My Experience With Nootropics and Why I Chose Adrafinil

When you look at the world today, you can’t help but feel left far behind in the race to better productivity. While nootropics are the likely answer, and there are a lot of people taking brain supplements, I wanted to know if they were as reliable as people made them out to be. 

Any Monday morning

A lot of this has to do with the fact that because of the stresses and strains of modern life, I’m perennially left tired and zombified. That surge of get up and go which I had about 3-4 years back is now gone, replaced with weariness and melancholy. 

Sorry to sound so dramatic, but this is what I think to myself every Monday morning when I look in the mirror. I’m sure a lot of you feel the same, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, right? But I have a revelation – whatever you read about me in the previous paragraph was the earlier me. 

These days I’m a much happier person professionally and personally. While I won’t attribute all my newfound cheerfulness to nootropics, I have to admit that a huge chunk of what is right with me at this moment is because of brain supplements. 

How I got started on nootropics

Nootropics are reasonably popular when you are looking for brain supplements. But the right one for you might take a bit more research. Since I’m really careful about what I put into my body, I wanted to know what I needed to know before I got started with it. 

I came across a lot of articles about modafinil. While it did offer superlative cognitive boosts, it was difficult to procure, and this will only get worse in the days to come. Quite close to this was the nootropic adrafinil. 

While adrafinil didn’t offer the same performance per weight ratio as modafinil, it was a lot easier to get because it was an OTC compared to the prescription required to get modafinil. So, it narrowed my choice down to this pretty much easily. 

My Brain Supplement Of Choice – Adrafinil

Since I was pretty sure that I wanted to get on a course of adrafinil, I went out and got it. It was pretty easy to get, and I didn’t have to jump through hoops like I had to when buying modafinil. All said I was really keen to get started on this and improve my cognitive abilities. 

I’m a 6’2” male weighing about 220lb I try to keep myself fit with regular exercise, but I wouldn’t call myself a triathlete. Suffice to say people call me big-built. Why am I telling you this? Because a critical part of a nootropic drug is to calculate the dosage, and dosage depends a lot on physiological aspects more than anything else. I’ve never taken nootropics ever, so I wanted to make sure that I started it slow. 

Adrafinil dose

I started with 100mg as most people I researched online did. It was a minimal safe dose to start with. And I took this only once a day – from this point, I could increase it to twice a day when I got comfortable and then double the dosage later. There was a lot of scope for experimentation and improvements. 

My day with adrafinil

Here I’m going to compare my normal day with when I’m on adrafinil. 

The first thing I noticed was my dependence on caffeine had considerably reduced. While on a normal day at work, I would be hard-pressed to get through it without at least 4 cups of coffee, here the only cup I had in the day was at home before breakfast. 

Usually, it’d be difficult to get 30 minutes in without resorting to some relief either from my social feed or Imgur, I was at it the whole morning churning out several templates, logos and creatives (I’m a web designer) like nobody’s business. I only tapered off in the evening which is understandable considering I’ve been at it for about 6 – 7 hours on the trot. 

I ended the day with a lot more energy and the feeling that I accomplished a lot more than I usually did. And the fact is that I did get a lot more done! I came home, helped the missus with the cooking, caught a movie online because we had ample time to ourselves and generally had a great evening together. 

Summing it up

While I have read that it doesn’t work all that great for a lot of people, my takeaway was that it was definitely worth the money that I spent on it. At the end of the day – it did deliver and has a lot going for it. And it was incredible that it was able to give me so much on just a beginner dose. 

I have read about tolerance and cycling nootropics – that will all come in time. To find something that can increase my cognitive abilities like adrafinil has been a revelation to me! Just remember to not go the whole hog when you’re starting off on adrafinil in the beginning. Stick to the dosage, and you will definitely see results!