Over the past month, I’ve used a variety of natural and easily obtainable supplements to significantly improve my focus, memory, mood, and cognition.
I have turned my brain into a more effective machine.
The typical reader of this blog probably takes a half-dozen supplements to improve his physical appearance and athletic performance. But what are you doing to improve your mental performance? Today I invite you to apply the same attitude you use in most areas of your life to your brain function.
In the future, I will write about my experiences with “heavy” Nootropics. Today’s post is limited to entry-level Nootropics which are:
- Somewhat familiar to Joe Blow on the street
- Available at your local Whole Foods or GNC rather than sketchy online pharmacies
- Unintimidating to a rookie
The supplements I’m about to recommend are not at all scary or difficult to come by, but they all have proven and remarkable effects on human brain function. So let’s get started with my favourite Nootropic combination…
1) Caffeine + Theanine
Caffeine is the ultimate Nootropic. I love coffee, but pill form is fine.
Caffeine can be paired with L-Theanine. Multiple studies show that it this combination supports a variety of positive health outcomes such as lymphocyte function, neuron health, and stress reduction.
Caffeine and Theanine complement each other perfectly. Theanine is the pill that cures approach anxiety, and is an effective natural treatment for general anxiety. With the Caffeine + Theanine stack, you get the stimulant effects of caffeine without any side effects like anxiety, increased blood pressure, and poor sleep. This is all supported by peer-reviewed studies: The combined effects of L-theanine and caffeine on cognitive performance and mood.
You can buy a three-month supply of Theanine at Amazon for $32. If you want to improve your focus, energy, and anxiety levels, I highly recommend you give it a try.
2) Fresh Vegetable Juice
Juicing is the most efficient way to increase the quantity of fruits and vegetables in your diet. I juice almost every day, and I’ve been a strong supporter of juicing for young men for two years.
Fresh juice is a quickly-absorbed punch of nutrients that your omnivorous ancestors evolved to consume in large quantities, and of which we generally don’t get enough of today. Consumption of fresh vegetables, juiced or otherwise, will benefit numerous bodily functions, cognition included. Studies demonstrate that high fruit and vegetable intake is positively correlated with antioxidant status and cognitive performance in healthy subjects.
The best place to find more information about juice recipes and the health benefits of juicing is at the Fit Juice blog.
3) Green Tea
High-quality green tea is a natural delivery mechanism for the above-mentioned Caffeine + Theanine stack, only milder. It’s a light jab compared to the 300mg caffeine + 200mg Theanine roundhouse kick to face.
4) Dark Chocolate
Chocolate is delicious and scrumptious, and this is reason enough to eat it. But now you have an excuse to crush it on a daily basis:
Cognitive function in the elderly is improved by ingesting high levels of natural compounds found in cocoa called flavanols. The study included 90 individuals with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. Subjects who drank a cocoa beverage containing either moderate or high levels of flavanols daily for eight weeks demonstrated greater cognitive function than those who consumed low levels of flavanols on three separate tests that measured factors that included verbal fluency, visual searching and attention. (Source)
5) Omega 3 Fish Oil
If you live in North America and pay less than twenty bucks for your steaks, you are almost certainly Omega-3 deficient. There many reasons why you should supplement with fish oil, and cognitive function is one of them:
Omega-3 supplementation is associated with an improvement of attentional and physiological functions, particularly those involving complex cortical processing. (Source)
6) Ginseng and Ginkgo Biloba
The mechanism and strength of these two inscrutable little Chinaman pills are in dispute, but they are inexpensive enough that they are worth a month or two of experimental addition to your daily pill cocktail.
Panax ginseng (G115) improves aspects of working memory performance and subjective ratings of calmness in healthy young adults. (Source)
We conclude that acute administration of Ginkgo biloba is capable of producing a sustained improvement in attention in healthy young volunteers. (Source)
I will not claim to have experienced anything extremely obvious from the inclusion of either of these boys to my morning pill cocktail, but their low price plus my assessment of the evidence leads me to keep stocking them.
8) Creatine
Creatine Monohydrate has been used by bodybuilders for decades to get bigger and stronger, and it’s also valuable as a cognitive enhancer:
Creatine supplementation is in widespread use to enhance sports-fitness performance, and has been trialled successfully in the treatment of neurological, neuromuscular and atherosclerotic disease.
Creatine plays a pivotal role in brain energy homeostasis, being a temporal and spatial buffer for cytosolic and mitochondrial pools of the cellular energy currency, adenosine triphosphate and its regulator, adenosine diphosphate.
