Every few years a new wave of interest in nootropics sweeps through the IT world. Someone reads about Silicon Valley, where engineers supposedly "hack" their brains with a handful of capsules every morning, someone watches a film about a pill that turns the hero into a genius, someone gets an ad for a "natural focus complex". Before long the work chat is discussing dosages and a jar with a promise on the label appears on a developer's desk. I approach this topic with curiosity and at the same time with the healthy scepticism of an engineer used to verifying claims with tests. Let me say up front: I am not a doctor or a pharmacologist, and anything concerning specific substances and your health should be discussed with a doctor. What I want to talk about is what usually stays outside the frame of the advertising.
The dream of a magic pill
Humanity has a very old love of shortcuts. Alchemists searched for the philosopher's stone that would turn lead into gold without long labour. We search for a pill that will turn a tired brain into a brilliant one without sleep, training or order in our lives. The wish is understandable: the work is intellectual, competition is fierce and the brain is not always in shape. But history shows that the shortcut almost always turned out to be either an illusion or a very expensive loan. The philosopher's stone was never found, but while looking for it the alchemists accidentally laid the foundations of chemistry. Nootropics are similar: there is no magic pill, but working out why there is none teaches you a lot about how your head actually works.
What reality says
The word "nootropics" covers a very motley crowd. It includes things with well-studied effects, such as caffeine, which genuinely increases alertness but does not make you smarter. It includes prescription drugs used for specific diagnoses, and a healthy person taking them "for productivity" is a completely different story with different risks. And it includes a vast number of supplements whose evidence base is weak or missing, and whose effect is hard to tell from a placebo. The problem is that on the shop shelf they all stand side by side and promise the same thing.
I have noticed a pattern among people who get into this. The "nootropic works" almost always in the first weeks, when the person simultaneously starts taking it, getting enough sleep, keeping a routine and tackling tasks with enthusiasm. A month later the enthusiasm fades, the routine slips, and the effect "for some reason stops working". It is a classic experimental error: several variables changed at once, and the result was credited to the one that comes in a pretty jar.
The most powerful nootropic I know of is called "eight hours of sleep". It is free, needs no prescription, and for some reason it is the first thing we cut back on.
The brain is not a processor you can overclock
Programmers love comparing the brain to a computer, and that comparison hides a trap. It seems that if you raise the clock speed, everything will run faster. But the brain is more like an ecosystem than a processor. Its productivity depends on dozens of interconnected factors: sleep, food, movement, stress, the meaning of the work, relationships with people, the number of switches between tasks. Interfering with one factor while ignoring the rest is like fertilising one tree in a forest where the river has dried up. The tree may be pleased, but you will not save the forest.
There is another side that is rarely discussed. Intellectual work requires not only concentration but also diffuse thinking, when the mind wanders and links distant things. Many substances that promise "laser focus" boost the first at the expense of the second. The person becomes an excellent executor of a narrow task and loses the ability to see that the task was set wrongly in the first place. For an architect or an entrepreneur that is a very bad trade.
What really improves the way your head works
I realise this list sounds boring, and that is exactly why people dislike it. But in my practice and in the practice of people I have worked with, these are the things that work.
- Sleep as a priority, not a leftover. Not whatever remains after work and a series, but the first line in the schedule.
- Protected hours of deep work. Two or three hours without chats and calls give more than any stimulant, because they remove the main enemy of concentration: switching.
- Movement. A walk or a workout noticeably improves both mood and the ability to think. It is one of the few things with a genuinely convincing evidence base.
- Food without crashes. A heavy lunch guarantees a sleepy afternoon. You can check this on yourself within a week.
- Order in your tasks. Half of "brain fatigue" is actually fatigue from chaos: from unfinished business, blurred priorities and the need to keep everything in your head.
The link to how work is organised
The last point is especially close to me, because it is exactly what we do at Ingello. When a company's processes are not formalised, people have to keep dozens of small things in their heads: whom to call, where the document is, what was promised to the client. That is a huge background load that no pill will remove. A system in which everything is recorded, tasks are visible and routine is automated frees the head better than any nootropic. I would call good automation an organisational nootropic with no side effects, except that employees start going home on time.
What to do tomorrow: if you are taking something "for productivity", run an honest experiment like an engineer. Discuss with a doctor whether it makes sense at all, and if it does, change one variable at a time and write down the result. Meanwhile, try getting enough sleep for two weeks and protecting your morning hours from chats. Compare. I suspect the result will surprise you, and the jar on your desk will become just a jar.
