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paukkumaissi comments on Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks - Less Wrong
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I use Adrafinil, which is a non-controlled version of Modafinil. Taking one pill makes me want to do intellectual work and gives me better focus. Taking two pills makes me so sharp I find it a bit difficult to "chill out", so I really feel like spending my energy on working.
The downside is it's difficult to wind down in the evening when I just want to relax, but that's what cannabis is for, I guess.
Me too, except I use Modafinil b/c it has a shorter half-life so it doesn't keep me up at night. I use it 1-3x/week.
In the same vein of pharmaceutical solutions...
I used to, as a college student, have a terrible time getting to bed. I had 8 AM classes, and so I really needed to go to bed at a reasonable time like midnight (and not 2 or 3 AM); and in the morning I would regret tremendously staying up late. A classic case of akrasia - I could probably have even quantified it all in terms of grades.
My solution was to realize that the problem was that at any moment I was enjoying whatever more than I needed the sleep. I needed some way to induce a 'false' sleepiness. So I looked up the options and found melatonin. 3mg of melatonin would practically club me into sleepiness after 30 minutes - so it solved the issue of not wanting to go to bed.
Of course, this caused another problem: taking the melatonin at the right time! But this turned out to be much less of an issue, perhaps because taking a pill is so much easier than winding up for the night and going to bed.
EDIT: see my full length post on melatonin: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lt/case_study_melatonin/
I'd be worried about "too tired to go to bed" syndrome, but that might work for me if I avoided doing things where the syndrome would apply.
I've had that on occasion with modafinil, but melatonin doesn't seem to suffer from that; which makes sense, given its role in sleep - it can't make you need to sleep and not make you need to sleep, if you follow me. (The real danger is the dual to your syndrome: 'too tired to wake up', when you overdose heavily and feel like shite in the morning.)