…
Creatine supplementation had a significant positive effect (p < 0.0001) on both working memory (backward digit span) and intelligence (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices), both tasks that require speed of processing. These findings underline a dynamic and significant role of brain energy capacity in influencing brain performance. (Source)
Some people will tell you that you should just be yourself and be happy with who you are. To them I say: Fine. You go ahead and be your average, sub-optimal self. But I am a man who seeks an edge. I will use whatever advantages are available to me.
All of these supplements can be purchased at your friendly neighbourhood nutrition store, or ordered on Amazon:
Theanine (The best place to start)
Creatine Monohydrate (Also great for strength training)
Omega 3 (Most important supplement for all-around health)
That’s the best place to start, but I have barely scratched the surface of this topic. The human brain is a beautiful, remarkable machine.
Serious and experienced commenters only please. What are your experiences with Nootropics? What products are you most interested in checking out? Artificially enhanced super-genius operators are standing by.
I was hoping to hear your personal accounts on some of these such as the caffeine+theanine mix affected you. Similar to the bold+determined modafinil account. Thoughts?
Somewhat familiar to Joe Blow on the street
Available at your local Whole Foods or GNC rather than sketchy online pharmacies
Unintimidating to a rookie cognition hacker
There are no drug based nootropics (except maybe the neurostim products) which actually fulfill these criterion bro. The herbs and foods that help cognition perhaps, but the use of the word nootropic is tied to the movie limitless, and no herbal supplemental or food source will even get you close to that, the semantics are quite annoying in this field. Not to denigrate the options you listed, since I would recommend anyone interested in nootropics spend some time with those substances first, you would just need to retitle your concept as ‘cognitive optimization beginner stack’ or something, since a nootropic drug beginner stack is rather different.
Like working out two things are much more important than supplementation when it comes to cognitive optimization:
a. The Exercise
b. The Diet
The 3 most basic exercises for mental health are
– puzzles
– logic training (math, programming, philosophy, brain devolpment games like luminosity)
– READING!
There are plenty of other exercises but I would recommend pursuing at least 2 of these options daily if youre really interested in making your brain work better. These exercises are heavily optimized by nootropics but can provide massive benefit without supplementation. All three of these as life-long habits will keep your brain running in tip top shape for decades to come. This is mostly stimulating your brain intellectually or aesthetically, get out of the box, dont be tied down by memes, world views, and beliefs, just be curious and open to new ideas. Fuck you dementia. Midday naps are a massive boon to afternoon mental cohesion, and physical exercise helps stimulate blood flow to the brain and helps cognition, so hit the gym, shower and take a nap before you pop your pills.
Also if your using nootropics for work make sure you are improving your performance in other ways first, GTD, Pomodairo, Meditation, Naps, Music, Standup Desk, Physical Activity, ect ect. Once youve have a good foundation, then you can hit the booster rockets of nootropics.
Your diet needs the balance of all your macro and micro nutrients, with a ton of water. You need to be healthy, dont eat a ton of processed shit or anything else that has chemicals that alter your biochemistry to outlandishly. Unfortunately most brain development happens in the first 10 years of life. if your a woman this keeps going till your 18-20 and as a man this development keeps happening till 28-30, so changing your diet, exercise, or supplementation will not have massive benefits to brain growth and structuring your mind, but they are def going to be more beneficial than not doing them. I prefer a paleo diet, but as long as you keep the sugars down, and the water intake up you should be relatively fine.
Only if someone was taking care to make sure that there mind has lots to take in and thier body is healthy would I even bother to tell them anything about nootropics.
Also, before I go into your article (dont worry its good, im just adding my two cents) these articles need disclaimers.
I hate the FDA, but since free market regulatory organizations have a hard time competing with them, its unlikely that the whole picture of Nootropics is going to be available for a while. Dont think im trying to say they should be heavily regulated and only prescribed by doctors, but there is inherent risk in thier usage.
a. unless you synthesize it yourself you are at the mercy of the producer
b. benefits may be exaggerated
c. your biochemistry may react negatively
d. the long time side effects of nootropics are mostly unknown (except the more super common ones like caffiene, nicotine, ginseng ect ect)
e. There is even less known about stacks and interaction between nootropics
I am a proponent for the use of nootropics, nothing ventured nothing gained, but educate yourself first and keep in mind the risks at all times when using these substances.
On to thumotics great nootropic article
1. Caffeine + Theanine
No problems with that. As an aside the link for the people’s stack the link takes you to site talking about alpha brain. Onnits products are great, powerful joe rogan, but they are not that impressive for the cost. Good for skeptics and beginners.
