16 things you didn't know about the ultimate creativity smart drug 🔬 Meta-Analysis of Nicotine by @jeroseland on 3Speak
▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- Nicotine is the secret weapon of elite Biohackers for instant creativity, concentration, and verbal horsepower. It's a not-low-risk, fast-burning, and highly addictive Nootro...
Tags: #nicotine #creativity #memory #productivity #smartdrugs #nootropics #cognitiveenhancer #covid #biohacking #science
Nicotine is the secret weapon of elite biohackers for near instant creativity, concentration, and verbal firepower. It's a not low risk or risk-free, neutropic. It is a... fast burning, and it is a highly addictive smart drug that should be used sparingly. But for many high performers, its upsides outweigh its downsides. Hey, I'm Jonathan with Limitless Mindset, and this is my deep dive meta-analysis on this smart drug that I have had an on again, off again, romance with for eight years now. So I'm going to break down a bunch of things about this drug that you may not have known, and maybe you'll decide to use it to great... effect. I'm going to start with a story about a sultry smoking Serbian babe. As you can see, I am here in front of the Hotel Moscow in Belgrade, Serbia, which I thought was an appropriate location because Serbians really love their nicotine. Almost all of them smoke. Many, many, many moons ago, when I was a digital nomad dude. I was in Belgrade, Serbia, and I was headed out from my hostel one evening, and this Serbian girl caught... my eye she was smoking outside on a summer evening and she had kind of the doll-like face, long, black hair, fake tits, skinny waist. If you've spent much time in the Balkans, you know the type. And so I walk over, and I just start chit chatting with her, and I invite her just on the spot to come out and join us. And this was a time in my life when I was this single dude, and I was just doing some experimentation with seeing. if I could push boundaries, just a little bit in social situations. I was just, I was going through a challenge phase of myself. So I invite her a couple times to join us, and she impulsively decides to go to a bar with me. So we sit down at a bar, and she is just smoking. voraciously the whole time. I'm not smoking, and I say to myself, okay, I got her to come out with me impulsively, maybe I can kiss her. Like, we just met about 10 minutes ago, but... Maybe I can kiss her. So I keep attempting to kiss her. Anytime there's a little bit of a chance that I've got where maybe she laughs at one of my stupid jokes just a little bit, or our heads are kind of close to each other. I try to lean in and kiss her, and she doesn't want to kiss me. And I think I tried three or four times at a bar, then we walk to a park, tried a couple more times at the park. and she told me that she was 13, but I think that was just because her English was really bad. I think she was 31. She looked a whole lot more like 31 than 13. I think, you know, if you're speaking, trying to speak a language that you hardly speak, 13 and 31, those are pretty, those are pretty easy to confuse. So anyway, so she's showing me pictures of her cat on... her phone, and just unapologetically blowing that secondhand smoke in my face and refusing to kiss me, and then we eventually parted ways for the evening, and we connected on Facebook, and I never saw her again in person, but she, after that... relentlessly stalked me on social media for years. She just did not really want to take no for an answer, and I got into the relationship with my girlfriend, and they got married to her. But this Serbian woman, she just kept contacting me. There was something about my boldness. I guess I was... I was the one that got away to her, and she, she tried, and she tried to get me back, but, ah, alas, maybe in the next life. And, in Serbia, in Belgrade, this is a place that I spent some time, and this is a place where... They really like nicotine. Almost everybody smokes there. And I actually did my first video about nicotine, reviewing nicotine in USB solution, and talking about how it can be such an enabler of creativity. I did that there in that appropriate balkin. Capital. So maybe go check out that biohacker review that I did to see just a little bit more of Belgrade. As per the usual, this meta-analysis, the article, and everything that I'm going to talk about here, can be found below in the link area of wherever you are watching or listening to me. So, do delve into some of the stuff that if you're going to use nicotine, do so as a informed. biohacker and do go and check out this page on my website. I think it's actually one of the best nicotine articles on the internet. By the way, none of the nicotine sources I mention here have paid me to do so. So this is kind of a pro bono piece of content for me. I do think that you will get a lot out of it, especially if you are a creative. If you appreciate that, please do leave my podcast a positive... dare I say, five-star review wherever you can, give it a like, upvote, give it a share. If you are