Rubber ducks are better than adderall.
Adderall is a mixture of amphetamine salts that stimulate the central nervous system.
It does so by stimulating the release of two important hormones and neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.
Dopamine improves the signal-to-noise ratio, filtering distractions and raising activity in the prefrontal cortex. It also strengthens your goal-directed behaviour, reducing impulsivity by messing with your basal ganglia (brain region affecting motivation). Norepinephrine is a hormone and neurotransmitter that plays a crucial role in your body’s stress response: it boosts alertness and wakefulness. There’s a part of your brain called the locus coeruleus that synthesizes this thing, and adderall boosts the region.
This all sounds great Patrick, why are you telling me this? You want me to take adderall?
No. Over time, your dopamine and norepinephrine transporters down regulate and desensitize. Your postsynaptic receptors may also down regulate, reducing response.
Your dopamine and norepinephrine stores will deplete after 4-6 hours, and you will crash with fatigue, depression and irritability. Especially if you don’t have ADHD (adderall is mostly prescribed for that). As a cherry on top, your psyche will get addicted, and your reward pathways will sensitize to the drug, but desensitize to everything else, meaning you’ll need adderall to just feel normal again.
“So what do I do Patrick? I have finals coming up, I need to study for interviews and I’m sleep deprived!”
Easy there. Get yourself a duck 🦆.
A pair of eyes on you while working will activate your amygdala, signalling social salience and slight arousal (not the sexual one, but mild stress that improves focus). It also activates your medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, becoming more self-aware of your actions, naturally making you more productive to avoid the public shame of slacking. The public, in our case, is our lovely trusty duck.
Guess what, dopamine pathways are also activated, increasing attention and drive. It keeps you accountable and makes you judge your actions more critically (by activating your default mode network)
THATS ONLY FOR A PAIR OF EYES WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ADD A BRIGHT ORANGE ANTHROPOMORPHIC OBJECT?
The bright colors will capture your bottom up attention, anchor your awareness to your workspace, and serve as a visual cue to LOCK TF IN. Thinking of the duck as someone you can talk to will activate the neural mirrors of being in a social conversation, leading to better reasoning, emotional processing and even motivation. AND if you start explaining your leetcode solutions to your duck, putting complex abstract thoughts into structured language, forcing yourself to think about your thinking, you will literally become smarter just by pretending someone else is listening.
AND. May I say. All of this comes with no side effects.
Get yourself a rubber duck.