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Modafinil is a pretty amazing drug. The come down after one use isn’t too bad. But if you’ve been using it daily for a week, the comedown is BRUTAL: pretty much

Modafinil is a pretty amazing drug. The come down after one use isn’t too bad. But if you’ve been using it daily for a week, the comedown is BRUTAL: pretty much feel like you have zero energy and feel like laying prone for 8 hours. Once did 48 straight awake on it and felt wide awake 36 hours in… Distinctly remember the 1st time I took it. Was perhaps 8pm at night and I swore it was 8am in the morning and I’d just had an amazing sleep: felt completely wide awake and alert.

ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
I took it heavily in grad school. Prescribed off label for adhd. You can be in any state of exhaustion, take a modafinil, and an hour later feel like you just woke up on a Sunday morning after sleeping in. It’s nuts. The military uses it for fighter pilots. You can take it for days and only lose minimal amounts of reaction timing. At my peak, I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total. Don’t lecture me, I know. Anyway, it took 2 days in bed for me to recover after. Brutal. Towards the end of that time period, my brain stopped processing information in the 30 degrees at the edge of my peripheral vision on either side. We were at a restaurant celebrating being done and the waiter kept teleporting into view at around 60 degrees off my center line. Very startling. Done with it now since I don’t have anything nearly that stressful in my life, but back then, it was a godsend. Modafinil has a 15 hour half life so my main complaint was my sleep schedule was about 26-28 hours so I was constantly shifting. Adrafinil is only the active isomer in modafinil so it’s more potent. I didn’t like it as much. Even at a half tab it still kept me up longer than modafinil. Also modafinil makes your pee smell when it’s metabolized whereas adrafinil not nearly as much.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  Am I the only one thinking there is something seriously wrong with an education system if students have to resort to drugs that keep them awake for a week to succeed in it? I mean I'm not exactly anti-medication but... wow.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    It’s worth it, no faster way to get into lifelong debt!
  - brimble 5y ago
    "Have to", maybe not. Will perform better if they do, probably. Will be outcompeted by others if they don't, many of whom only did better because they used drugs, yes. It took me half a lifetime to really come to grips with it, but fact is, winners absolutely do use drugs. William S. Sessions' anti-drug arcade game ads lied to me.
    - gunshai 5y ago
      I hate that I feel so congruent with this comment.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      Maybe school shouldn't be a competition with winners and losers.
      - ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
        Maybe most schools but I went to the top school (most years) so it was. …and I had imposter syndrome, so I did everything I could to keep pace.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        That is impossible because there is limited supply of the things you want to achieve with your education, e.g. a tenure track position, and the demand is always higher than the supply.
        bryan_w 5y ago
        Shhh don't tell them, let them stay unambitious. It makes it easier for the rest of us.
        akimball 5y ago
- nojs 5y ago
  > I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total I’m confused when I read anecdotes like this. Are you staying you literally slept for 2 hours over the course of 7 days, averaging 17 minutes of sleep per night for a week? I think that’s very unlikely!
  - argc 5y ago
    probably a slight exaggeration
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    It's possible but unlikely. You physically cannot sleep on these drugs without something like clonazepam. So I have no doubt a series of bad decisions could lead to someone being up that long. However, psychosis usually sets in around ~96 hours of sleep deprivation. It is however possible that this individual is unique or resistant, or maybe just his youth helped him. When I was 16 and MTV still played music-- I could survive on 2hrs sleep a day for weeks.
    - r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
      I'm sorry, this is rubbish. One of the reasons Modafinil is useful is that it will help you stay awake and alert for long periods AND when you want to sleep you still can do. It isn't like speed.