not a creative, but you know a creative, share this with them. That algorithmic stuff, those signals really do make a difference to me. I really do appreciate those. And you can support me on Substack. from $7 monthly, which is not a lot of money, but enough that it gets that sunk cost motivation working for you, which can be a game changer, especially for those creatives of you out there that are harrowing through a book or a big project. So this meta-analysis podcast is going to focus on decoding what the human studies are saying about nicotine and how this squares up with the anecdotal experiences of biohackers online. And for more of my own personal thoughts, comparisons, and, well, I guess I'm going to give you a lot of that also in this meta-analysis. So, it is, as I said, the creativity drug. It's the original creativity drug, but you don't have to take my word for it, because some of the greatest writers and novelists were voracious smokers, and they should inspire you to take on a creative project if you choose to use this drug. And there is Tolstoy. Dostayevsky, Ein Rand, there is, oh, no, my screen is not expanding to show you these authors. It is basically all of the greatest novelists ever were pretty, not all of them. But many of those really iconic authors were smokers. So go and check out the photo gallery that I have in my article of them. If you in your life have enjoyed great classic novels, you have nicotine to thank partially for that. Dave Asprey, the godfather of biohacking, comments on its potent... Creativity Stimulating Power. He wrote, I predict that over the next few years, it will become much more popular for performance and cognitive enhancement. After all, about 99%, that's what he says, of the great works of literature in the last 200 years, were written under the influence of caffeine and nicotine. Mother Nature's original... Smart Drugs. So if you go on nicotine, write that book that you've always been thinking about. Start a video channel or a blog, make art or music, because you are going to be at the four of a mighty gust of winds in your creative sales on nicotine. Because... As the patron demon of the deadly sin of sloth admits in the novel, the Dievel Diaries, this is what he says. Cigarettes were my greatest invention. You know, makes people feel like they're doing something, even if they're only lounging in an armchair. So, yeah, don't just lounge around. Don't just live your life the normal way. Take on an epic creativity project. If you've enjoyed the creativity and the rigor of my content, along with the relentless production of it over the years, nicotine is somewhat to thank for that. When I really want to unleash creativity, I do some nicotine. pour a cup of green tea, slip on my over-ear headphones, and listen to the brain power boosting holosink style tunes of Brain FM. Those things are a great stack. I do hope that some of you will try it, and then share with me some of what you've created on it. Let's talk about nicotine as a mitochondrial biohack. In this article, I quote liberally from Headstrong by Dave Asprey. And this book makes the case that optimizing your mitochondria is the ultimate performance-enhancing thing that you can do because your mitochondria are the fundamental energy generation mechanism that underlies everything. Else, Dave's exuberant praise of nicotine on his podcast were what initially convinced me to try pharma-grade nicotine five years after I successfully quit smoking. I'll quote from the book, when you get the right amount, nicotine does a lot for you. It gives you faster, more precise... Motor Control, maybe they'll make you a better line dancer. People show more controlled and fluent hard handwriting after taking nicotine. So write some of those love letters to your partner, and they're able to tap their fingers faster on a keyboard without sacrificing accuracy. That's pretty cool, right? Nicotine makes you more vigilant, too. Participants who used nicotine patches were able to pay attention to a mentally tiring task longer than controls could. Nicotine dumb, which we'll talk about later, had the same effect. Nicotine also sharpens your short-term memory. People who took nicotine... did better recalling a list of words they just read and also made fewer mistakes than people given a placebo when reporting a story word for word. Again, the boost in memory came from both patches and gum, and it has been shown that nicotine can even increase synaptic plasticity. That all is pretty cool. Let's talk about it as a memory consolidation hack. Anyone who's tried nicotine knows that it's a powerful stimulator of your short-term working memory. And this has a downstream effect of enhancing long-term memory via the consolidation mechanism. Ben Greenfield writes in the mind-blowing chapter on neutropics in his giant biohacking book, research also suggests that oral consumption of nicotine improves memory consolidation during learning by increasing the density and efficiency of nicotinic acetycone receptors in the cholergic system, the part of the nervous