I use Adrafinil, which is a non-controlled version of Modafinil. Taking one pill makes me want to do intellectual work and gives me better focus. Taking two pills makes me so sharp I find it a bit difficult to “chill out”, so I really feel like spending my energy on working.
The downside is it’s difficult to wind down in the evening when I just want to relax, but that’s what cannabis is for, I guess.
I used to, as a college student, have a terrible time getting to bed. I had 8 AM classes, and so I really needed to go to bed at a reasonable time like midnight (and not 2 or 3 AM); and in the morning I would regret tremendously staying up late. A classic case of akrasia—I could probably have even quantified it all in terms of grades.
My solution was to realize that the problem was that at any moment I was enjoying whatever more than I needed the sleep. I needed some way to induce a ‘false’ sleepiness. So I looked up the options and found melatonin. 3mg of melatonin would practically club me into sleepiness after 30 minutes—so it solved the issue of not wanting to go to bed.
Of course, this caused another problem: taking the melatonin at the right time! But this turned out to be much less of an issue, perhaps because taking a pill is so much easier than winding up for the night and going to bed.
I’ve had that on occasion with modafinil, but melatonin doesn’t seem to suffer from that; which makes sense, given its role in sleep—it can’t make you need to sleep and not make you need to sleep, if you follow me. (The real danger is the dual to your syndrome: ‘too tired to wake up’, when you overdose heavily and feel like shite in the morning.)
I use Adrafinil, which is a non-controlled version of Modafinil. Taking one pill makes me want to do intellectual work and gives me better focus. Taking two pills makes me so sharp I find it a bit difficult to “chill out”, so I really feel like spending my energy on working.
The downside is it’s difficult to wind down in the evening when I just want to relax, but that’s what cannabis is for, I guess.
In the same vein of pharmaceutical solutions...
I used to, as a college student, have a terrible time getting to bed. I had 8 AM classes, and so I really needed to go to bed at a reasonable time like midnight (and not 2 or 3 AM); and in the morning I would regret tremendously staying up late. A classic case of akrasia—I could probably have even quantified it all in terms of grades.
My solution was to realize that the problem was that at any moment I was enjoying whatever more than I needed the sleep. I needed some way to induce a ‘false’ sleepiness. So I looked up the options and found melatonin. 3mg of melatonin would practically club me into sleepiness after 30 minutes—so it solved the issue of not wanting to go to bed.
Of course, this caused another problem: taking the melatonin at the right time! But this turned out to be much less of an issue, perhaps because taking a pill is so much easier than winding up for the night and going to bed.
EDIT: see my full length post on melatonin: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lt/case_study_melatonin/
I’d be worried about “too tired to go to bed” syndrome, but that might work for me if I avoided doing things where the syndrome would apply.
I’ve had that on occasion with modafinil, but melatonin doesn’t seem to suffer from that; which makes sense, given its role in sleep—it can’t make you need to sleep and not make you need to sleep, if you follow me. (The real danger is the dual to your syndrome: ‘too tired to wake up’, when you overdose heavily and feel like shite in the morning.)
Me too, except I use Modafinil b/c it has a shorter half-life so it doesn’t keep me up at night. I use it 1-3x/week.