      - Apfel 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm afraid you're definitely wrong on this. I've used Modafinil extensively at several different doses. Even at a quarter pill (50mg) you will struggle to feel even remotely tired if you take it after 9am (assuming you go to bed at a normal-ish time).
        px43 5y ago
        You should probably be saying "I" instead of "you". Anecdotally, I've never had trouble going to sleep even a couple hours after having modafinil. If anything, it's a more peaceful transition to sleep too. Modafinil makes me feel relaxed and refreshed. Like going to bed after taking a shower, or being in a hot tub or something.
- thePostFuturist 5y ago
  The rumour is Limitless (the movie with Bradley Cooper in the early '10s) was modeled on Modafinil, the side effects being "inspired by" as well. I didn't have the peripheral vision failures to register, but the death like fatigue is real.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    Limitless is the film version of Alan Glynn's book The Dark Fields. It was published in 2001, so it would've been written before or at most a year or two after modafinil got FDA approval, and long before modafinil was popularized by Wired, etc in the mid-2000s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Fields https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Fields The book is really, really good. Much darker than the film, however. The ending is completely different, particularly the implications of the last paragraph. If you're on a Dark Fields kick, Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Geekier and not as philosophically weighty, but way more fun.
    - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
      > Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Great story, as are most of his. It reminded me of the Dark Forest Theory [0] from the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy [1]. [0] https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/the-dark-forest-theory-a-terrifying-explanation-of-why-we-havent-heard-from-aliens-yet/ https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/the-dark-forest-theo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past
- jack_pp 5y ago
  Different effects on different people I guess. Whoever is reading parent, don't expect this to be true for you. It certainly wasn't for me.. if I didn't get proper sleep and then took modafinil I would get super anxious, fidgeting and just plain feeling bad. Certainly couldn't work on it.
- musicale 5y ago
  Does skipping sleep during finals affect your ability to recall the material long term?
  - ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
    I had to make something. It wasn’t a cramming session. If it was a mental task, I would have taken a different approach. But I needed more hours and I got them.
- throwawayke 5y ago
  I take 200mg every morning. I can still have a midday nap. I'm not narcoleptic but somehow it just doesn't work that well for me. Dexamphetamine worked but ooh boy the side effects like munting.
- samatman 5y ago
  Small correction: adrafinil is a prodrug to modafinil and is less potent, it turns into modafinil after liver action. It also makes your pee smell more, if anything. I expect you're thinking of armodafinil, the isolated r-isomer. I've taken it a few times, it's more potent by weight than modafinil but I'm unconvinced the chiral group is anywhere near so decisive as it is with amphetamine, where the laevo-rotary molecule is useless unless you have a head cold.
  - ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
    This is 100% correct. I’ve never taken adrafinil, late night typi.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jack_pp 5y ago
By comedown you mean sleep debt or have you been using it like caffeine, got your required 8 hours but when you didn't use it one day you felt lethargic?
- marpstar 5y ago
  Not GP, but for me it really seemed to affect my sleep quality in addition to keeping me up later. I started by taking 100mg at 8AM and another 100mg at 12PM. Any later and I'd still be awake at 2AM. The lethargy and brain fog went away if I dosed again, but that only compounds the problems. I still dose when I need a guaranteed day of focus, but I really try not to use it on consecutive days. YMMV
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Sleep debt. It's very much burning the candle at both ends. It can also be pretty terrible for your sleep patterns even for a few days after. As another commenter mentioned, used judiciously, it's amazing.
diamondlovesyou 5y ago
