I don’t have an answer for the actual question you’re asking (baseline side effects), however I would like to offer my experiences with nootropics. A number of years ago, I went through a phase where I tried a large variety of nootropics, including doing some basic psychometric tests on a daily basis (Stroop test, dual n-back, etc).
It’s remarkably hard to find a test that measures cognitive ability and is immune to practice effects, but I figured some testing was better than just subjective assessments of how I felt.
In all my testing, I only found a very, very small handful of drugs that had any measurable effect:
Caffeine helped significantly (or rather, not having caffeine hurt, since I was consuming a lot of caffeine on a regular basis).
Modafinil / Armodafinil was amazing. I had to stop taking it though because I eventually developed an allergic reaction. If you try this, get an actual prescription for it rather than trying to buy it from a sketchy offshore pharmacy
Alcohol had a much longer negative effect than I would have thought. If I drank on Monday night, I could still see the effects on Tuesday night, and I didn’t rebound until Wednesday. This was for even moderate drinking (i.e., 1 cocktail).
Everything else I tried (*-racetam with and without choline, L-theanine, etc) had no measurable effects. I suspect nicotine might have had a measurable effect, but I wasn’t willing to risk dependence.
Finally, I would suggest that nootropics are mostly small scale optimizations compared to the benefit you’ll see from eating healthy, exercising, getting enough sleep, and maintaining a healthy body weight. If you haven’t optimized these, take care of that first and you’ll get a much bigger result from your efforts.
I don’t have an answer for the actual question you’re asking (baseline side effects), however I would like to offer my experiences with nootropics. A number of years ago, I went through a phase where I tried a large variety of nootropics, including doing some basic psychometric tests on a daily basis (Stroop test, dual n-back, etc).
It’s remarkably hard to find a test that measures cognitive ability and is immune to practice effects, but I figured some testing was better than just subjective assessments of how I felt.
In all my testing, I only found a very, very small handful of drugs that had any measurable effect:
Caffeine helped significantly (or rather, not having caffeine hurt, since I was consuming a lot of caffeine on a regular basis).
Modafinil / Armodafinil was amazing. I had to stop taking it though because I eventually developed an allergic reaction. If you try this, get an actual prescription for it rather than trying to buy it from a sketchy offshore pharmacy
Alcohol had a much longer negative effect than I would have thought. If I drank on Monday night, I could still see the effects on Tuesday night, and I didn’t rebound until Wednesday. This was for even moderate drinking (i.e., 1 cocktail).
Everything else I tried (*-racetam with and without choline, L-theanine, etc) had no measurable effects. I suspect nicotine might have had a measurable effect, but I wasn’t willing to risk dependence.
Finally, I would suggest that nootropics are mostly small scale optimizations compared to the benefit you’ll see from eating healthy, exercising, getting enough sleep, and maintaining a healthy body weight. If you haven’t optimized these, take care of that first and you’ll get a much bigger result from your efforts.