The productivity handbook.

What to do when renting your productivity through stimulants no longer works.

It’s George.

Sales and dispensing of stimulants are at an all-time high in the US and many other countries.

*We are not just talking about things such as caffeine but also prescription stimulants.

In the US for example prescriptions dispensed rose 60% from 2012 to 2023, from 50.4 million to 80.8 million.

This is of course partly explained by the fact that patient numbers also grew significantly (up 48% over the same period), with especially sharp increases among adult women.

So it’s an undeniable reality that more and more people are both using and abusing stimulants, no matter what they might say publicly.

People can lie in surveys. But they never lie with their wallets.

The overall market of prescription stimulants is projected to keep growing at 6–9% CAGR through the 2030s and the market of coffee is valued at ~$107–138 billion and grows at 3–4.5% CAGR.

Now even though people rely more and more on stimulants, they do not rely on them for the reasons a person might initially think.

The reasons, as we will see, vary from:

• Their addictive nature (an aspect that’s unfortunately severely downplayed, but let’s face it, with enough artificial stimulation any activity can become tolerable)

• Poor emotional discipline that springs from not knowing how to process emotions

• Highly dopaminergic lifestyles

• Shitty hormonal profile

• Physical dependency

• Mental dependency

• Poor recovery

• Externally driven identity (aka “if i don’t do X,Y,Z, i am worthless”)

• Shitty mitochondria

• Misaligned purpose

• Nutritional deficiencies / Poor nutritional habits overall

• Shitty gut health

But unless you are like 22, it doesn’t take long to realize that relying on stimulants will result in:

• Premature skin ageing

• Gut issues

• ED

• Hair loss in susceptible individuals

• Kidney issues and gout flares in susceptible individuals

• Cardiovascular disease

• Anxiety and mental health issues overall in susceptible individuals

• Anhedonia

• Immune system suppression

and much more.

So you are basically renting productivity and paying it back with an extremely high interest rate and the main question is, if it is worth it.

Usually the answer is no because, as you’ll soon find out, you can not ruin your health and reclaim it overnight.

You can not abuse your body and expect it to keep treating you well.

“George you don’t get it, my schedule is too demanding”.

That’s fine. If your schedule is demanding for like a month or if you have a newborn.

This is why later in this article i will mention the safest options when it comes to stimulants.

Buf if your schedule has been “demanding” for 5 years, well, you will probably crash harder than you expect unless you let go of a few things (which is of course extremely hard to do if you have tied your identity and self-image with them (and partly an underlying reason why stimulants are heavily abused by type A personalities)).

Of course, these days more and more scientists, entrepreneurs and so on openly discuss stimulant use, which also creates the following problem:

Plenty of people think that stimulants will turn them into geniuses.

They won’t.

Tom Platz for example frequently used the analogy that steroids may make a Volkswagen faster, but they cannot transform it into a Ferrari.

The same thing is true with stimulants.

They won’t magically turn you into a genius and if you understood how your brain works (go here: https://healthlibrary.substack.com/archive), you’d already be aware of this obvious fact.

So overall, i am not against stimulants as tools.

But the amount of stimulants a lot of people use these days looks like a beginner in the gym using tren.

Overall, you don’t have to rely on stimulants.

People conquered entire nations and created tremendous scientific and philosophical works without them.

Once again: stimulants help you temporarily “rent” productivity with an extremely high interest rate so you better make that interest back while using them.

“But my stimulants are organic”.

But you are a retard.

Nicotine for example, has strong sympathomimetic and pro-vasoconstrictive effects.

It binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) (mainly α3β4 subtypes) on postganglionic sympathetic neurons and nAChRs on chromaffin cells in the adrenal medulla.

This triggers the release of catecholamines (mainly norepinephrine) from nerves and epinephrine from adrenals.

The first binds to α1-adrenergic receptors on vascular smooth muscle cells leading to calcium influx, muscle contraction and vasoconstriction.

Chronic nicotine usage also upregulates α1-receptors, amplifying the norepinephrine response.

It also upregulates endothelin-1 (ET-1) production/release from endothelial cells (a vasoconstrictor acting on ETA/ETB receptors) and impairs NO/prostacyclin (PGI2) pathways(*).

(*) It reduces endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) activity and nitric oxide (NO) bioavailability, impairs prostacyclin (PGI2) production, increases oxidative stress (superoxide), which scavenges NO to form peroxynitrite.

These are of course the tip of the iceberg.

So anyone who says that nicotine (or any stimulant) is totally safe is usually affiliated with some brand that sells it.

You can achieve every benefit nicotine has through other safer means.

Now here’s the productivity handbook (it’s quite long, to be fair (it’s close to 75 pages)).