system responsible for memory function. So your long-term and your short-term memory work together via the memory consolidation mechanism. What enhances your short-term memory will ultimately make you better at remembering everything that you need to. Let's talk about it as a cognitive enhancer. It's a potent, smart drug. I know this from the brain training that I've been doing for about a decade now. Nothing impacts my dual and back scores, which is a very good measure for working memory and executive control, like... Nicotine does. I've done brain training on smart drugs like modafinil, parasitam, and phenoporacetam, and a bunch of those fancy branded neutropic stack products, and nicotine actually outperforms, maybe not all of them all the time, but it's extremely competitive as a smart drug, and I include... a screenshot of a brain training performance that I was quite proud of, and this was a near all-time high dual endback score of 4.2, and that was achieved on nicotine after nearly an entire month of not. Brain Training, and this is something that's super cool about dual endback, is that the brain power gains, the executive function gains, that you get out of it, are largely sustained when you stop doing it. You know, if you quit going to the gym, your muscles are going to get weaker, right? But dual end back brain training is not quite like that. You can sustain... Brainpower, working memory, intelligence, all that good stuff with infrequent training. And, of course, the nicotine helps. Ben Greenfield adds. Research has shown that while moderate doses of nicotine typically enhance cognition, high doses can inhibit cognitive performance. So when it comes to dosing nicotine, moderation, and precision are key. Effective doses range from... 2 to 4 milligram administered over 20 to 30 minutes, a dose easily available in the form of gum or spray. Boy, that's good to know, so you want to resist that temptation to go crazy with it. Let's now look at the recent scientific research on it. There is a truly massive body of science done on nicotine. Over 10,000 human research papers have been published in just the past 10 years alone on PubMed. So next, I'm going to summarize every single one of them. Just kidding. We don't have nearly as much time for that. We're going to look at some that jumped out at me. A recent Taiwanese study gave it to 13 healthy male baseball players and evaluated it as a sports performance enhancer. Quote, compared with the placebo group, the nicotine group exhibited enhanced motor reaction times, grooved pegboard test results on cognitive function. That just sounds like a really fun thing to do on a date. and baseball hitting performance, and small effect sizes were noted. Nicotine could induce changes in endocrine and sympathetic nerve activity and enhanced cognitive function and baseball hitting performance. However, no increase in muscle strength was observed after nicotine intake. A recent meta-analysis that included studies totaling over... 900 human subjects confirmed that it's a potent smart drug, concluding that it had statistically significant positive effects on attention and non-significant effects on memory in healthy non-smoking adults. Many are understandably concerned that nicotine might cause cancer. But a paper describes the lung health study, which enrolled nearly 6,000 patients, and compared to, compared smoking to nicotine replacement therapy. Nicotine replacement therapy, they call it NRT, because the scientists really love to give everything acronyms, is basically what I'm doing with the USP solution, or... what you can do with the gums. And it concludes, smoking predicted cancer in this analysis and nicotine replacement therapy did not. Whew, that's kind of a bit of good news, isn't it? A. 2023 meta-analysis out of Bahrain, out of Bahrain of the NRT roans, though. pooled estimates revealed a statistically significant number of patients developed mouth or throat irritation, or oral soreness, or gastric reflux, or vomiting. And it says patients on NRT must adhere to their regular dentist visits and should check their oral mucosa, which is, that's what I was trying to share with the, uh, Serbian babe, they're in Elgrade. And this is an important, valid concern with taking nicotine orally the way I do. However, in the half decade, more than a half decade, that I've been using nicotine... orally, I've never had dental issues or oral soreness. Well, sometimes I'll have maybe a little bit of oral soreness directly after I take it if I don't wash it down properly, which just reminds me to take a drink of my infasutical water here. But I've had no serious dental issues, nothing, I've had some checkups, but nothing serious in there. Interestingly, I found that nicotine vaccines are a thing. These are preventative tools for substance use disorder, and apparently they work pretty well for people that want to kick or prevent a nicotine habit. So, hey, that's the kind of vaccine that I am a big fan of. Next, let's talk about mechanism of action, and I've got a diagram for this. When nicotine