No, really, stop taking [stimulant] every day
Your wisdom is limited so long as you're at the mercy of your history and habits
This is my first post since finishing the Inkhaven residency. I spent all of April at Lighthaven. I had to post at least 500 words a day or be kicked out.1
At the beginning of the month I was drinking one cup of tea a day. I kept up my habit until April 21st, when I went cold turkey. No headaches – but depressive thoughts and intense emotions, for a couple of days. On April 22rd I wrote a thing telling people to stop taking caffeine every day. The poem at the end gives a glimpse of my bleak state of mind, the night before.
I haven’t had any caffeine since then, but I have had a few conversations, and more time to think… and I still agree. Stop taking caffeine every day! Actually, stop taking [stimulant] every day! That applies not just to me at Inkhaven, but to most people, most of the time.2
Imagine this: a close friend comes to you to confide that they’re taking a drug every day, and when they stop, they go through withdrawal. They’re pained and irritable and can’t work well. What do you hope they’ll do? Maybe you wouldn’t just tell them directly to stop it, because you’re aware of the danger of giving advice. But wouldn’t it be better if they found themselves on the other side of withdrawal, with no more dependence?
Your friend is convinced that the drug makes them more productive. You ask how they know this. After a bit of back-and-forth they retreat to “I feel really groggy and irritable and unmotivated before I take it” and also “I’ve never gone more than three days in a row without taking it since I was in high school”.
Arjun Panickssery suggests Consider working more hours and taking more stimulants.
Famous intellectuals, artists, and statesmen throughout history often took stimulants, sometimes in copious amounts. Silicon Valley culture has a similar reputation. Besides lifestyle interventions like lifting weights (12% chance of a life-changing effect), sleeping more, and running, there could be huge information value from experimenting with modafinil or amphetamines like Adderall (12.5% chance [of a life-changing effect])
That 12.5% chance of a life-changing effect is based on online self-reports. People took a survey, and some of them reported taking amphetamines, of which 12.5% rated them a 10/10 on the “useless to life-changing” scale. Troof, who collected and analyzed the results, points out the flaw: “You take a pill. It makes you feel good. You go on a website which asks you how good the pill is. You say it’s awesome. Little did you know that it was, in fact, merely good."
Amphetamines release dopamine. They inflate your confidence across the board – they corrupt the system that makes the ratings! There’s little evidence that they are cognitively enhancing in general. They might improve processing speed. Why processing speed? You become faster at doing a thing when you’re more instantly confident, and lock in more quickly at each step. But this only works if you already have a series of steps to lock into.
One day at Inkhaven, I took a bit more of my amphetamine prescription than usual.3 Several of us took a walk to the beach. I took my shoes off to walk in the sand. As we were about to leave, I saw my shoes, and immediately put them on while we were still on the sand. Not great. Why would I do that? I don’t visit beaches much, so I don’t have a strong beach-specific prior about when to put my shoes back on – though the answer is obvious as soon as I reflect on it (wait until you’re off the sand). No, my closest-to-automatic model was “put your shoes on when it’s time to go on a walk”, and I locked in as soon as the opportunity arose.
Amphetamines bias you towards known actions. Similarly, they increase motivation and perseverance a bit. So go ahead, as Arjun suggests: consider taking more amphetamines. They might help, and they’re probably physically harmless. But once you start, they don’t need much help from you! They will self-rationalize just fine.
Now, none of that touches on chronic usage specifically – and this post is about not taking [stimulant] every day! Well, an execution bias is useful sometimes, like when you need to grind something out. But when you put yourself in a locks-in-easily, highly-automatic, low-empathy state every day, then all of your learning is shaped by that bias. Are you sure that’s good? Remember, the drug is bending your mind to make you think it’s good, and it takes more than a day or two of abstinence to see outside that.
What about caffeine?4 Gwern has a review of the caffeine research. There’s not a lot. Some of it says caffeine has negative effects on memory retrieval. It clearly has negative effects on sleep. And none of the research says chronic caffeine is good for cognitive performance.
