What I learned gathering nootropic ratings (2022)

Good recent writing on the topic: https://dynomight.net/theanine-2/

Not sure why the nootropics people are always trying to come up with alternate theories for why something works when substances like caffeine are well studied and known to provide a mood boost.

Kraton I couldn't make the same argument and not familiar with tianeptine / gas station scag.

Controlled trials are actually very revealing of the placebo effect, which is a rampant confounded in nootropics communities. When people spend months reading about new nootropics, then a week waiting for it in the mail, then they take their first dose with excitement and anticipation they generally report feeling something.

The nice thing about trials is that they can start separating out this placebo effect.

Several people have done self-trials with different compounds with surprising results. Gwern is perhaps the most famous. Whenever people post about magnesium being a life altering substance or producing profound effects I also point them to his measured magnesium trials where the net effect over time was beginning to trend negative.

One of the myths in nootropics communities is that everything is a matter of neurochemistry and everyone is substantially different. In reality, RCTs are actually great at capturing enough people to see subgroups responding if you have enough people.

One thing most nootropics people don’t acknowledge enough is how often placebo effect appears in RCTs. Perform an RCT for depression and the placebo group will get better. It happens in every study. Give college students Adderall before an exam and they will report performing better, despite no statistical improvement in their grades. Now consider these facts in light of all of the scattered nootropics forum reports from people claiming different substances cured their depression or made them smarter. Not surprisingly, if you check their post history more recent comments will show them off on a new tangent trying a new substance, the old one long forgotten as a short trial that didn’t work out.

There is an argument that people should treat their own lives as an experiment. Where you track the things you do and see if you can find patterns on mood and productivity and such. If you want to know what generally works, though, there is no counter to effectiveness in RCTs, though?

Put differently, when has evidence ever gone counter to RCTs? Not just are there some questions that an RCT hasn't covered, but times it has been counter to the results?

That said, sounds like we are largely in agreement? I have gotten where I assume everything is dominated by noise.

Spent 8 continuous hours vomiting with the worst nausea I've ever felt in my life.

Lesson hard learned. I've been using Phenibut for nearly 10 years, I only take it on the weekends.

I quite enjoy high doses, feels much better than drinking without negative physical side effects. I don't drink alcohol in general, to be honest.

It's a ton of work at first but it's completely worth it -- post-exertional malaise sucks.

Other things that helped me personally: daily cold plunges up to the chin (so you feel it in your vagus nerve), HRV reset breathing exercises, and daily meditation. Wish you the best of luck.

Do you really not eat bread? We've got to come up with better ways to categorize foods. At face value such a term seems to imply you should only eat raw food.

Look up the Regeneron COURAGE trial

Otherwise, you'll never stick with it.

I hate jogging, I have forced myself to do daily jogging for several month periods, but I never stick with it.

For me, incline treadmill at maximum incline and a moderate pace gets my heart-rate up and doesn't feel nearly as awful.

There's no particular reason why running on asphalt, or even running on a treadmill, shouldn't hurt. It might! It's not a natural surface. And hard surface + modern shoes might not be a good enough combo to overcome the pain it creates.

I live near a beach and run on sand every other day; I don't have body pain problems. But change the surface and I think I would.

My suggestion is to stop your workout a little before you want to, almost as if you're disappointed it's over now, which will make you want to go to the gym the next day more consistently.

As I've gotten older, I've found other activities to fill the void such as rock climbing and mountain biking. Both can be strenuous when you want them to be, but you can also take it easy. Combined with low level weight training, I've found it a lot more enjoyable since both require your brain to be 100% engaged when doing it so there's also a mental boost as well.

It's much easier on your joints, and you can adjust the difficulty gradually.

What is the muscle building theory? Not everyone who does weightlifting is aiming for hypertrophy. Some are aiming for strength.

Honestly, it sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself not to do it. That’s okay. It’s difficult to know where to begin and avoid potential injury. It does take some time to learn. I like to recommend starting with a functional training class. This kind of class provides a guided session in building strength in everyday movements and provides a steady pace to really tune in to your body. It’s very difficult to injure yourself.

As a counterpoint, since you seem to like anecdata: I am around 50 and have been doing weightlifting for the last 8 years. No pain. No injury. Extreme positive effects on my entire life.

I would respectfully suggest that you need to a) know what you are doing, e.g. start with a trainer, and b) not try to be an olympic athlete, e.g. reach reasonable benchmarks and not try to be a weightlifting champ.

I don't know what "exercise professors" are, but you might want to talk to different people.

- Before I exercised regularly, I developed aches and pains in upper and lower back, also a shoulder for some reason. These all went away thanks to pull-ups and pushups. Lack of exercise will also wreck your body—if you have not experienced this I have to assume you are very young.