reaches your brain, it binds to nicotinic receptors. Guess where they got their name from? Activating the pathways that control attention, memory, motor function, and pleasure. That's why people like to have them in that post-orgasmic blow. COVID. Oh, this is the part I'm going to have to censor for YouTube. Do you remember when the coronavirus first paralyzed the world with fear in 2020, and many predicted a mass die-off of smokers? Well, that didn't exactly happen, because surprisingly... Nicotine has an anti-inflammatory effect that helps us fight COVID. And this is one of these things that got caught up in the disingenuous COVID misinformation counter campaign. mudding the waters of scientific debate on the topic, but a large meta-analysis looked at human studies totaling nearly 6,000 people, 6 ,000 people, okay, and it concluded, although the generalized advice to quit smoking, as a measure to reduce health remains valid. The findings together with the well-established immunomodulatory effects of nicotine suggest that pharmaceutical nicotine should be considered as a potential treatment option in COVID-19. However, The largest clinical study done with COVID patients showed that transdermal nicotine did not significantly reduce day 28 mortality, but this was done with hospitalized patients. So I'd regard nicotine as a preventative measure. for arresting or maybe preventing COVID infection in the early stages. The two times I think that I had COVID, I used nicotine to stay on point cognitively, and both times COVID was a walk -in-the-park thing for me. No long COVID here. And I might add that my Bulgarian mother -in-law was this voracious smoker for about half a century. And when COVID came around, and she just sat there watching the mainstream media coverage of COVID, I kept thinking, maybe she should quit. That might be a really good idea. This might be just the time for her to finally quit. And, of course, she didn't. And she is, she is still kicking. Okay, about nicotine versus constipation. Interestingly, nicotine can act on very similar pathways to support acetylcholine production. And some people have even experimented with nicotine patches over the lower right abdomen, abdomen, abdominal, oh, no, I'm mispronouncing that, to stimulate peristosis or deal with constipation. Next important topic is cycling and withdrawals. And I actually created a R-chart diagram to go along with this. This is one smart drug that you must refrain from using as much as you might like to. There are, I think, probably health risks to chronic nicotine use. It is a poison, after all. and it loses its performance enhancement potency, the more you build up tolerance. The first week I'm on nicotine, it's awesomely stimulating of my brain power and creativity. But after a month or two, it's kind of just a thing that I need to get the day started. So do plan to go off it cyclically. Fortunately, For me, at least, quitting nicotine the way I use it is very easy. If I quit cold turkey after a month or two of daily use, the first day or two, I feel a little off. I have mild cravings and I'm a bit more irritable. I need to be mindful that I don't snap at my wife over some small thing. So meditation, a gym session, or a few extra cups of coffee. Help on these withdrawal. days. What makes withdrawal even easier, though, is tapering. So for a week in advance of quitting, decrease your intake by half or more. And I find that this makes the withdrawal really no problem at all. But I'm blessed with a non-addictive personality type. If you've struggled with addiction in the past, you should probably just stay away from nicotine. Unless maybe it's a thing where you were a smoker and you find that you get those cravings every single time. You see people light up and then you have an urge. Maybe you want to re-associate that serotonin pathway with, well, nicotine replacement therapy. You will re-associate your nicotine stimulus pathway with whatever it is that you're using to consume the nicotine. In my case, it's this little sprayer bottle. Next, let's talk about nicotine and... productivity slash growth cycles. It won't take long to notice that you get a lot done on nicotine, especially before you've built up a high tolerance to it. So I intentionally schedule productivity sprints around the times that I'm going on nicotine for a month or two. This year, I produced the second edition of my first book, My Life Hacking Manifesto, on just such a sprint. And I actually put that book out for free as an audiobook. I'm such a genius businessman that I put it all out for free. Then I went off nicotine for a couple of months and just... took life a little bit easier. Then I went back on it for about two months to produce my magnum opus course on sex and relationship hacking for men. And this course was the result of... Oh, geez, at least a half decade of experience, research, and writing, and working with coaching clients. But I impressed even myself with the sheer amount of creative work, video production, design, wordsmithing, and content polishing that I got…