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For years now, I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with the world of what my editor dubbed “White Collar PEDs,” or productivity-enhancing drugs. Though I’d never heard the phrase before, I knew immediately what he was talking about—the seemingly infinite profusion of supplements and “nootropics,” prescription “study drugs,” and illegal or semi-legal drugs that have become popular among young professionals seeking not to get high, but to optimize their brains and bodies for work.
Every year, there’s a drumbeat of worried think-pieces about the rise of these substances. But it’s no real mystery about their popularity. The human mind does not want to spend eight hours or more per day planted in front of a computer screen, when there are far more inherently interesting activities it could be dedicating its attention to. Learning to suppress these impulses and knuckle down anyway is, of course, the work of civilization, and yet our minds nonetheless frequently revolt. We feel bored, tired, distracted; we are assailed with bouts of “brain fog,” in which we seem to be operating a standard deviation below our normal IQ; our brains keep us up at night with worries or misplaced energy, ruining our sleep and thus sapping our performance the next day. Nonetheless, we must work. And so we seek a little help.
I also have a bit of personal experience in this world. Back during my first few weeks of graduate school, a classmate, on hearing me express awe at the sheer amount of reading that was assigned every week, advised me that at least half of my peers were getting chemical assistance. He suggested I could make my life a lot easier for myself if I did the same. Roughly a week later, I was walking out of a local doctor’s office with a monthly prescription for Vyvanse, a “prodrug” that metabolizes into dextroamphetamine, the drug distributed to Allied bomber pilots during World War II. Now, it would be helping me tear through dry scholarly tomes on the concept of convivencia in Early Modern Spain.
Learning to suppress these impulses and knuckle down anyway is, of course, the work of civilization, and yet our minds nonetheless frequently revolt.
I spent most of the next five years, from ages 24 to 29, as a semi-regular Vyvanse user, taking 40mg a day anywhere from one to five days a week, depending on how much work I had. I’ve read plenty of confessional essays from other writers about their addictions to prescription stimulants, but in my case, there were no horror stories. The drug worked well for its intended purpose, which was to help me override my natural tendencies toward sloth and forgetfulness and do whatever it was I needed to do. But it came with enough off-putting side effects that I never reached the point of taking it every day. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I’d just moved cities and had not yet found a new doctor who I could ask to renew my prescription remotely, so I just stopped taking it and figured out a way to cope.
Still, ever since ditching the Vyvanse, I’ve suffered at times from my own absentmindedness and reluctance to deal with the sort of low-level administrative tasks necessary for modern life. I’ve often wondered if I should go back and experiment with a lower dosage, or if there was some alternative drug or biohack that could help me answer all of my emails on time while also allowing me to sleep. So, offered the opportunity to test-drive as many substances as I could get my hands on, gonzo style, I figured—sure, why not?
Vyvanse
The brand name for lisdexamfetamine, a prodrug that, once ingested, slowly converts to dextroamphetamine, one of the active ingredients in Adderall. Originally developed as a longer-acting and less easily abused alternative to dextroamphetamine, lisdexamfetamine is now the third most commonly prescribed stimulant in the United States, according to the DEA, with around 15 million prescriptions dispensed in 2023. With insurance, a 30-day supply of Vyvanse usually runs around $50.
Given my prior experience with the drug, I assumed I’d be able to briefly get back on it for the purposes of this article. Back in 2015, I’d found the process of getting Vyvanse incredibly easy. I went in for one appointment, took a questionnaire, and walked out with a prescription. Once I was in the system, a renewal was only ever a phone call away. Now, a decade later, it was nearly impossible. I hadn’t had an active prescription in more than five years, so no provider I spoke to was comfortable writing me one without a new evaluation.
I picked a doctor near me, who had me fill out an adult ADHD self-diagnosis test, which found “symptoms highly consistent with ADHD in adults,” and that I warranted “further investigation.” The “investigation” turned out to be an exploratory interview with a nurse—in which I was honest, and which also ended with the conclusion I likely had ADHD—and then a battery of tests, one measuring my ability to press a spacebar in response to patterns of beeps and silences, the other measuring my ability to press a spacebar in response to letters flashing across my computer screen. I apparently passed these, because in my follow-up meeting with the nurse, I learned that my beep-test skills were so magnificent that I was not eligible for a stimulant prescription. Instead, the nurse offered me Strattera, a non-habit-forming norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor that some patients found helpful for managing the symptoms of ADHD. But more on that later.
