This is my personal experience. I maintained this schedule all throughout grad school. Eventually, though, I just got a prescription for Adderall and that worked much better.
Caffeine has a steep tolerance curve, and you will rapidly experience diminishing returns if you exclusively use caffeine. This means you are using caffeine to address your caffeine dependency and get you to baseline, rather than to push yourself above baseline. For this reason, you must cycle caffeine with other stimulants (or tolerance breaks) for it to remain effective. You also must have accurate dosage tracking in order to understand the long-term effects. You should also, in my opinion, match caffeine with a 1:2 ratio of caffeine to l-theanine (this is the inverse of the green tea ratio, which has 2:1 caffeine:l-theanine). All of this means coffee is an inadequate source of caffeine. Do not get your caffeine from coffee. Take caffeine pills, starting with a low dose like 25mg caffeine/50mg l-theanine. Track your dosage and dose times in a spreadsheet and also try to rate how effective it was; this self-report is not objective but is better than nothing in the long run. The smallest Starbucks coffee is about 125mg caffeine; on hard days when I was struggling to meet a deadline I might take 200mg (with 400mg l-theanine) twice in a day. While high doses of caffeine paired with 2x l-theanine is the closest you can legally get to adderall, I don’t really recommend it outside of making desperate efforts.
The best secondary stimulant I ever found was nicotine. As a non-smoker and non-secondhand smoker with a negligible nicotine tolerance, I needed about 1-2mg sublingually to match the effect of 100mg caffeine. Nicotine has a shorter effect than caffeine and you’ll need to redose multiple times in a day for the same effect. It also has a steep curve, and I usually found myself taking up to 5mg by the end of my nicotine weeks. I tried many forms of nicotine, but the most reliably effective with the least side effects was sublingual liquid nicotine at a 1mg/ml concentration. Patches were the worst, gum never really worked, lozenges worked but are kind of high risk high reward.
My schedule was to spend one week on caffeine, one week on nicotine, and one week on adrafinil. Adrafinil never really worked right and eventually I would use this week as a break week. I think it would also have worked fine if I did just caffeine/nicotine, but I never tried that extensively.
This is my personal experience. I maintained this schedule all throughout grad school. Eventually, though, I just got a prescription for Adderall and that worked much better.
Caffeine has a steep tolerance curve, and you will rapidly experience diminishing returns if you exclusively use caffeine. This means you are using caffeine to address your caffeine dependency and get you to baseline, rather than to push yourself above baseline. For this reason, you must cycle caffeine with other stimulants (or tolerance breaks) for it to remain effective. You also must have accurate dosage tracking in order to understand the long-term effects. You should also, in my opinion, match caffeine with a 1:2 ratio of caffeine to l-theanine (this is the inverse of the green tea ratio, which has 2:1 caffeine:l-theanine). All of this means coffee is an inadequate source of caffeine. Do not get your caffeine from coffee. Take caffeine pills, starting with a low dose like 25mg caffeine/50mg l-theanine. Track your dosage and dose times in a spreadsheet and also try to rate how effective it was; this self-report is not objective but is better than nothing in the long run. The smallest Starbucks coffee is about 125mg caffeine; on hard days when I was struggling to meet a deadline I might take 200mg (with 400mg l-theanine) twice in a day. While high doses of caffeine paired with 2x l-theanine is the closest you can legally get to adderall, I don’t really recommend it outside of making desperate efforts.
The best secondary stimulant I ever found was nicotine. As a non-smoker and non-secondhand smoker with a negligible nicotine tolerance, I needed about 1-2mg sublingually to match the effect of 100mg caffeine. Nicotine has a shorter effect than caffeine and you’ll need to redose multiple times in a day for the same effect. It also has a steep curve, and I usually found myself taking up to 5mg by the end of my nicotine weeks. I tried many forms of nicotine, but the most reliably effective with the least side effects was sublingual liquid nicotine at a 1mg/ml concentration. Patches were the worst, gum never really worked, lozenges worked but are kind of high risk high reward.
My schedule was to spend one week on caffeine, one week on nicotine, and one week on adrafinil. Adrafinil never really worked right and eventually I would use this week as a break week. I think it would also have worked fine if I did just caffeine/nicotine, but I never tried that extensively.