[It’s] not clear that caffeine results in performance gains after long-term use; homeostasis/tolerance is a concern for all stimulants, but especially for caffeine. It is plausible that all caffeine consumption does for the long-term chronic user is restore performance to baseline. (Imagine someone waking up and drinking coffee, and their performance improves - well, so would the performance of a non-addict who is also slowly waking up!) See for example, James & Rogers 2005, Sigmon et al 2009, and Rogers et al 2010. A cross-section of thousands of participants in the Cambridge brain-training study found “caffeine intake showed negligible effect sizes for mean and component scores” (participants were not told to use caffeine, but the training was recreational & difficult, so one expects some difference).
What does the long-term caffeine user look like? I see a spectrum of types. Roughly from worst to best:
they are neurotic all the time and simply cannot stop taking more caffeine because withdrawal makes them feel even worse;
they are drowsy or irritated, especially right after waking, and caffeine makes it go away, and also causes it (through tolerance and withdrawal);
they drink a lot of tea or coffee but seem to be immune to withdrawal effects; drinking tea/coffee/whatever is basically an aesthetic garnish to their life.
After presenting the research and side effects of caffeine, Gwern continues (emphasis mine):
For me, my problems tend to be more about akrasia and energy and not getting things done, so even if a stimulant comes with a little cost to long-term memory, it’s still useful for me. I’m going continue to use the caffeine. It’s not so bad in conjunction with tea, is very cheap, and I’m already addicted, so why not? […] Suppose there was conclusive evidence on the topic, the value of this evidence to me would be roughly $0 or since ignorance is bliss, negative money - because unless the negative effects were drastic (which current studies rule out, although tea has other issues like fluoride or metal contents), I would not change anything about my life. Why? I enjoy my tea too much. My usual tea seller doesn’t even have decaffeinated oolong in general, much less various varieties I might want to drink, apparently because de-caffeinating is so expensive it’s not worthwhile. What am I supposed to do, give up my tea and caffeine just to save on the cost of caffeine?
The talk of energy and akrasia makes me think Gwern is #2, since there’s not much reason to believe that chronic caffeine gives energy that can’t be had by doing things we should be doing anyway, i.e. sleep and exercise and meal-timing.
I’m just as productive as I ever was, now that I’m active and caffeine-free. And I feel better. It’s subtle: on caffeine, I did feel better after having my coffee or tea – and there was a pretense, that it gave me more energy than I would otherwise have – but in hindsight that was self-deception. I was at the mercy of my drives, and all my reasons were bent around them. To do away with the self-deception, I had to do away with the bent memories of the “better” things. I had to soften part of my mind and put myself in something like the state I would’ve been in, had I never gotten fixed on tea in the first place. I love tea, but now I am okay living mostly without it; if I start taking it again, I’ll be more selective.
Ignorance may be bliss, but if we are aiming for wisdom instead of an unreflective status quo built out of the accidents of our personal histories, then we should want to do better. Don’t you want to know what your life could be like? Say, if you had never been addicted to that thing you’re addicted to? Don’t you want to know if you are papering over your experience with something shallower, more mindless? Do you care if what you’re experiencing is cope, or if it’s deeply real? Do you just want to go fast and get to the ending – all endings, all the time?
Do you like being at the mercy of forces you only pretend to control?
That’s 15,000 words total. My count was either 34,275 words (according to the Inkhaven portal) or 24,824 (according to Brinkhaven, which only counted my first 29 posts). I’m not sure why the counts are so different.
Specific cases where it does not apply are like, people with moderate or severe ADHD who cannot perform important life functions without their stimulants, but even then I am skeptical about every-day-forever dosing.
On the days I take lisdexamfetamine, I take 5-8 mg. This day, I took more like 12 mg. These are small doses.
There are other stimulants too, of course. I’ve chosen to focus on just caffeine and amphetamine for this post. Modafinil is worth revisiting later.