Thwarted by mental health gatekeeping, I reached out to friends. One offered me a few tablets of dextroamphetamine, which I accepted, and which I’ll review in a moment. But eventually, after about a week of searching, I was able to procure two 30mg Vyvanse, a little less than my old dosage. I waited for a day when I had a particularly heavy workload, set myself an early alarm for 5:30am, and popped the first of the pills before drifting off for an extra 30 minutes of sleep, a trick I’d learned back in the day. When you’re on these drugs, you need all the sleep you can get.
Reader, don’t let anyone ever tell you that Vyvanse doesn’t work. Normally when I get up in the morning, I’m stiff and bleary-eyed, and remain that way until sometime between my second and third cups of coffee. With the Vyvanse in me, I woke up ready to go. What had seemed, the day before, like an overwhelming pile of tasks all of a sudden seemed easy; the day stretched out before me like hundreds of miles of empty highway. Within the first hour, I’d answered several emails I’d been putting off, made an extensive outline for the newsletter I wanted to write later that afternoon, and then folded and put up some laundry during a five-minute break that I normally would have frittered away on social media. By 10:30am, a time when I’m normally just getting started, I was all but finished with my formal job responsibilities for the day and had begun digging into random tasks I’d been putting off for months—filling out insurance forms for healthcare reimbursement, filling out forms to register my car in New York City, pruning my personal email inbox of clutter from endless newsletters and promotions. After another hour, I’d finished with that, and began assembling a reading list for a longer-term project I was working on. Then I started fiddling with my investments. It was like my work day had been extended by six hours, without the loss of any free time.
What’s more, I felt great, at least during the first half of the day. Due no doubt to the hypernormal amounts of dopamine flooding my brain, I was confident, motivated, and easily able to push aside the sort of ambient distractions that normally sap my productivity. Instead of my normal post-lunch crash, I simply plowed ahead and did more work. The euphoria started to taper off a bit by the late afternoon—I no longer felt excited to be working, and I began to notice that I was grinding my teeth—but I remained alert. When I finished, I went to the gym to burn off my excess energy, which proved almost impossible to do. I ripped off five sets of heavy squats, an exercise I’d been avoiding since a sciatica flare-up earlier in the year, and then, not yet tired, did a whole battery of split squats, teardrop squats, hamstring curls, and back extensions, finishing off with a mile on the treadmill. I thought to myself, I made a horrible mistake ever going off this drug.
Vyvanse has a smooth come-up, cresting into a peak that lasts several hours, followed by a long and slow taper during the latter half of the day. ‘Dexy’ felt more like railing a line of cocaine.
By nighttime, however, I was starting to remember why I had. The euphoria had now completely worn off and I felt a sort of dull mental fatigue, but I couldn’t really relax, either. It was like my brain wanted to start shutting down but was being artificially prevented from doing so. I tried watching TV with my fiancée, but I became impatient with the slow pace of the medium, and instead decided to read, which at least gave me more to focus on. My normal bedtime, 11pm, passed without the wiry feeling going away, and I began downing as many sleep supplements as we had in our apartment—magnesium glycinate, L-theanine, glycine, chamomile tea, melatonin. I tried to go to sleep around midnight, but realized after 15 minutes it wasn’t going to happen and went into the living room to read on the couch. I read about 100 pages of A Bright Shining Lie before making another attempt, this time well past 2am. I must’ve eventually fallen asleep, because next thing I knew I was waking up on the couch, with my 7am backup alarm blaring and feeling like I got hit by a truck.