Funny. The couple of times I took Modafinil, it might as well have been placebo. Absolutely no effect. I gave the pills away. I have ADD, and am prescribed 60mg Adderall XR/day. OTOH, I have slept on 30mg Adderall XR a couple of times, so maybe I'm just "built differently" w.r.t. The Stimmies.
- pgt 5y ago
  There’s a genetic component - don’t remember which gene, but only some are subject to its effects.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  This is a interesting one. I once heard a psychiatrist ask someone during an evaluation: have you ever borrowed Ritalin from your friends? Follow up question: did it work? I guess this is a really nice hack he had: Has used Ritalin illegally? Increased probability of ADHD. Does it work? Even more increased probability and he know knows the person tolerates it. This fascinates me. Some people seriously take stimulants at night to fall asleep, others in the morning to wake up..! Recently I heard the story about how stimulants came to be used to treat ADHD and one thing that stood out except that this was an extremely suprising effect was the very simplified explanation that stimulants seems to stimulate the inhibitory parts of the brain most which seems to account for the increased self control.
  - Apfel 5y ago
    As someone who has just gone through the ADHD diagnostic process in the UK - previously abusing stimulants is a risk factor they have to consider before prescribing you anything. I have previously used Modafinil fairly extensively and considered purchasing Ritalin or Adderall on the dark web, but was very worried about telling the doctor in case it would cause me issues getting treatment.
- callamdelaney 5y ago
  Brand can affect this according to anecdotes on /r/modafinil/
madaxe_again 5y ago
I’ve used it once, for a week-long slog on an impossibly short timescale project - it just made sleep an absolute irrelevance, and I was able to just sit and code from Sunday to the following Tuesday. The delivery was on time, the client congratulated “the team” (lol), and our business gained a reputation as being able to pull off the impossible. I felt fine for the duration. Two things, though. One, that week does not exist to me. Like, I don’t remember it apart from the abstract knowledge that it happened. I learned C# and .net in the first 48 hours, having never used either before (we were a PHP shop - but some combination of naivety and hubris had us take the project on) - and a few weeks later when making some tweaks, I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before. Two, the comedown wasn’t awful, but I did sleep for about 36 hours straight, and woke up hungry enough to eat a bear. Haven’t used it since - haven’t needed to - but I do keep a blister pack handy in case I ever find myself needing to function without cessation for a week again.
- openknot 5y ago
  >I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before. Was there any memory or retention of C# and .net at all (e.g. if you tried to learn it later, was it easier to pick up, or was the memory completely gone)? I'm curious about what happened after, too. Were you rewarded with a raise/promotion, or was there no reward so you moved companies? Faced with an impossible deadline, I've read it's better to just let the deadline slip because it's not worth the burnout or cost to mental health (because few deadlines are truly life-or-death), so I'm wondering whether pushing through was worth it in your case.
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    Nope, completely gone. I may as well have started from scratch the next time I looked at it. It was my business. I was the idiot that signed us up for it - it was kinda out of necessity, as it was for the New York marathon, and their developers had evaporated on them two weeks before a critical deliverable - and we charged blood money for it.
samatman 5y ago
Big ol' ymmv on this one. I've run years on end on a 50/5 stack, 50mg 15 minutes after waking, 5 days a week. Energy levels on the weekend could be low but hard to separate that from working hard all week. It was sustainable. Now if you get a real streak going, the two days after discontinuing you'll feel like an idiot. Hyperbolic tapering is a reliable solution to this: go 200/100/50/0 instead of 200/0, give your brain a fighting chance.
gadders 5y ago
I've taken it twice. Once for an overnight implementation, and once as a pre-workout for a strongman competition. There used to be a vitamin for sale in the UK called Berocca that had the slogan "You but on a good day." Modafinil for me felt like me on a really, really good day.
Ghast 5y ago
I've never felt a comedown from it. I take it 6 days a week. I wonder if some of that 'comedown' is just lack of sleep.

