I've often felt there's an optimal level of arousal for any given task. Pure creative tasks favour less arousal, organisational and physical tasks favour more a

I've often felt there's an optimal level of arousal for any given task. Pure creative tasks favour less arousal, organisational and physical tasks favour more arousal. Alcohol, caffeine (or coca leaves, khat, or similar) are tools we've used to shift our arousal needle closer towards what is useful for the task at hand. Unfortunately they do carry a number of pretty severe negative side effects - especially when you refine the coca leaves. In my past life, I would frequently myself spend the late night periods, sometimes a but drunk, coming up with new solutions to problems, then the highly caffeinated day time implementing them. It worked very well (until it didn't, but that's another story). So, I'm all about self modification, but I think anyone playing that game would do well to bear in mind the potential negative side effects. Being able to grind out for days and weeks at a time may be extremely useful in the short term, but boredom is a powerful motivator for finding alternative solutions. Maybe not a good idea to turn that off for everyone, every day. Also the medical industry has been proven wrong time and time again when they claim their drug has no long term side effects. People are still being told that SSRIs have no withdrawal effects.