Under the general principle that what goes up must also come down, I felt like dogshit the next day. Sleeping in was not an option, and I considered simply taking my second Vyvanse pill to power through the day. But I feared the prospect of yet another insomniac night and figured that living through the hangover was more journalistically honest. So I decided to soldier on. My focus felt shot—even more so than in normal low-sleep situations—and I found myself stumbling through my morning routine, initially trying to make coffee without putting water in the machine and then accidentally setting my phone down in the refrigerator while taking out my orange juice. My knees and lower back ached from overtraining them the previous day, and my jaw hurt from the teeth-grinding, which I assumed had continued throughout the night. I had a bad case of brain fog and was not motivated to do much of anything.
Strattera
This one will be brief.
Generic name atomoxetine, Strattera is a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor initially developed by Eli Lilly to treat depression, but later approved as an ADHD treatment when it was found to be ineffective for its intended use. Strattera is far less commonly prescribed than Adderall, Vyvanse, or Ritalin—4.3 million prescriptions were dispensed in 2023, per the DEA—but may be favored for patients with a history of addiction, due to its low potential for abuse. It’s also cheap; with my insurance, a month’s supply of Strattera cost less than $10.
Strattera is what the doctor gave me when I passed the ADHD beeping test, and it’s sort of like a diet Vyvanse. Like Vyvanse, it floods the brain with norepinephrine, improving energy and focus, but without the sugar, i.e. the dopamine. Like most diet products, it sucks.
In a narrow sense, the drug worked for me. For about four hours after taking it, I felt a small but noticeable improvement in my ability to focus. But without the dopamine, I had no real desire to do so. If anything, working felt worse on Strattera than sober. I wasn’t distracted by my phone, and I could grind for hours without taking a break. But the subjective experience was of a grim death march through the minor annoyances of email-job life, Sisyphean in its pointlessness. I felt like a character in Office Space.
In my experience, a drug’s hangover is usually roughly proportionate to the high it delivers, with mild drugs producing correspondingly mild comedowns. Not so here, which is why Strattera gets my vote for the worst substance of all time. The active phase of the drug was moderately effective and mildly unpleasant. After the four-and-a-half-hour mark, though, things got genuinely miserable. The first symptom was a feeling of crushing hopelessness, like being thrown back into the worst breakup of your life. Far from being able to focus on work, I was suddenly ruminating on every anxiety tucked away in any back corner of my mind.
The overwhelming fatigue that came shortly afterward was thus something of a relief. I had to splash cold water on my face to wake myself up to finish the work day, then realized I was up for neither exercise nor cooking. I laid on the couch, ordered a burrito on UberEats, and went to bed at 8pm with the sun still up, no longer able to sustain focus on the television, let alone anything “productive.” When I woke up the next morning, I threw the rest of the pills in the trash.
Dextroamphetamine
Basically like Adderall but stripped of levoamphetamine, a less potent amphetamine isomer that helps to smooth the overall effects of the drug. Dextroamphetamine, or “dexy,” has been around since the 1930s, and was issued to US bomber pilots in World War II to help keep them awake on nighttime missions. It’s still around today, but far less common than Adderall or Ritalin (methylphenidate). Around 915,000 dextroamphetamine prescriptions were dispensed in the United States in 2023, according to the DEA.
Given that this is the drug that Vyvanse metabolizes into, I was expecting it to be more similar to the Vyvanse experience than it was. There was certainly a family resemblance, but the best way I can explain the difference is that while Vyvanse feels like a real prescription drug—something that’s been designed in a lab by scientists to boost your energy and attention—dextroamphetamine feels like a street drug, something that teenagers would take to get high.
My friend had given me two 10mg pills of the stuff, which I took on two separate days, spaced about two weeks apart. On the first day, I took it in the morning before heading into my office, hoping it would help me drown out the distraction of being around coworkers. It had almost precisely the opposite effect. Vyvanse has a smooth come-up, cresting into a peak that lasts several hours, followed by a long and slow taper during the latter half of the day.
“Dexy” felt more like railing a line of cocaine. Riding the subway into Manhattan, I noticed that my palms were sweating and my heart was racing, and when I arrived in the office, sitting down and staring at my computer was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to talk to people, to listen to music, to leave the office and walk around, to get a beer at lunch. I did all of these things but the last one, because by lunchtime, I hadn’t accomplished a single thing I’d set out to do that morning. By 1pm, I was in the midst of a hard crash, which I used to actually get my work done.
