Modafinil: Is This Wildly Popular Smart Drug Safe And Effective? (& What It Can Do For Your Sleep Cycles & Brain Health).

These are things that we have to watch out for. If you're going to try to use modafinil for cognitive enhancement, specifically with the goal of restricting your sleep, you will pay a physiological price for that.

Prebiotic compounds, like marshmallow root and inulin... some of the things people are using to feed good bacteria in their gut, those also slow the release or the uptake of modafinil.

When we restrict ourselves to 5 hours of sleep, we lose our insulin sensitivity. We undergo a state of insulin resistance if we have 5 hours of sleep a night.

While modafinil appears to act pretty much exclusively by blocking that dopamine transporter, cocaine has effects mediated by blockade of the dopamine transporter, just like modafinil, but also serotonin transporters to some extent and noradrenaline transporters to some extent. So, that's one thing that will discriminate, modafinil from cocaine.

Modafinil is FDA approved for conditions in which someone is suffering from excessive daytime sleepiness.

You have decided, 'I want to get five hours of sleep a night. That's what I'm going to do.' And if you do that, there's a vanishingly small percentage of the population who can pull that off without pharmaceutical enhancement. Most of us cannot pull that off without pharmaceutical enhancement, at least in the long-term term, more than a few days at a time.

Apparently, 800 mg of modafinil, in people who have used cocaine and also used modafinil, these folks report that they get a very similar effect as using cocaine when they take 800 mg of modafinil.