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An Experience with Modafinil

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Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#331

Post by prepend »

inter_netuser wrote: post #167
dpark wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have high confidence that you will never find this study, and that it doesn’t exist. I’m not accusing you of malice, but I think you must be misremembering something. But I’d love to be wrong. That would be a very interesting result.

It was in a context of a lecture, it could be that she referenced multiple papers. but, like it or not, caffeine is a psychostimulant, and psychostimulant substitution is fairly well established, idk whats the controversy. if you want to find it, you might have to crawl thru every reference of volkow's 100+ papers on cocaine.

> if you want to find it, you might have to crawl thru every reference of volkow's 100+ papers on cocaine.

If you want to use the reference, I suggest you find it and validate it exists before trying to make some claim.

I also don’t think anything malicious but think it’s more likely that you misunderstand something than the paper exists and you can’t find it.

As a reader trying to determine if your claim is bullshit it’s not worth the risk that you’re wrong for me to exhaustively review all 100+ papers to make sure it doesn’t exist.

As the saying goes, “If you hear hoofbeats outside your door, it’s probably a horse not a zebra.”

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#332

Post by Ghast »

brotchie wrote: post #12

Modafinil is a pretty amazing drug. The come down after one use isn’t too bad. But if you’ve been using it daily for a week, the comedown is BRUTAL: pretty much feel like you have zero energy and feel like laying prone for 8 hours. Once did 48 straight awake on it and felt wide awake 36 hours in… Distinctly remember the 1st time I took it. Was perhaps 8pm at night and I swore it was 8am in the morning and I’d just ha…

I've never felt a comedown from it. I take it 6 days a week.

I wonder if some of that 'comedown' is just lack of sleep.

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#333

Post by [deleted] »

inter_netuser wrote: post #305
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The study scales ended up being skewed because one subject had paradoxical response and felt relaxed instead on amphetamines, lol. That happens to me and I want to research what it means but your link doesnt seem to work

It’s an old study, from 60s. No OCR. You can get the full text from other sources but it will be useless for your purposes, they don’t spend any time on that at all. Being calm and relaxed on amphetamines can potentially mean there is some arousal disorder: sleep apnea, narcolepsy, delayed sleep syndrome, or just chronic sleep deficit. Maybe concussions (mild TBI), amphetamines work for that too. ADHD is most likely…

[deleted]

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#334

Post by anonymousDan »

nfw2 wrote: post #269

Modafinil had only major flaw in my experience, but it was significant enough for me to stop taking it; it made it very difficult to stick to a 24-hour circadian rhythm. To illustrate, if I got a full night sleep, then took modafinil, I would be up for easily 18 hours without feeling any urge to sleep...which seems great until it's 5am, and you need to be at work again in 4 hours. The apparent solution to the problem…

Ha, I had a friend who had the exact same problem when writing up his PhD thesis. His solution? Take modafinil just before going to bed - he would then sleep through the first 8 hours or so and wake up fully charged. By the time he got to the end of the day it would be wearing off and he would repeat the whole process. He did that for about a month straight I think. Having said that he was a bit nuts in general!

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#336

Post by brimble »

mise_en_place wrote: post #96
brimble wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Have to", maybe not. Will perform better if they do, probably. Will be outcompeted by others if they don't, many of whom only did better because they used drugs, yes. It took me half a lifetime to really come to grips with it, but fact is, winners absolutely do use drugs. William S. Sessions' anti-drug arcade game ads lied to me.

Be careful with this line of thinking. It can lead you to justify some extremely unhealthy habits. You'll justify it by saying it's fine, you're getting things done. But the cost will always be there, either physical or mental.

Don't worry, I'm still taking it pretty easy. I'm just not surprised when I see someone who's very successful and seems far more alert and energetic than I could possibly be without some serious uppers—mystery solved, they're very probably on some serious uppers.

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#337

Post by darawk »

inter_netuser wrote: post #173
bb88 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you're in that 20% that can. He still has an out.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7714788/ >“The mood effects but not the physiological effects of intravenous caffeine were similar to those previously observed with cocaine in studies using similar methods and subjects.” https://archive.fo/bLX94 >This is obviously worrying. “Cocaine is one of the most addictive substances of abuse,” says Volkow. “Ritalin we give to children.” She stresses, however, that taking a stim…

> ....but why would you even try pure i.v. caffeine though? cocaine i can understand, but caffeine?

Sometimes when you're an IV drug user and you're out of real drugs, you do weird shit. I had a tub of anhydrous caffeine, had to try it.

I get that you think you can disprove things like this with science, and that's generally a good perspective to have. But cocaine and caffeine are nothing alike. It's the difference between a kiss on the cheek and a punch in the face. You could describe those two things in the same terms if you wanted to be abstract and clinical enough, but the idea that they are indistinguishable is laughable to anyone who has experienced both.