I slept fine that first night, which made me overconfident in my second go-round. Figuring that the effects of the pill had fully worn off after about six hours, the next time I took a pill, I did it around three in the afternoon on a day I was expecting to have to stay up late to meet a deadline. I did have to stay up late, and I ended up filing my story around 1am. But the dexy kept me up for another three hours after that, which included a frightening episode of tachycardia around 3am in which I briefly considered waking my fiancée and telling her to drive me to an emergency room. The episode subsided and I eventually fell asleep, but I figured that was a sign I should end any experimentation with dexy, which hadn’t helped much with work anyway.
Modafinil
Unlike the other drugs on this list, Modafinil is not primarily an ADHD treatment. It’s a non-amphetamine stimulant and “wakefulness-promoting agent” developed in France in the 1980s as a treatment for narcolepsy, but its current claim to fame is as the “upper” of choice for the US Air Force to manage pilot fatigue on long missions (it’s also frequently prescribed for night-shift workers). Prescription modafinil is generally cheap with insurance, but the variant I bought—a supplement containing adrafinil, a closely related substance—cost $40 for a jar of 30 pills.
Modafinil was not on my radar for this article until I chanced across a series of posts from an X user calling himself @modaminister, who appeared to be Sebastian Campos, the co-founder of an energy drink company called Adrafül. Campos was hawking his company’s signature energy drink, “The OG,” which promised “enhanced focus, extended-release energy, and no crash” for members of “the productive classes” who wanted to experience an “uninterrupted flow state.” What wasn’t clear on the website was how Adrafül worked so well; the website merely stated that it included a “low dose of caffeine and nootropics,” and a search for “Adrafül ingredients” led me to a company page that purported to explain the product’s effect with reference to its specific ratio of caffeine and L-theanine. On X, however, one user pointed out that the ingredient list included adrafinil, which metabolizes into modafinil in the body.
While it’s almost certainly illegal to sell an adrafinil energy drink—adrafinil is unscheduled, but the Food and Drug Administration considers it “unlawful” to include it in food—I decided I should probably give it a whirl. Unfortunately, Adrafül remained sold out for the entirety of the time I was working on this article, but I managed to find an online nootropics store that sold me an adrafinil-containing nootropic supplement. I vaguely wondered if every successful nootropic worked by dosing unwitting customers with precursors of a Schedule IV drug.
The adrafinil supplement, however, was quite effective. I took it daily for about a week, and while I wouldn’t say I achieved hours of effortless productivity or uninterrupted flow state, it did help me feel wakeful in the morning and to power through my typical post-lunch crash. There was no real high or euphoric feeling, as with Vyvanse, nor was there the terrifying depression and crushing fatigue of Strattera. It gave me a “clean” feeling, not quite as good as the natural energy that comes from good sleep and exercise, but a better approximation of that than the other drugs. Tolerance built quickly, though, with my Friday dose giving me considerably less energy than my Monday dose had. I was also starting to experience persistent dull headaches by the late afternoon, which was apparently a common side effect. It was irritating enough that by the end of the week, I was ready to go back to my normal “nootropic”—caffeine.
Zyn
The meme; the legend. This, too, will be brief.
Zyn is the original brand of smokeless tobacco pouches, introduced by a Swedish company, Swedish Match, as a tobacco-free alternative to snus in 2016 (its major competitor, Velo, is also Swedish, though both companies are now owned by international tobacco conglomerates). In the United States, Zyn is sold in tins of 3mg or 6mg pouches, though the European version of the product—which I purchase from my local Yemeni-owned bodega in New York City—also comes in 9mg, 11mg, and 14mg varieties. Retail, in New York, a tin costs around $9—up from $5–6 only a few years ago.
I am well aware that some people use Zyn and other nicotine products as a “PED.” Technically, as even health nuts like Stanford’s Dr. Anthony Huberman attest, nicotine is a “nootropic” with cognitive-enhancing properties, allegedly improving focus, attention, working memory, and processing speed. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of programmers who will stash away nicotine pouches the way normal people might hide away a spare Adderall, i.e. as a crutch to help get through particularly intense periods of work.
