Surely there’s a better drug than coffee for staying awake for a long time.
As far as I could find out, they are illegal (Amphetamine), prescription-only (Modafinil) and/or very bad for your health (Methamphetamine). Amphetamine and Methamphetamine are also rather addictive and apparently quitting once you formed a habit is no fun. Ephedrine might be an alternative, but in Germany, it's prescription-only, and I did not care enough to research the possible health issues it might cause. I vaguely remember there were a few substances that sounded promising, but they were fairly new, and I could not find out anything about their possible health effects, addictive-ness, etc...
So it's either caffeine or plenty of sleep, at least for me.
So I found that psudoephedrine (cold medicine) is pretty darn close to amphetamines.
Find the 12 hour, 120mg capsules. I think you get 20 pills for like 6 dollars. Basically I'd take 2 saturday morning. Wait a half hour and drink caffeine as needed through the day.
Wow. I'm talking from 5AM until 2AM I am able to work. Not just stuff I enjoy, but even the worst of work.
Gl, dont get screwed by CVS's placebo and crappy brand name psudoephedrine. Be responsible.
I dont get it more than 1 time a month, but I have noticed that stores dont use the same database. You can go from CVS to walmart to the local pharmacy if you needed to.
But if you need more than 10 days a month of psudoephedrine, I wish I never recommended it to you.
But on top of that, B-vitamin complex pills benefit from a lot of side-effects of high intake, including e.g. Niacin flushes and tingling effects, which I thin probably boost the perceived effect well beyond any actual effect.
It's still one of the most popular (if not the most popular) illegal drugs in Japan. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_methamphetamin...
[0]https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/JINH_a_00212 (I could only find this abstract about US use.)
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs...
The others have no trouble sleeping even with large doses, but experienced some bad headaches, or personality changes ("I just want to work all day now" -- this may not be bad depending on context).
I quit the trial when I developed large purple circles on my skin. Turns out skin problems, including some medically serious ones, are a relatively common side effect.
Proceed with caution!
Effect attenuates with regular daily use for me, despite most research to the contrary, which leads me to believe it's caused just by plain old lack of sleep during consumption days.
Care to elaborate on the skin issues? Were they planar circles (I know, oxymoron)? And what's "large"? I could maybe correlate some skin issues of mine (up to 1cm, but majority smaller than .5 tumor-like skin bumps, mostly colorless, but some red with darker aureola) to this.
The second time I took it was for an athletic competition to give me focus. It worked well, but I don't think it lasted the whole day.
However while Modafinil will keep you awake, it doesn't mitigate the downsides of being sleep deprived. At 4am you'll still be irritable, burnt out and not make good decisions. Regular sleep is really the only medicine.
Ephedrine was an excellent stimulant, but a few people died because they didn't understand what it would do. You wouldn't feel thirsty, and it was sold as a workout supplement, so people would take it and then exercise outside in the summer and suffer severe dehydration. After that it was made illegal in the US, which is too bad because for me it was much more effective than caffeine and sold over the counter.
Bronkaid works great as an appetite suppressant, a little energy boost without much of the caffeine jitters, and as its prescribed effect of opening up the lungs.