ei8htyfi5e 5y ago

I took it heavily in grad school. Prescribed off label for adhd. You can be in any state of exhaustion, take a modafinil, and an hour later feel like you just woke up on a Sunday morning after sleeping in. It’s nuts. The military uses it for fighter pilots. You can take it for days and only lose minimal amounts of reaction timing. At my peak, I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total. Don’t lecture me, I know. Anyway, it took 2 days in bed for me to recover after. Brutal. Towards the end of that time period, my brain stopped processing information in the 30 degrees at the edge of my peripheral vision on either side. We were at a restaurant celebrating being done and the waiter kept teleporting into view at around 60 degrees off my center line. Very startling. Done with it now since I don’t have anything nearly that stressful in my life, but back then, it was a godsend. Modafinil has a 15 hour half life so my main complaint was my sleep schedule was about 26-28 hours so I was constantly shifting. Adrafinil is only the active isomer in modafinil so it’s more potent. I didn’t like it as much. Even at a half tab it still kept me up longer than modafinil. Also modafinil makes your pee smell when it’s metabolized whereas adrafinil not nearly as much.

marcan_42 5y ago
Am I the only one thinking there is something seriously wrong with an education system if students have to resort to drugs that keep them awake for a week to succeed in it? I mean I'm not exactly anti-medication but... wow.
- kfarr 5y ago
  It’s worth it, no faster way to get into lifelong debt!
- brimble 5y ago
  "Have to", maybe not. Will perform better if they do, probably. Will be outcompeted by others if they don't, many of whom only did better because they used drugs, yes. It took me half a lifetime to really come to grips with it, but fact is, winners absolutely do use drugs. William S. Sessions' anti-drug arcade game ads lied to me.
  - gunshai 5y ago
    I hate that I feel so congruent with this comment.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Maybe school shouldn't be a competition with winners and losers.
    - ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
      Maybe most schools but I went to the top school (most years) so it was. …and I had imposter syndrome, so I did everything I could to keep pace.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      That is impossible because there is limited supply of the things you want to achieve with your education, e.g. a tenure track position, and the demand is always higher than the supply.
      - bryan_w 5y ago
        Shhh don't tell them, let them stay unambitious. It makes it easier for the rest of us.
      - akimball 5y ago
nojs 5y ago
> I stayed up for finals for a week straight with maybe 2 hours of sleep total I’m confused when I read anecdotes like this. Are you staying you literally slept for 2 hours over the course of 7 days, averaging 17 minutes of sleep per night for a week? I think that’s very unlikely!
- argc 5y ago
  probably a slight exaggeration
- oceanghost 5y ago
  It's possible but unlikely. You physically cannot sleep on these drugs without something like clonazepam. So I have no doubt a series of bad decisions could lead to someone being up that long. However, psychosis usually sets in around ~96 hours of sleep deprivation. It is however possible that this individual is unique or resistant, or maybe just his youth helped him. When I was 16 and MTV still played music-- I could survive on 2hrs sleep a day for weeks.
  - r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
    I'm sorry, this is rubbish. One of the reasons Modafinil is useful is that it will help you stay awake and alert for long periods AND when you want to sleep you still can do. It isn't like speed.
    - Apfel 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm afraid you're definitely wrong on this. I've used Modafinil extensively at several different doses. Even at a quarter pill (50mg) you will struggle to feel even remotely tired if you take it after 9am (assuming you go to bed at a normal-ish time).
      - px43 5y ago
        You should probably be saying "I" instead of "you". Anecdotally, I've never had trouble going to sleep even a couple hours after having modafinil. If anything, it's a more peaceful transition to sleep too. Modafinil makes me feel relaxed and refreshed. Like going to bed after taking a shower, or being in a hot tub or something.
thePostFuturist 5y ago
The rumour is Limitless (the movie with Bradley Cooper in the early '10s) was modeled on Modafinil, the side effects being "inspired by" as well. I didn't have the peripheral vision failures to register, but the death like fatigue is real.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  Limitless is the film version of Alan Glynn's book The Dark Fields. It was published in 2001, so it would've been written before or at most a year or two after modafinil got FDA approval, and long before modafinil was popularized by Wired, etc in the mid-2000s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Fields https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Fields The book is really, really good. Much darker than the film, however. The ending is completely different, particularly the implications of the last paragraph. If you're on a Dark Fields kick, Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Geekier and not as philosophically weighty, but way more fun.
  - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
    > Ted Chiang's 1991 short story Understand is worthwhile. Great story, as are most of his. It reminded me of the Dark Forest Theory [0] from the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy [1]. [0] https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/the-dark-forest-theory-a-terrifying-explanation-of-why-we-havent-heard-from-aliens-yet/ https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/the-dark-forest-theo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past
jack_pp 5y ago
Different effects on different people I guess. Whoever is reading parent, don't expect this to be true for you. It certainly wasn't for me.. if I didn't get proper sleep and then took modafinil I would get super anxious, fidgeting and just plain feeling bad. Certainly couldn't work on it.
musicale 5y ago
Does skipping sleep during finals affect your ability to recall the material long term?
- ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
  I had to make something. It wasn’t a cramming session. If it was a mental task, I would have taken a different approach. But I needed more hours and I got them.
throwawayke 5y ago
I take 200mg every morning. I can still have a midday nap. I'm not narcoleptic but somehow it just doesn't work that well for me. Dexamphetamine worked but ooh boy the side effects like munting.
samatman 5y ago
Small correction: adrafinil is a prodrug to modafinil and is less potent, it turns into modafinil after liver action. It also makes your pee smell more, if anything. I expect you're thinking of armodafinil, the isolated r-isomer. I've taken it a few times, it's more potent by weight than modafinil but I'm unconvinced the chiral group is anywhere near so decisive as it is with amphetamine, where the laevo-rotary molecule is useless unless you have a head cold.
- ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
  This is 100% correct. I’ve never taken adrafinil, late night typi.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jack_pp 5y ago

By comedown you mean sleep debt or have you been using it like caffeine, got your required 8 hours but when you didn't use it one day you felt lethargic?