For me, however, 6mg Zyn—rising to 9mg in times of crisis—has become a necessity akin to drinking water. I no longer know what Zyn “feels like,” per se, since I only feel its absence, in the form of scattered attention, forgetfulness, and low-level irritability. When I am on deadline or otherwise swamped with work, I rarely go 10 minutes without a pouch in my mouth. Half-hearted attempts to quit or moderate my usage are, inevitably, thwarted by periods of high stress, when I return to the Zyn lest I punch a hole in the wall or fling my MacBook through an open window.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
If you’ve ever poked around in the world of nootropics and productivity enhancers, you’ll know that the substances themselves are only one part of a broader universe of “alternative health” and holistic self-care practices designed to make us fitter, happier, and more productive. These are the sorts of things that periodically bubble up on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and were briefly popularized by Huberman, before he was taken down a peg by New York magazine for simultaneously keeping several girlfriends in different states.
You know the sort of thing I’m talking about: saunas. Cold plunges. Sunlight first thing in the morning. Dopamine fasting. Real fasting. Breath work. Breath work (Wim Hof method). Nose breathing. Taping your mouth shut at night. Strength training. Flexibility training. Eliminating seed oils. Fixing your gut health. Fixing your testosterone. Learning jiu-jitsu.
Indeed, in much of this world, the PEDs are frowned upon as a sort of shortcut to enlightenment. Sure, stimulants and nootropics can offer a temporary boost, but you don’t want to be reliant on popping a pill every morning to get through your work day, especially when similar effects can be achieved through more natural methods. I naturally incline toward this view, and none of the drugs I tried seemed like the sort of thing I’d want to take every day, especially since—thank God—I’m not a junior investment banker working 90 hours a week at a job I hate.
I am not a regular Huberman listener, and upon doing a little digging, I realized that his recommendations, laid out via hundreds of hours of podcasts and then debated at length by his devotees on forums, were going to be too complicated for me to master in time for my deadline. Instead, I found a dumbed-down version of Huberman’s basic protocols on Reddit, and decided to combine those with the recommendations from Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, a book I’d frequently heard cited in the world of bro wellness. For two weeks, I’d stick with my normal supplement routine in the morning: creatine, L-theanine, methyl B-12, and coffee. Every day, I’d follow the Hubermanian advice to go outside immediately after waking, so that natural sunlight could help regulate my circadian rhythm. I’d abstain from alcohol completely during the week, and try to abstain as much as possible from refined sugar, while getting the sugar I needed from fruit and dairy. I would tightly regulate my phone usage, and my screen time generally, and try to avoid all screens for at least an hour before bedtime, which would be consistently set at 11pm. I would exercise every day, use the sauna at my gym, and follow it up with a cold shower. I’d sleep every night with a breath strip on my nose.
I no longer know what Zyn ‘feels like,’ per se, since I only feel its absence, in the form of scattered attention, forgetfulness, and low-level irritability.
After an initial adjustment period, I found most of these recommendations easy to follow—with the exception of the cold shower, which remained excruciating no matter how long I’d spent sweating in the sauna immediately beforehand. The major problem, I soon realized, was going to be regulating my screen time. I had not previously thought of myself as a particularly screen-addled person—I have not had Facebook for nearly a decade, I check Instagram only about once a month, and if I spend more than three minutes on TikTok I feel like I’m having a schizophrenic break. And yet, as soon as I tried to impose a rule on myself that I could not check my phone during the work day or look at screens after 10pm, I was forced to confront the fact that I now live the overwhelming majority of my life on screens.
I work on screens—laptop, monitor, iPhone—and, as my day job is mostly remote, all of my work-related communication is mediated through them. There are the emails and Zoom calls, of course, plus a work group chat that, due to the time-zone differences of its members and the unconventional sleep habits of Tablet’s editorial staff, is active virtually 24/7. I keep up with my family through a wide array of chats, with largely-but-not-entirely overlapping members—Dad, Mom, and brother to discuss holiday plans; Dad, brother, and cousin to talk sports; Mom, aunts, and uncles to share updates from this or that branch of the family. Socially, my closest friends are scattered up and down the East Coast, and for most of the year, we keep up via a long-running group chat that, on a particularly active day, will have 1,000 messages or more.
