As your energy reserves drop in the body, your brain begins to send out chemical sleep signals. In effect, your brain is trying to shut down your body until energy reserves have been tapped. Caffeine interferes with those chemicals, forcing the body to continue for a period of time putting further stress on your body. But here’s the problem, your body continues to flood your brain with chemical sleep signals…it’s not like the chemicals just went away, caffeine just got in the way of them. As more of the chemical sleep signals build up, they overwhelm the amount of caffeine in your system and you experience a crash. The crash occurs because the initial dose of caffeine is limited and the body begins to metabolize caffeine almost immediately all the while it continues pumping out chemical sleep signals because your body needs to rest.
Some people resort to using nootropics— these are sometimes referred to as "brain drugs" that have a psychoactive stimulant effect on the brain by enhancing two chemicals in your brain, norepinephrine and dopamine. These drugs might provide a short-term boost to the brain, but the brain depends upon a chemical balance. By disturbing that balance you WILL create problems down the line for yourself.
Although it is beyond this article, messing with your brain’s chemical balance can actually modify the neurons in your brain. Put a little differently, your brain will modify itself in an attempt to reestablish its chemical balance. Thus when you do not have the nootropic in your system, your brain’s “new chemical balance” is once again out of balance and you will perform worse than had you not started using nootropics in the first place. With all of this said, there are people that benefit from drugs like Adderall or Ritalin, but it is because they have a chemical imbalance in the first place.
I strongly recommend adopting behavioral strategies to make yourself more productive as you will have more consistent and prolonged performance. Being successful doesn’t require that you kill yourself with work. It means understanding basic principles that avoid wasting time and ensuring you prioritize the goals you are trying to accomplish. Time and Clarity of Thought are Your Most Valuable Resources.