Caffeine is a moderate boost to wakefulness. You feel a little more energetic, a little more awake. Maybe a bit happier. Cocaine is every form of success you've ever felt multiplied by 100, rolled into one, and compressed into 3 seconds. You ever win a low probability bet, or be right about something when everyone you know doubted you? That's what cocaine feels like.

Shoot up caffeine and you might work a little harder for a couple of hours. Shoot up cocaine and you might marry a stripper you don't even know yet.

EDIT: What I will say is that, perhaps at a sufficiently low dose, they may be hard to distinguish. But at the doses consumed by recreational users, they very much are not. My guess is that these studies are using very low doses of cocaine compared to what a recreational user would take, for ethical/safety reasons. So, in that context, it may be true, but you should not take that to mean that cocaine and caffeine are in any meaningful sense indistinguishable.

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#338

Post by jpalomaki »

sauwan wrote: post #217
pengaru wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 80% of people couldn't distinguish I.V. cocaine from I.V. caffeine in some study I am unable to locate at the moment, which I think involved Nora Volkow from NIH, either as PI or collaborator. All this tells me is that I'm clearly consuming caffeine incorrectly in the form of coffee and/or tea.

I quit caffeine about 8 years, only having a white tea on occasions. But I love a cup of decaf every so often. One day at work, one of my coworkers swapped the decaf pot with the regular pot and I drank a 16oz mug before I realized what was going on. I was absolutely lit up and it was an incredible experience. I felt utterly amazing. Like I could take on the world. I had a hard time focusing at work, because I just w…

Best part of quitting coffee is that you can start drinking it again.

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#339

Post by ActorNightly »

smegger001 wrote: post #315
ActorNightly wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in modern day, we have FDA, which is a very-tough-to-get-by filter for public medication.

The FDA has decided that this a substance the needs restricting from general consumption for a reason wrong or no. Was that the right decision or wrong I don't know. But I have to assume they have some reason but it would be enough for me to take seriously the possible consequences of having a adverse reaction when dealing with the lives of OTHER PEOPLE if he had started his self experiment on his own time that would…

Your statement is essentially "given OPs current state and prior probability of him making a mistake on the job, and the action of taking modafinil, that probability increases given the OP takes that action.

Which is not an accurate statement.

Modafinil is a nootropic, which means that it can increase attention, therefore decreasing the chance of a mistake. The probability that someone will experience more wakefulness and attention is high in this regard.

And it being FDA approved lowers the probability of an adverse reaction that can cause someone to not be in the right mind and make mistakes to a very small number, which accounts for things like heart conditions.

Re: An Experience with Modafinil

#340

Post by kortex »

inter_netuser wrote: post #312
kortex wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But normal. The cloud of thoughts gone, I am able to make myself do anything with one thought, I have energy, the aches are gone, the tinnitus is gone, I don't second guess, I don't overthink. I just am and I do. It's amazing. Have you been evaluated for ADHD? This is one of the classic tells. Methylphenidate is structurally and chemically very similar to cocaine. Vyvanse is definitely the best when it comes to dur…

I have no idea why people like Vyvanse so much. It’s just time release with a fancy mechanism and paranoia around abuse potential of instant release formulations, which work just as well in most, if not all. However, Ritalin is less neurotoxic than amphetamines that can indeed hike your risks of Parkinson’s (and probably few other things)

Because it's been life-changing for me, and countless others? It's not just time release; that's the old school drugs like Concerta.

The chief problem I have with all stimulants is too fast of an impulse response. It comes on too fast, crashes too fast. For me, for instant release drugs, I experience the following half-lives:

- methylphenidate: 60-90m

- amphetamine salts/dexedrine: 3-4h

- caffeine: 3h

- modafinil: 6-8h

Once a drug reaches about 1.5 HLs (about one Tau/time constant, conveniently), I start fading hard. There is a hysteresis effect: peaking/crashing/re-dosing is not the same as plateauing at some in-between value. Once my brain checks out, that's kind of it for the day.

So what Concerta, Adderall XR, and similar do for me, is give me what feels like two randomly spaced doses of instant release over a 4-6h window. This is unpredictable and thrashes my mental state. It peaks too high and crashes too low. The companies market these drugs based on averaging the plasma profiles of individuals to show a nice smooth curve, but I dug into the literature and this is NOT what you see on an individual level, at all. Concerta just doesn't do it for me.

Vyvanse is way smoother. The plasma peak is already low-pass filtered by the pharmacokinetics of hydrolysis of the lysdexamphetamine. As a result, my subjective experience is basically a 6h plateau. I split my dose to basically get a nice, actually smooth profile over 8-12h with a gentle taper instead of a crash. That also means lower peak plasma conc, and peak plasma is the greatest risk factor in neurotoxicity.

If you actually dig into the literature on neurotoxicity of amphetamines, you basically don't see any until you start getting to the equivalent of 50-100mg IR, and even then it's basically within the noise floor until you get to hundreds of mg per day.

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