My drug of choice, however, is X—though using it doesn’t really feel like much of a choice. In my day job, I’m the editor of a daily politics-focused newsletter, where my duty is to provide readers with a more or less comprehensive digest of everything they need to know from the day’s news. On a normal day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check X. The last thing I do before going to bed is check X. I browse X while I sip my morning coffee. Throughout the day, I take breaks from writing to see if anything new has hit X that I might need to incorporate into my writing. After I’m done for the day, I keep monitoring X throughout the evening to get ahead of the next day’s stories. When I try to ignore X and source my writing from the “mainstream” press, I inevitably find that The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal has omitted some critical piece of context without which it is impossible to truly understand the story. If I take too much time away from X—on weekends, for instance—I inevitably find I lose the thread of the news, and have to work doubly hard on Monday to catch up.
For the first week of my experiment, however, I did a reasonably good job suppressing my desire to scroll. I read physical books and magazines at night. During breaks in my work day, I’d roll out a yoga mat and do stretches rather than check my phone. I monitored X in time-limited increments—10 minutes per hour, max—and only from my laptop during normal work hours.
I felt fantastic. For the first time in what felt like a year, I got at least eight hours of sleep five nights in a row, after regularly getting less than seven. I’d read in Lembke’s book that cold showers promote a release of dopamine, and I used that knowledge to force myself through at least a minute of one each day, even if every time, my body reacted to the shock by sending panic signals to my brain that I was about to die. Five minutes after stepping out, I felt incredible. Having heard somewhere that training while nose breathing can improve testosterone, I took to going on jogs with my mouth closed, running for as long as I could breathing only through my nose. Whether it was the placebo effect or not, that felt good, too. Also for the first time in what felt like a year, I went nearly a whole week without once losing my keys inside my apartment.
By week two, though, events intervened to ruin my little holistic bro science Eden. Late one night, as I was coming home from dinner with my fiancée, news broke that Israel had attacked Iran. I’d been covering Middle East news on a near-daily basis for almost two years now, and I felt I had a professional duty to “monitor the situation,” as X users described their compulsive need for by-the-minute updates on the war. After a week and a half of minimal screens at night, I soon had something of a war room set up in my living room—the news on the TV, my laptop open to a dozen feeds at once via X Premium, and my phone pinging with hundreds of updates from various group chats. I even stuck in a single AirPod to listen to a Middle East-focused X Space with one ear, while listening to the cable news broadcaster with the other. The first night of the war, I blew straight through my 11pm bedtime and stayed up until nearly three in the morning. Four hours later, I woke up and, skipping my morning sunlight, immediately got back on my screens to see what had happened while I slept. Things continued pretty much like this for the rest of the war, even as I spent the last week of it at the Paris Air Show. Jet-lagged in a foreign country, I was still glued to my phone, trying to gauge from social media reports the extent of the US bombing damage to the Fordow nuclear facility.
It was of course my fault that I fell off the wagon in the way I did; with better discipline, I feel I could have maintained a semblance of the routine that had seemed to be working so well for my health and productivity, and I fully intend to reinstitute such a routine as soon as I’m able. After all, there was no reason I needed to read about Trump’s overnight Truth Social posts immediately upon waking rather than 20 minutes later, after I’d had my morning dose of staring into the sun.
At the same time, the experience was a good reminder of why people reach for the PEDs in the first place, rather than simply “fixing” one’s “underlying issues.” I’m in my early thirties and don’t yet have children, which is what allowed me to even attempt to set up such a neat little system in the first place. Even with those advantages, things happened that I simply had to pay attention to at inconvenient times and in suboptimal ways for my health, out of a sheer sense of professional responsibility. By the time I sat down to put the finishing touches on this essay, I was once again tired, jet-lagged, and really, really wishing I’d remembered to pack the rest of my adrafinil.
Park MacDougald is editor of The Scroll, a daily afternoon newsletter from Tablet Magazine, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.