The Terrible Truth about Modafinil | Hacker News Reader

The Terrible Truth about Modafinil

medium.com

24 pointsbuddhanature13 comments

Modafinil is heavily stealth “marketed” on Hacker News (I hate it when people try to manipulate me)

Is this true? A quick search [1] shows 52 mentions of Modafinil in HN stories with about 1 mention every 1-2 months in the past year. There are 156 comments that mention Modafinil in the past year [2]. Marketing must be very stealth indeed.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=modafinil&sort=byDate&prefix&p...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=modafinil&sort=byDate&prefix&p...

it's bigger on reddit

400mg a day, for a healty person, is drug abuse. One can get a better-than-coffee effects from 25mg, actually lower than the recommended dose. And why would anyone take it every day?

But the author is abusing modafinil, and that is problematic. It's like an alcoholic saying "Alcohol is evil because if you have 16 drinks a day your life falls apart and your liver gives out."

It's true in some contexts!

> I’ve taken the recommended daily allowance as stated on the package: 200 mg twice a day.

Well here is the problem. 200mg twice daily might be the recommendation for narcoleptics, but it is an absurd regimen for aiding focus over the course of a decade that I think almost nobody would recommend.

Why didn't the author take Modafinil "as needed"? Or at a minimum, go on drug holidays to allow for a reset?

This blog post is all over the place. I hope the author feels better after settling into his newly unadulterated brain.

I take it occasionally. Usually a 200mg dose. By occasionally one bottle has lasted a year.

My focus is intense when I’m on it. I get a ton of shit done and when I check over my previous day’s work it’s always on par.

Now, if I stop focusing on work, I hallucinate like crazy.

Not LSD goblins and dragons hallucinating but, “my the leaves are really pretty” MDMA hallucinating.

It’s as if all of my senses get extremely sharp.

If I have orange juice, “it’s the best tasting orange juice.”

If I go for a swim or a run, “the water or air has never felt so good.”

Recently I had my wife look at my color scheme in Atom as I’d gotten a little obsessed over “how pretty it was” and wanted to show her.

She asked if I was on modafinil. :D

All around good drug. Two thumbs up, would do again.

I'm glad the author is making a conscious health and ethical decision that they think will improve their life, and I would never want to belittle that choice. It's up to all of us to individually make choices that are in line with our convictions and the trade-offs we make in our health.

The basic idea that drugs have side effects that should be understood is a good realization to have. But several years of taking 400 mg a day does not have to be the way to learn that lesson. Most people I know to take modafinil (for non-narcolepsy reasons) take half that, at most. Never have I ever seen it suggested to take that amount, for that long, especially without breaks. The smallest amount of research would've shown not to do that.

And even with all of this, the arguments against the drug are:

> Gaining weight (modafinil suppresses appetite by the way)

> Not sleeping enough.

> It’s cheating; I relied too much on the pill

Okay, fair enough. But that is no "Terrible Truth". All of those are personal issues, that can be reduced or eliminated by not taking a 400mg dose, or not taking it every day. The problem isn't the pill, it's your abuse of it.

This doesn't match my experience at all.

For starters, as others have said: If you're taking it as a "smart drug" rather than for narcolepsy or to deal with shifts why in the world would you take the full 200mg on an ongoing basis? I've seen nobody recommend that.

Blaming Modafinil for weight gain and problems sleeping also seems very odd to me, though it may have some truth to it:

If you take these drugs and sleep less as a result, chances are you'll face weight gain, because in my experience at least, like caffeine, modafinil does not remove your tiredness over the long term - it just lets you power through it. Even more so for modafinil than caffeine, as caffeine at least makes you feel awake for a while, while my experience with modafinil is that it just lets you stay awake while still feeling the effects.

And for met at least, if I stay awake for protracted period of time , I do tend to eat more, and especially when tired.

But as for problems sleeping, it's a bit of a combination of "well duh" and "really?" On one hand modafinil certainly lets you stay awake. On the other hand one of the things that sets modafinil strongly apart from caffeine is that you can generally go to sleep on modafinil a lot easier (though some people report it affects their dreams and I believe I've experienced some of that).

Making you happy? I've never seen anyone claim modafinil makes you happy. It's not that kind of drug. Maybe some people feel happy as a side effect. I've never experienced anything like it. To me a lot of his description makes it sound as if he's used another drug entirely.

The withdrawal description as well seems odd to me. But then again I take modafinil on and off, so maybe you need to be on higher doses for a protracted amount of time to experience them. Overall, though, withdrawal from modafinil is overall far weaker than from equivalent use of caffeine (which can get truly nasty on high doses; including cold sweats, diarrhea, headaches, fevers etc. that can persist for a week or more).

The description of "blunting" you etc. is fair enough. This isn't a drug you take to be creative. It's a drug you take to maintain focus. And hence it's not a drug to take the way the article writer took it: persistent and over time.

But I guess the article writer will think this is "stealth advertising" (how I wish people were paying me for the time I spend on HN; I spend way too much time here). To me throwing in that kind of thing makes me think it was included only to get attention.

There is a prevailing myth in our culture that when drugs are associated with problems, it is the drug itself that is inherently bad.

Like with any drug, abusing it is where the problem lies. He was taking the drug in a high dosage that created dependency. The same applies to any drug.

I take Modafinil intermittently, on occasions when I would benefit from it. I don't do so in a pattern that creates dependency. I do the same with coffee (i.e. avoid drinking it every day), and likewise with Alcohol - I drink when it's a suitable occasion, not every day. Similarly, I have smoked weed in the past, in moderate dosages, when it fitted the occasion and my lifestyle. It doesn't fit my busy lifestyle now, so I don't smoke weed.

I could have fallen into a pattern of Abuse with Modafinil, but that's the same with any of the other drugs I've mentioned. The usage/abuse pattern of the drug is the issue, not the drug itself.

Does it make you smarter or increase your performance? "Its cheating" or "they experimented on cats" isn't a good reason not to do it for me.

A reason not to do it for me would be if it had something like a stimulant effect on the brain that pushed it to fatigue faster like coffee. I have found that the performance I gain from drinking coffee at first, I lose later in the day. Its like I only have so much "brain juice" and I can use it faster if I want but it will run out faster and ultimately end up getting less done oftentimes.

Is Modafinil like that? Or does it increase performance all day? I really like cats but I don't see how taking that drug will undo any harm done to them in the past. And I never believe anything about a lack of withdrawal anyway.

I find it weird that the author links research from 1967 in his reasons for not using modafinil.

Doesn't seem particularly terrible; more like: has upsides, has downsides.

Modafinil has a half life of 15 hours, how the hell does anyone get any sleep after taking it repeated days in a row - never mind twice a day for a 4 years, at the end of that he was on ridiculous amounts.