to avoid stressing the same overworked muscles, but eventually I had no pain whatsoever.
That kind of pain quickly subsides after relaxing your routine though. It's not chronic.
The inflammation pathways aren't the same as disease state pathways.
Soreness is not a bad thing. And it's true that people who regularly exercise will often be in a state where they feel some level of soreness somewhere. That's the kind of pain people say you should embrace.
It's also true that lots of folks injure themselves exercising. Sometimes this leads to having to take time off to recover.
But people who don't exercise are more at risk of injury in general. This is because their tendons, bones, and muscles are less able to deal with sudden stress.
> And yet, nobody mentions how supplements can't generally damage you
And last of all - this is plainly not true...
The fact is resistance training is vital for able bodied folks to avoid feeling pain later. And of course it has many other benefits than that. Even just pulling on some resistance bands can save your back and shoulders and the chance of injury there is minuscule.
Hahahahahahahahaha
Been doing ~daily resistance training for > 10 years, have a hell of a build, and do not experience anything like this. I have had a couple of injuries, but never anything that caused me pain outside of the gym.
Ditto for many of my friends/colleagues.
Sounds like you may just be in a bubble of fatties
> Maybe if you are underdoing it its possible but if you follow the muscle building theory, you are certainly going to get fucked eventually. Even the slightest position issue can make your tendons hurt for months...
I think your definition of "underdoing it" is what's fucked. If your goal is to optimize your enjoyment of your body now and in the future, then do whatever works best to serve that goal in the gym. I have no idea what "muscle building theory" is, but if it causes constant injuries that require pain medication, then it probably isn't the best way to pursue your goals.
> Too bad exercise seems to be a must after you are 50+
This really varies from person to person. Judging by the people I know, the non-resistance-trainers are worse off at least by forty, earlier for many. Everybody has pain, but people doing resistance training have less pain while being able to enjoy more activities.
Personally, I started having occasional back pain in my mid-twenties, often when I woke up in the morning. My dad said it started at the same age for him and got slowly worse over time, and he just put up with it. A few years later I discovered weightlifting, and a year later I wasn't waking up with back pain anymore -- one of the many things about lifting weights that completely surprised me. (I got into it in the early 2000s, when 99% of the information online was meathead bullshit just drenched in testosterone, sexism, and homophobia, and I was lucky to stumble across a single web site that made a case for lifting weights without the off-putting machismo. I never had a bunch influencers promising that lifting weights would cure every problem in my life, so almost everything positive about lifting weights came as a surprise to me.)
A problem that both my parents started experiencing around forty, and which I encountered on the same schedule, was chronic knee pain. It took me a couple of years to figure out some contributing factors and fix them, but now I don't have knee pain, while still enjoying a lot of activities that my parents gave up long before my age.
My friends sometimes say things like, you hurt yourself playing soccer, isn't that dumb? Why are you doing things that hurt you? And my question back to them is, can you even play soccer? How many years has it been since you could play soccer for even five minutes without seriously hurting yourself? I'm going to take a few weeks off and then I'll be able to play soccer again, what's your plan? Late thirties and early forties is when sedentary people discover that attempting to join in on fun physical activities is not as pleasant for them as they remember, and/or likely to result in an injury that takes a long time to heal, so they start to opt out. When you see someone in their forties look particularly satisfied while they stand to one side at a gathering while others are playing a casual pickup game of soccer or Ultimate, it's because they're internally congratulating themselves on having the wisdom not to try.
Obviously I'm going to hit limitations that exercise can't fix. But in the meantime, I'm hitting one problem after another that exercise can fix, and seeing my sedentary friends hit the same eminently fixable problems like brick walls.
The best was galantamine, noopept, acetyltyrosine, and cdp-choline. It was beloved by many.
However, my magnum opus could have been stacks that changed daily, to prevent any neurochemical adaptation or tolerance.
But, at some point the almighty paycheck hijacked my brain. Why not include money as an anti-nootropic in your study?
Judging by the boundless stupidity we are seeing in the world of oligarchs now, maybe too much money is tge ultimate anti-nootropic /s
All therapy, practiced with any consistency, is effective -- probably because sacrificing for one's self builds up self-investment, and self-investment leads to self-protective decision-making that improves outcome and outlook.
Nootropics with perceptible feedback will always seem to be working. This might make their practice more consistent initially, but actually undercuts the build-up of self-regard by replacing it with dependency.
The statistical and analytical perspective is the mature way to handle objective decisions over stochastic processes, and it's the right approach for validating drugs at population scale.
But for personal assessments, decisions, and planning, the statistical can at best provide warnings about addiction or ineffectiveness. But more dangerously, it can give a veneer of objective confidence reinforcing self-destructive feedback loops, and suppress the uncertainty that would drive reflection and personal integration.
It's much better to embrace uncertainty, and share with a friend.
This is just clearly false?
I don't mean to go super-literal here, but unless you have a very narrow definition of what counts as therapy (or if your definition of "therapy" is simply "any thing which, practiced with consistency, is effective") this is not even wrong.