- Exercise also causes lots of random little injuries. For example basketball gave me an ankle and a knee that have never been quite the same. But, I find that exercise itself helps dampen the pain response and makes them more bearable. I have ankle and knee warmup routines that help a lot.

Among people I have met, exercisers with injuries have full lives who are able to live around their injuries. Non-exercisers also develop little pains over time of being sedentary, and end up being much more constrained in what they can do.

So, I disagree with you. If you take it slow and listen to your body and maintain good form youre golden.

Soreness is not a bad thing. And it's true that people who regularly exercise will often be in a state where they feel some level of soreness somewhere. That's the kind of pain people say you should embrace.

It's also true that lots of folks injure themselves exercising. Sometimes this leads to having to take time off to recover.

But people who don't exercise are more at risk of injury in general. This is because their tendons, bones, and muscles are less able to deal with sudden stress.

> And yet, nobody mentions how supplements can't generally damage you

And last of all - this is plainly not true...

Hahahahahahahahaha

Been doing ~daily resistance training for > 10 years, have a hell of a build, and do not experience anything like this. I have had a couple of injuries, but never anything that caused me pain outside of the gym.

Ditto for many of my friends/colleagues.

Sounds like you may just be in a bubble of fatties

The fact is resistance training is vital for able bodied folks to avoid feeling pain later. And of course it has many other benefits than that. Even just pulling on some resistance bands can save your back and shoulders and the chance of injury there is minuscule.

I got muscle problems from _not_ doing resistance training, my bad posture caught up with me finally. And I was doing quite a bit of cardio (treadmill walking), so my general health was OK.

It took months to build up muscles enough to avoid stressing the same overworked muscles, but eventually I had no pain whatsoever.

That kind of pain quickly subsides after relaxing your routine though. It's not chronic.

The inflammation pathways aren't the same as disease state pathways.

> Maybe if you are underdoing it its possible but if you follow the muscle building theory, you are certainly going to get fucked eventually. Even the slightest position issue can make your tendons hurt for months...

I think your definition of "underdoing it" is what's fucked. If your goal is to optimize your enjoyment of your body now and in the future, then do whatever works best to serve that goal in the gym. I have no idea what "muscle building theory" is, but if it causes constant injuries that require pain medication, then it probably isn't the best way to pursue your goals.

> Too bad exercise seems to be a must after you are 50+

This really varies from person to person. Judging by the people I know, the non-resistance-trainers are worse off at least by forty, earlier for many. Everybody has pain, but people doing resistance training have less pain while being able to enjoy more activities.

Personally, I started having occasional back pain in my mid-twenties, often when I woke up in the morning. My dad said it started at the same age for him and got slowly worse over time, and he just put up with it. A few years later I discovered weightlifting, and a year later I wasn't waking up with back pain anymore -- one of the many things about lifting weights that completely surprised me. (I got into it in the early 2000s, when 99% of the information online was meathead bullshit just drenched in testosterone, sexism, and homophobia, and I was lucky to stumble across a single web site that made a case for lifting weights without the off-putting machismo. I never had a bunch influencers promising that lifting weights would cure every problem in my life, so almost everything positive about lifting weights came as a surprise to me.)

A problem that both my parents started experiencing around forty, and which I encountered on the same schedule, was chronic knee pain. It took me a couple of years to figure out some contributing factors and fix them, but now I don't have knee pain, while still enjoying a lot of activities that my parents gave up long before my age.

My friends sometimes say things like, you hurt yourself playing soccer, isn't that dumb? Why are you doing things that hurt you? And my question back to them is, can you even play soccer? How many years has it been since you could play soccer for even five minutes without seriously hurting yourself? I'm going to take a few weeks off and then I'll be able to play soccer again, what's your plan? Late thirties and early forties is when sedentary people discover that attempting to join in on fun physical activities is not as pleasant for them as they remember, and/or likely to result in an injury that takes a long time to heal, so they start to opt out. When you see someone in their forties look particularly satisfied while they stand to one side at a gathering while others are playing a casual pickup game of soccer or Ultimate, it's because they're internally congratulating themselves on having the wisdom not to try.

Obviously I'm going to hit limitations that exercise can't fix. But in the meantime, I'm hitting one problem after another that exercise can fix, and seeing my sedentary friends hit the same eminently fixable problems like brick walls.

I wish! If you're lucky (or not particularly unlucky) that might be true.

I don't feel any mental benefits, nor do I sleep better. Fun kinds of exercise (badminton, football, BJJ) always seem to injure me me over longer time periods (and it takes months, or even years, to heal when you're in your forties). And they are not very forgiving, schedule-wise.

Lifting weights or rowing on a machine is painfully boring, but it does make me feel better physically. It's a great upside, but the downsides are real too.