Nicotine and Cognitive Performance – The Benefits of Nicotine?
prymd.com
prymd.com
Sweet Mother of Uncontrolled Confounding Factors.
OK, let's do this. We're a weird and diverse crowd. Does anyone here other than the article's author have experience with taking nicotine-containing smoking cessation aids purely for their own sake, without previously having been a tobacco user?
As I am leery of long term complications, I limit my current usage to when I'm feeling down and not-productive. This time centers around the dark times of the year, and I estimate that I self-medicate with nicotine gum for about 4 weeks total a year.
Caffeine makes me more effective at focusing on the mundane parts of programming, but it makes it more difficult to actually reason through problems.
Nicotine doesn’t interfere with my reasoning as much, though the body high can be a distraction. Also, I still have to go outside to vape, because even if it’s not as bothersome as smoke, I’m not sure my coworkers would appreciate me blowing clouds all over the office.
I take breaks occasionally, for periods of 1–3 weeks. Cravings last a few days and they’re slightly worse than caffeine.
It’s also just a bit of geeky fun to experiment with building your own setup. I’ve never had such an intuitive understanding of electricity before. :)
Also a lot of this is anecdotal. I know many people (myself included) who are addicted to nicorette gum. They wean themselves off smoking and onto gum. Nicotine is still addictive.
I'm still looking for the "natural Adderall". Maybe socially accepted is the better term. Amphetamines are hard (read: impossible) to beat... Especially if you spent a long time taking them in high doses daily.
Anyway I really hope we get more research in this space. Coffee only does so much.
You may enjoy this then: http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine