Same question applies perfectly to caffeine. I might just be justifying my addiction, but it’s possible this is still worthwhile as it allows one to manually select when they want to expend their mental energy, overriding the normally semirandom fluctuations brought on by exhaustion, mood, etc.

A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.

> A big difference is that caffeine isn't addictive. It may seem like it, and you do get a few headaches when you quit cold turkey, but you just don't get the intense graving you get with addictions.

I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.

Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?

> Isn’t the standard definition that you continue to use the drug despite it causing serious negative problems in your life?

There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.

By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.

There are tools for measuring the level of dependence and addiction for different substances (like the severity of dependence scale.)

You may also be interested in studies on caffeine dependence, like: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/

> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.

I think you’d be surprised. When i quit coffee cold turkey, I was basically out of commission for a week. Mentally I felt and functioned as though I was running a heavy fever, I could never feel full, and I felt exhausted and ready to sleep the moment I woke up. The headaches were constant and agonizing for about a whole week, easily worse than a migraine, and I had weird mood swings where I’d suddenly feel very anxious or sad out of nowhere. The difference is I was probably drinking 300mg a day or so.

It actually helps Alzheimer’s patients regain their faculties, if only temporarily.

There is fairly good evidence that nicotine causes some mild cognitive benefits beyond the baseline. Of course there are also downsides even separate from the effects of smoking.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/

I think nicotine is one of the very few components that can enhance some brain functions very slightly. It does however have far more negative side effects as its role in nature would suggest it would have.

This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.