Modafinil: the best stimulant
Modafinil is the best stimulant. It lasts longer than nicotine, builds less tolerance than caffeine, changes mood less than amphetamines, and is less dangerous than cocaine.
It’s extremely effective at what it does, which is keeping people awake. So much that it’s possible to pull an all-nighter with no effort as long as the drug is active in the body. It’s said to be a fairly popular drug at the White House. Joe Rogan and Sam Altman have said positive things about it.
It’s been approved by the FDA to treat various sleep disorders; since it’s a controlled substance, a prescription or a grey market source are necessary.
In terms of statistical effect size, it’s surprisingly low. It decreases sleepiness in narcoleptics is about 0.61 SD on the ESS scale. I assume that people who have actually tried the drug would have a different opinion — myself included.
In terms of cognitive enhancement? A disappointment. The best meta-analysis on the drug’s effect finds an overall effect of d = .12, and it barely crossed the threshold of statistical significance.
Said meta-analysis was restricted to healthy adults. Presumably, it improves cognitive function more in people with sleep deprivation, just like adderall does.
People have studied its effects on chess performance, along with caffeine and ritalin. Overall, it didn’t have an effect on winning. It made people make better moves, but it took them longer to make decisions, so they lost on time more often. The effects cancelled each other out. The exact implications of this are unclear to me: it could be that the drugs made them smarter, but caused them to take more time to make decisions independently of that. Or a dozen of other interpretations.
Modafinil’s side effects are weak and easy to ignore. There’s a 1/1,000,000 chance of getting a Stevens-Johnson reaction, which causes a fraction of your skin to die. They say you can avoid the headaches by taking choline, but I haven’t tried that myself.
The drug does build up tolerance. When I first started taking the drug, it felt extremely strong, and a ~300mg dose gave me bad anxiety. I fixed that by taking 50-100mg instead. Over time, I started having to take the normal dose (200mg) to get the same effect on wakefulness. Even on an appropriate dose, I felt less empathetic and more extraverted. Kind of like amphetamines, but a more muted effect.
