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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 w

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
        This is true only if your range of available strategies is constrained to a closed competitive subsystem. The actual range of available strategies is unbounded, given unlimited rationality.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      School is just a part of life, and life has limited resources. There will always be winners and losers. At least, until (and if) we reach a point where the total sum of resources exceeds the total demand for them.
      - 5y ago
- majormajor 5y ago
  Cramming is less "required" then "an alternative way to get a good grade than working all semester long."
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    I had multiple classes in university where the professor didn't finish their syllabus for the term and so the TAs crammed the last few weeks worth of class into a study session.
  - bbreier 5y ago
    I definitely remember approximately weekly having to stay up all night to finish my regular assignments assigned the same day and due the next
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
    It wasn’t a paper test and cramming. I had to create a product from scratch. I could have made a simpler product but I’m type a and challenged myself. 3D modeling, waiting for a 3D printer to complete, designing and manufacturing creating circuit boards, programming them, setting up a server, modifying the printed case by hand to insert glass, iterating when tolerances aren’t right. …it was a lot of work. But now I get to make cool shit for a living. Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      > Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it. Same, but it didn't take a week on modafinil to finish a crazy project for me, I just always just liked making cool shit ever since I was a kid. Currently more on the software/kernel side, but I've done my share of hardware projects. For me, after bouncing around a few universities, I realized how much of a broken joke the system was and resolved to go the easiest route to get the piece of paper (an on-line university), which I'm glad I did because the one time in my life I needed it it was important... but uni never taught me anything I couldn't have learned more efficiently on my own. I distinctly remember that time in a microcontrollers class where the book was wrong and teaching the exact opposite of the solution to the problem it was trying to teach, and I'd known about that one for like 7 years at that point, and when I offered to the teacher to write a little article about it so we could all learn about it, he said yes and never even read it... Or that time where as a sophomore I was helping a team of seniors working on a project to build a CubeSat, and I designed the PCBs and all the firmware and we won the competition to get funding and actually launch... and the uni's response was to kick us out of the lab we were in because "we were using too much space" (about 1m of desk space there). That CubeSat never launched. Also, there was one part of that board designed by a professor instead of me. It was the only part that didn't work. And I thought it was dodgy at the time, and with my current experience I can confidently say that design was utterly insane and broken and he had no idea what he was doing. Meanwhile in Calc II they wanted me to memorize three dozen identities because... why? I liked math until I got to that class, because even though it wasn't exactly being taught in an engaging way, I could work out the underlying concepts and understand and appreciate it, and work from first principles. Then it got complicated enough that doing that at the exam was no longer viable and I was just expected to become a computer and memorize all the damn formulas (and it wasn't just a few), understanding be damned. I cheated my way through that exam ("yes professor, I promise this TI-84 emulator on my Zaurus PDA is exactly like the real thing and I don't have a little formula database app in another window"). I damn well know what integration is and how it fundamentally works and how to apply it, but storing rote trivially looked up information is what we have paper and computers for. I don't go around memorizing programming APIs, I look up what I need and whatever I use often enough comes naturally. Chemistry was more fun. We were allowed one index card, handwritten, both sides for the exam. I developed an electrical arc sharpening mechanism for mechanical pencil lead, so I could handwrite it all in 4pt size or so. Give me limitations and I will make the best use of them :) Yeah, the system is broken.
- echelon 5y ago
  Some students have ADHD or simply learn in a way that does not track with how school and university are taught. The rewards and incentives are typically orthogonal to what a person diagnosed with ADHD wants, and often times extreme measures must be taken to adapt to the rigid expectations.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    That is a failure of the system to adapt to the needs of students. I have adult-diagnosed ADHD and school sucked for me too... and I'm on medication now, which makes me function normally, not stay up for a week.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Definitely don’t have to. It’s an anecdote from a single person, it’s not normal behavior. Don’t read too much into individual HN comments, especially those describing outlier behavior.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  How about kids don't procrastinate and play videogames?
- mlac 5y ago
  I’ll never forget that I was sitting outside the hallway before my SATs, and some random girl I just met offered me Adderall - I had 3 thoughts: 1) I’m not taking random pills from a stranger, let alone before the SATs 2) If it is adderall, I have no idea what it would do to me 3) If I need adderall to do well on the SATs that would get me into a better college, I’m going to need it through college Seeing this story makes me think that, yeah, some people probably do make it through hard programs with medication…
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.