Black coffee has a crap ton of health benefits, (cinnamon+cocoa is really good too), keep in mind this is black, many healthy benefits outside of caffiene disappear once you start adding milk and sugar. Coconut butter in french press coffee is pretty damn tasty though.
I dont recall off hand, but im pretty sure that l-theanine is in green tea and thats why it doesnt have such a hard hit or anxiety.
id recommend this stack
2. Juice
I dont disagree with you statistically or logically on the benefits of juiceing, but semantically I would be hard pressed to call juiceing a nootropic. Id file it under a good diet and what food stuffs help cognition. If I eat the carrots whole or juice them the cognitive benefit is the same. But I wouldnt tell someone not to eat their fruits and veggies (paleo bro :D)
3. Green Tea
Taste wise, its acquired, but green tea is def a great thing to fold into a diet for cognitive development especially right before a 15 minute afternoon nap. Should be an offshot of the caffeine section
4. Dark Choclate
Cocoa is badass, and dark chocolate is great, but ‘cocoa’ beverage might be more south american in taste and style (which is not even close to american understanding of hot cocoa) portioning is important. Also it has the highest anti-oxidant levels of any common foodstuff.
5. omega-3
Everyone should be eating this, but I wouldnt call it a nootropic, id file it under the same grouping as vitamin D. A necessary supplement that helps your brain. Its really semantic, but everyone needs both of those compounds on a daily basis.
6. Ginseng and Ginko
your right, benefits are in dispute, you need to get the ancient chinese versions of these compounds and have them in high dosages, the amount that you get at the average store will not do the job.
also female ginseng is preferable.
7. Creatine
No arguments from me, workout body + mind and use creatine bro.
8. your conclusion.
-Noticeably smarter, quicker, focused? Perhaps, but keep in mind that this is not a very great gain and is only noticeable if you arent working out regularly and/or are a coffee drinker/smoker. The picture of limitless is appropriate for the theme, but the benefits are not that great. Dont expect these substances to really have any affect similar
– Cost is very important here, dont get your expectations up and dont drop a few hundred on any kind of supplementation expecting steroid or limitless results.
– Go live on the edge, but be mindful that it is sharp, and if you get cut you have no one to blame but yourself. It is of course preferable to sitting at home rotting your brain to television taking no chances.
– IQ is total bullshit. The theory of multiple intelligences is much more useful for those trying to measure their gains from cognitive optimization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences
9. your links
-r/nootropics is a great resource, everybody interested should check it out
-the body building thread is a thread you should be cautious of. Its a bunch of copy pasted data, do your due diligence after going there
– bulletproof has good data, but keep in mind that guy makes affiliate money, modafinil should be respected if not feared (pretty much legal speed) and huperzine is snake oil. Aniracetam on its own without choline is a dumb idea.
– Modafinil fits into the Tim Ferris view of nootropics, there is no biological free lunch. It is very potent, but also pretty much legal speed. Finally bold and determined, as much as I dig them, is the poster child of bro science.
10. my conclusion
Good article, good shit, but at the end of the day it read like base line supplementation, and it did not even have a recommended stack amount beyond caffiene-theanine. These arent really what I would discuss with the layperson as nootropics, and I say many as base line supplements you should be using before you fuck around with nootropics.
I will really like to see your use of ‘heavy nootropics’ among certain topics like
– stimulants (the scary nootropic) like adderal . These are not so much additive as controlling. Your experience with these will be fascinating.
– Vitamins, the additive stuff, similar to this article.
– Racetams. What people generally see as nootropics.
– Dopaminergics and the danger of using such substances
– Cholines for raw neurotransmitters
– Serotonergics like 5-HTP
– Blood Flow improvement, like creatine
and the various advanced stacks you were using. Always happy to see a fellow brain hacker.
MY EXPERIENCE
I’m no newbie when it comes to coffee, but i prefer tea. I dont rely on either, but i do enjoy them.
I use an electronic cigratte for nicotine (which is actually a nootropic-stimulant) that is relatively healthy once its outside burning plant matter and the other additives of cigarettes. Im not addicted to it and I smoke it occasionally. Very noticeable results, if I smoke enough the high is similar to cannibis but with no negative cognitive impact, just the opposite actually.
Ive used adderall, and modafinal and I would NEVER ever use them again. Modafinal was more pleasant, but it still made me feel like shit after using it (fuck addiction) and adderall is such a gross feeling, its like all you can do is focus on ONE thing for 8 hours, its not fun at all.
