For years now, I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with the world of what my editor dubbed “white-collar PEDs,” or productivity-enhancing drugs. Though I’d never heard the phrase before, I knew immediately what he was talking about—the seemingly infinite profusion of supplements and “nootropics,” prescription “study drugs,” and illegal or semilegal drugs that have become popular among young professionals seeking not to get high, but to optimize their brains and bodies for work.
Every year, there’s a drumbeat of worried think pieces about the rise of these substances. But it’s no real mystery about their popularity. The human mind does not want to spend eight hours or more per day planted in front of a computer screen, when there are far more inherently interesting activities it could be dedicating its attention to. Learning to suppress these impulses and knuckle down anyway is, of course, the work of civilization, and yet our minds nonetheless frequently revolt. We feel bored, tired, distracted; we are assailed with bouts of “brain fog,” in which we seem to be operating a standard deviation below our normal IQ; our brains keep us up at night with worries or misplaced energy, ruining our sleep and thus sapping our performance the next day. Nonetheless, we must work. And so we seek a little help.
I also have a bit of personal experience in this world. Back during my first few weeks of graduate school, a classmate, on hearing me express awe at the sheer amount of reading that was assigned every week, advised me that at least half of my peers were getting chemical assistance. He suggested I could make my life a lot easier for myself if I did the same. Roughly a week later, I was walking out of a local doctor’s office with a monthly prescription for Vyvanse, a “prodrug” that metabolizes into dextroamphetamine, a drug distributed to Allied bomber pilots during World War II. Now, it would be helping me tear through dry scholarly tomes on the concept of convivencia in Early Modern Spain.
I spent most of the next five years, from age 24 to age 29, as a semiregular Vyvanse user, taking 40 mg a day anywhere from one to five days a week, depending on how much work I had. I’ve read plenty of confessional essays from other writers about their addictions to prescription stimulants, but in my case, there were no horror stories. The drug worked well for its intended purpose, which was to help me override my natural tendencies toward sloth and forgetfulness and do whatever it was I needed to do. But it came with enough off-putting side effects that I never reached the point of taking it every day. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I’d just moved cities and had not yet found a new doctor who I could ask to renew my prescription remotely, so I just stopped taking it and figured out a way to cope.
Still, ever since ditching the Vyvanse, I’ve suffered at times from my own absentmindedness and reluctance to deal with the sort of low-level administrative tasks necessary for modern life. I’ve often wondered if I should go back and experiment with a lower dosage, or if there was some alternative drug or biohack that could help me answer all of my emails on time while also allowing me to sleep. So, offered the opportunity to test-drive as many substances as I could get my hands on, gonzo-style, I figured—sure, why not?