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
      This is true only if your range of available strategies is constrained to a closed competitive subsystem. The actual range of available strategies is unbounded, given unlimited rationality.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    School is just a part of life, and life has limited resources. There will always be winners and losers. At least, until (and if) we reach a point where the total sum of resources exceeds the total demand for them.
    - 5y ago
majormajor 5y ago
Cramming is less "required" then "an alternative way to get a good grade than working all semester long."
- WalterSear 5y ago
  I had multiple classes in university where the professor didn't finish their syllabus for the term and so the TAs crammed the last few weeks worth of class into a study session.
- bbreier 5y ago
  I definitely remember approximately weekly having to stay up all night to finish my regular assignments assigned the same day and due the next
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
  It wasn’t a paper test and cramming. I had to create a product from scratch. I could have made a simpler product but I’m type a and challenged myself. 3D modeling, waiting for a 3D printer to complete, designing and manufacturing creating circuit boards, programming them, setting up a server, modifying the printed case by hand to insert glass, iterating when tolerances aren’t right. …it was a lot of work. But now I get to make cool shit for a living. Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    > Honestly believe if you give me enough time and money I can make anything. Worth it. Same, but it didn't take a week on modafinil to finish a crazy project for me, I just always just liked making cool shit ever since I was a kid. Currently more on the software/kernel side, but I've done my share of hardware projects. For me, after bouncing around a few universities, I realized how much of a broken joke the system was and resolved to go the easiest route to get the piece of paper (an on-line university), which I'm glad I did because the one time in my life I needed it it was important... but uni never taught me anything I couldn't have learned more efficiently on my own. I distinctly remember that time in a microcontrollers class where the book was wrong and teaching the exact opposite of the solution to the problem it was trying to teach, and I'd known about that one for like 7 years at that point, and when I offered to the teacher to write a little article about it so we could all learn about it, he said yes and never even read it... Or that time where as a sophomore I was helping a team of seniors working on a project to build a CubeSat, and I designed the PCBs and all the firmware and we won the competition to get funding and actually launch... and the uni's response was to kick us out of the lab we were in because "we were using too much space" (about 1m of desk space there). That CubeSat never launched. Also, there was one part of that board designed by a professor instead of me. It was the only part that didn't work. And I thought it was dodgy at the time, and with my current experience I can confidently say that design was utterly insane and broken and he had no idea what he was doing. Meanwhile in Calc II they wanted me to memorize three dozen identities because... why? I liked math until I got to that class, because even though it wasn't exactly being taught in an engaging way, I could work out the underlying concepts and understand and appreciate it, and work from first principles. Then it got complicated enough that doing that at the exam was no longer viable and I was just expected to become a computer and memorize all the damn formulas (and it wasn't just a few), understanding be damned. I cheated my way through that exam ("yes professor, I promise this TI-84 emulator on my Zaurus PDA is exactly like the real thing and I don't have a little formula database app in another window"). I damn well know what integration is and how it fundamentally works and how to apply it, but storing rote trivially looked up information is what we have paper and computers for. I don't go around memorizing programming APIs, I look up what I need and whatever I use often enough comes naturally. Chemistry was more fun. We were allowed one index card, handwritten, both sides for the exam. I developed an electrical arc sharpening mechanism for mechanical pencil lead, so I could handwrite it all in 4pt size or so. Give me limitations and I will make the best use of them :) Yeah, the system is broken.
echelon 5y ago
Some students have ADHD or simply learn in a way that does not track with how school and university are taught. The rewards and incentives are typically orthogonal to what a person diagnosed with ADHD wants, and often times extreme measures must be taken to adapt to the rigid expectations.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  That is a failure of the system to adapt to the needs of students. I have adult-diagnosed ADHD and school sucked for me too... and I'm on medication now, which makes me function normally, not stay up for a week.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Definitely don’t have to. It’s an anecdote from a single person, it’s not normal behavior. Don’t read too much into individual HN comments, especially those describing outlier behavior.
Bancakes 5y ago
How about kids don't procrastinate and play videogames?
mlac 5y ago
I’ll never forget that I was sitting outside the hallway before my SATs, and some random girl I just met offered me Adderall - I had 3 thoughts: 1) I’m not taking random pills from a stranger, let alone before the SATs 2) If it is adderall, I have no idea what it would do to me 3) If I need adderall to do well on the SATs that would get me into a better college, I’m going to need it through college Seeing this story makes me think that, yeah, some people probably do make it through hard programs with medication…

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.