For 5 months (well tech. 4 with once month break in between) I used a beginners nootropic stack
Aniracetam x 1 gram
Pircetam x 1 gram
Alpha GPC x 1 gram
take every 8 hours.
It does increase cognition noticeably, but it also puts a stopper on creative thought for me. I have access to my normal creative range, and actually use it much easier, but i hit writers block much more often, unless i use an imagination stimulating herb. I am much more effected by all drugs so id recommend an attack dose of 3 times that for the first week and then 2 grams instead of 1 gram like I did. I would also recommend cycling it out after 8 weeks for 4 weeks. 2 months on, one month off.
I have been experimenting with a more advanced stack,
Piracetam – 1600mg – 1/day
Aniracetam – 750mg – 1/day
Alpha GPC – 300mg – 2/day
L-Theanine/DHA Blend – 100mg(theanine)/300mg(DHA) – 2/day
picamilon – 150mg – 2/day
ALCAR – 500mg – 1-3x/week
sulbutiamine – 300mg – 1/day
glutamine – 5g – 1/day
but for the most part currently ive been just using caffeine, nicotine, and creatine as of late as I do more research.
I don’t actually use any physical/body enhancing supplements. What do you recommend for a beginner? Can you list them in order of most bang for buck to least?
Wow, tough to top these comments above ^. I almost went into TL;DR mode…but he made some good points. I think you’re on target to talk about these more basics aspects of cognitive improvement first. If you don’t have the basic dietary and exercise benefits then you’re missing out on a huge natural increase in thinking ability and motivation in my personal experience.
I’ve used choline stacked with either Piracetam, Aniracetam and Oxiracetam. My favorite is 300mg-600mg of Alpha-GPC (The best choline supplement IMO after trying to go cheaper with choline bitartrate and lecithin granules…go with the Alpha-GPC if you’re going to do it) with 3 grams to 6 grams of Piracetam. The first thing that happens for me on this stack is my ability to harness language goes up considerably, my speech flows effortlessly, no searching for the right word to express myself. I love it before an interview, a speech, or with social interactions/chicks where you have to keep up a lot of dialogue.
Oxiracetam and Aniracetam seemed to crank up my ability to understand complex problems better such as when you’re working on algebra or calculus problems.
Overall my favorite is definitely Piracetam+AlphaGPC, I rarely mess with the others just because the effect isn’t as pronounced and clean feeling for me personally. It’s mostly banned at this point, but for a basic focus or adderal effect, geranium (1,3 dimethylamaline) with caffeine worked very well. There was a product on the market called ‘AMP’ by ergopharm (Patrick Arnold’s company) that was caffeine, 1,3 dimtheylamaline and chochamine, a cocoa extract. I always like that as a study aid but it operated like an amphetamine.
…as with anything, everyone’s mileage will vary with this stuff. Some people can’t eat peanuts.
J.W.
Great post. All I’d add is to try adding Acetyl L-Carnitine to your Fish Oil intake, it makes a noticeable improvement in its diffusion through the blood-brain barrier.
Look up Nooept, I just started taking it, monday and its supposed to be 1000 stronger than piractram.
This is a great article. I’ve recently started using Theanine – only two days in but I’ve already noticed a number of awesome benefits. Looking forward to adding to this very basic stack.
yep great article. I use the drug from the movie limitless modafinil and it works great. this is where i found mine http://www.brainenhancingdrugshq.com
Another brain food is choline. It’s available at all the “vitamin” stores. It’s also available in egg yolks. I stopped taking it at night and moved it to breakfast because, when I took it in the evening, it was giving me too many dreams and causing me to wake up at night. It also helps protect your liver from NAFLD.
Who has tried Aniracetam? The 40 year old smart drug DARPA experimented with… http://youtu.be/yDWxyM2fYPo
Check out Alpha Brain from Onnit, stuff Joe Rogan uses.
All good, except I have a lingering suspicion that Gingko jacked up my blood circulation from taking it on a two month basis. Whether thats crap or not, I dont know, but it may be a truth.
Hey,
great post! I recently came across l-theanine and it works really well with coffee. The coffee alone always gave me jitters and anxiety.
I wanted to know what you think about kratom ? I use it since a few months and i even prefer it to coffee. I gives me constant energy without anxiety and without a “crash”.
greetings from germany
björn
Hey Bjorn, thanks for stopping by.
I haven’t tried Kratom but Good Looking Loser swears by it and I trust him completely. It’s definitely on my to-do list.