marpstar 5y ago
Not GP, but for me it really seemed to affect my sleep quality in addition to keeping me up later. I started by taking 100mg at 8AM and another 100mg at 12PM. Any later and I'd still be awake at 2AM. The lethargy and brain fog went away if I dosed again, but that only compounds the problems. I still dose when I need a guaranteed day of focus, but I really try not to use it on consecutive days. YMMV
aunty_helen 5y ago
Sleep debt. It's very much burning the candle at both ends. It can also be pretty terrible for your sleep patterns even for a few days after. As another commenter mentioned, used judiciously, it's amazing.

diamondlovesyou 5y ago

Funny. The couple of times I took Modafinil, it might as well have been placebo. Absolutely no effect. I gave the pills away. I have ADD, and am prescribed 60mg Adderall XR/day. OTOH, I have slept on 30mg Adderall XR a couple of times, so maybe I'm just "built differently" w.r.t. The Stimmies.

pgt 5y ago
There’s a genetic component - don’t remember which gene, but only some are subject to its effects.
skinkestek 5y ago
This is a interesting one. I once heard a psychiatrist ask someone during an evaluation: have you ever borrowed Ritalin from your friends? Follow up question: did it work? I guess this is a really nice hack he had: Has used Ritalin illegally? Increased probability of ADHD. Does it work? Even more increased probability and he know knows the person tolerates it. This fascinates me. Some people seriously take stimulants at night to fall asleep, others in the morning to wake up..! Recently I heard the story about how stimulants came to be used to treat ADHD and one thing that stood out except that this was an extremely suprising effect was the very simplified explanation that stimulants seems to stimulate the inhibitory parts of the brain most which seems to account for the increased self control.
- Apfel 5y ago
  As someone who has just gone through the ADHD diagnostic process in the UK - previously abusing stimulants is a risk factor they have to consider before prescribing you anything. I have previously used Modafinil fairly extensively and considered purchasing Ritalin or Adderall on the dark web, but was very worried about telling the doctor in case it would cause me issues getting treatment.
callamdelaney 5y ago
Brand can affect this according to anecdotes on /r/modafinil/

madaxe_again 5y ago

I’ve used it once, for a week-long slog on an impossibly short timescale project - it just made sleep an absolute irrelevance, and I was able to just sit and code from Sunday to the following Tuesday. The delivery was on time, the client congratulated “the team” (lol), and our business gained a reputation as being able to pull off the impossible. I felt fine for the duration. Two things, though. One, that week does not exist to me. Like, I don’t remember it apart from the abstract knowledge that it happened. I learned C# and .net in the first 48 hours, having never used either before (we were a PHP shop - but some combination of naivety and hubris had us take the project on) - and a few weeks later when making some tweaks, I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before. Two, the comedown wasn’t awful, but I did sleep for about 36 hours straight, and woke up hungry enough to eat a bear. Haven’t used it since - haven’t needed to - but I do keep a blister pack handy in case I ever find myself needing to function without cessation for a week again.

openknot 5y ago
>I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before. Was there any memory or retention of C# and .net at all (e.g. if you tried to learn it later, was it easier to pick up, or was the memory completely gone)? I'm curious about what happened after, too. Were you rewarded with a raise/promotion, or was there no reward so you moved companies? Faced with an impossible deadline, I've read it's better to just let the deadline slip because it's not worth the burnout or cost to mental health (because few deadlines are truly life-or-death), so I'm wondering whether pushing through was worth it in your case.
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  Nope, completely gone. I may as well have started from scratch the next time I looked at it. It was my business. I was the idiot that signed us up for it - it was kinda out of necessity, as it was for the New York marathon, and their developers had evaporated on them two weeks before a critical deliverable - and we charged blood money for it.

samatman 5y ago

Big ol' ymmv on this one. I've run years on end on a 50/5 stack, 50mg 15 minutes after waking, 5 days a week. Energy levels on the weekend could be low but hard to separate that from working hard all week. It was sustainable. Now if you get a real streak going, the two days after discontinuing you'll feel like an idiot. Hyperbolic tapering is a reliable solution to this: go 200/100/50/0 instead of 200/0, give your brain a fighting chance.

gadders 5y ago

I've taken it twice. Once for an overnight implementation, and once as a pre-workout for a strongman competition. There used to be a vitamin for sale in the UK called Berocca that had the slogan "You but on a good day." Modafinil for me felt like me on a really, really good day.

Ghast 5y ago

I've never felt a comedown from it. I take it 6 days a week. I wonder if some of that 'comedown' is just lack of sleep.