Amphetamines can drive you through brutal work shifts, push you through boring study sessions or keep you dancing till dawn.
They fuel ambitions and sharpen minds.
We've given them to soldiers to fight harder and to children to help them focus.
Today, millions of brains are running faster than evolution had ever planned.
In the last 15 years, amphetamines have become one of the fastest growing drug markets in the world, second only to cannabis.
Like any drug, amphetamines can be used to escape reality.
But unlike any other, they promise to help us master our modern world.
What makes them so appealing?
And what happens to your body once you take them?
Supercharging your brain.
Almost everything humans do relies on focus and motivation.
Whether you're working playing studying creating, working out, partying or fighting, you need to push through exhaustion silence, distractions and stay in sync.
Amphetamines are stimulants and do just this extremely well.
They come in three main types, plain amphetamine, methamphetamine and MDMA.
Meth is an extremely potent and addictive version, and MDMA or ecstasy has some quite unique effects.
But today we'll focus on plain amphetamine sold on the street as speed or as prescription drugs like Adderall or Vyvanse.
The main effect of amphetamines is to trick your brain to massively increase the levels of dopamine and noradrenaline.
Dopamine is the chemical of motivation and excitement, like the rush when you're about to beat that impossible boss in a Souls game.
Noradrenaline makes your mind awake focused, alert and sharp, able to precisely and quickly move your fingers to perform the combo that destroys the boss.
Dopamine says, yes, this matters, and noradrenaline gives you the tools to make it happen.
On amphetamines, you aren't simply excited, but plugged into a hidden power source.
You can quickly absorb and react to everything around you.
Your attention is locked in the moment.
In the best case, you enter a state of flow easily.
Your mood is lifted and boring tasks seem more engaging.
Distractions become less distracting in the face of your goals.
Your heart pounds faster, your breath quickens and sweat beads on your skin.
Hunger fades and fatigue dissolves.
Other stimulants like cocaine, peak or fade quickly, maybe crashing you and leaving you more tired than before.
But amphetamines lift you up and hold you there for 4 to 14 hours.
Back in the day, amphetamines used to be prescribed for all kinds of problems to lose weight, fix your depression or against nasal congestion.
Nowadays, they're mainly prescribed for ADHD, a mental disorder that makes it hard to concentrate on things you find boring and to control your impulses.
ADHD brains are basically looking for a reward that never comes.
Amphetamines solve this by providing this reward, turning a super easily distracted scatterbrain into a focused one.
In the last decades, ADHD diagnoses in kids and adults in the US have skyrocketed, leading to an unprecedented amount of prescription amphetamines.
But amphetamines aren't just drugs, they're tools.
Performance-enhancing tools perfectly aligned with our most mainstream ambitions.
And if they manage to keep you awake and focused better than coffee or energy drinks, why not get your daily performance boost with a dose of amphetamines?
They're made in labs, prescribed by doctors and safely taken by millions after all.
So their legal and illegal use has surged in many workplaces, particularly in very stressful or highly competitive industries that require long hours and intense focus.
From tech to finance bros, from cooks or truck drivers to surgeons or nurses.
In the US alone, more than 4 million people illegally use prescription stimulants.
Especially college students have started to rely on them more and more, not to party, but to push for better grades.
Concentrating and studying are hard enough on their own, but even more so in times where short-form videos and endless scrolling have nuked our attention spans.
Some believe they have undiagnosed ADHD, that their struggle to concentrate is a flaw that needs chemical fixing, or they simply want an easy edge to achieve more.
Imagine you're cramming for finals.
Someone offers you a pill and the fog in your brain lifts.
Eight hours vanish in a hyper-focused blur.
Should you take another one tomorrow?
This is starting to sound like a commercial.
But the frank reality is that amphetamines promise an easy fix to things that many of us struggle with.
But of course, nothing good in life comes for free.
Speed crash.
The dark side of amphetamines comes in two flavors, unpleasant side effects and serious health risks.
The least negative bad experience may be that amphetamines work, just not for the right thing.
Instead of finally writing the paper that's due tomorrow, you hyperfocus on grinding your game and then the day's over.
Congrats on the new item, but you'll still fail your class.
More serious is that noradrenaline puts your body into fight-or-flight mode, which can make you feel nervous, tense and on edge.
Your heart beats faster and your breaths are shorter, which is exactly how your body feels when you experience anxiety or panic.
Suddenly, you feel extremely worried or can't stop ruminating.
If you're already pretty stressed or anxious, this can worsen your anxiety or even lead to a full-blown panic attack.
On the other hand, your motivation can overshoot.
Your patience shrinks to almost zero and you can feel wired and very annoyed at people because they speak and think too slowly, making you jittery and pretty unpleasant to others.
Amphetamines also make you numb towards the needs of your body, so it's easy to forget that you need to drink, eat and sleep.
You may suddenly realize that you're totally dehydrated, tired and shaky after neglecting your body's needs for hours and hours.
And while amphetamines lengthen the time you can stay awake and be productive, if you took them too late in the day or too much, it may just be impossible to get to sleep, as your mind can't stop racing, making you exhausted the next day, tempting you to solve the problem with another dose.
If you take too much, all the enhancing effects can reverse, leaving you nervous restless, obsessively overthinking or outright unable to focus on anything.
Some prescription amphetamines like Vyvanse stay active in your system for up to 14 hours, so if you have a bad trip, you may have to wait it out.
And the comedown can also be pretty harsh.
After hours of being bathed in dopamine and noradrenaline, their levels drop suddenly.
You may feel extreme fatigue.
Your mood can crash, leaving you feeling low energy and depressed.
You may experience a fresh boost of anxiety as your brain tries to rebalance itself.
And of course, there's addiction.
First of all, constant artificial dopamine highs can totally disrupt your emotional baseline.
Swinging from euphoric and super focused and driven to stressed and tired is pretty unpleasant.
If you take amphetamines regularly, you build a tolerance, needing higher doses to achieve the same effects, which raises the risk for all the negative effects.
Maybe at the beginning amphetamines were the solution to finally do your homework, but after a while you just feel completely unable to study or work at all without the boost they give you.
It can be hard to get back to your normal baseline afterwards.
Okay, not ideal, but can amphetamines destroy your life?
Well, maybe.
Definitely your brain and heart.
The flood of chemicals that boosts your brain can overwhelm it, mixing noise and signal and turning clarity into chaos, leading to psychosis.
You can no longer tell for sure what's real and what's not.
Typical symptoms are bizarre thoughts, hallucinations, and paranoia.
In most cases, they fade once the drug wears off, but sometimes they stay for months.
And for a minority of people they can evolve into full-fledged schizophrenia, changing your life forever.
Amphetamines speed up your heart and, over time, even mild increases in blood pressure can damage vessel walls, causing them to thicken, narrow and lose elasticity, which forces your heart to work harder.
If you use them long term, this can lead to serious complications like cardiac arrest or an irregular heartbeat.
And in high enough doses, especially mixed with other stimulants like cocaine, amphetamines can trigger heart attacks, tear open major arteries or burst blood vessels in your brain, leading to strokes, even in young people.
How likely is this to happen?
Today, it seems that low-dose prescription use over the short term for ADHD is relatively low risk, while chronic and especially heavy use in healthy people is probably harmful.
If you want our opinion after our research, amphetamines are a huge gray zone.
A part of society runs on speed because it wants to work more, be more focused, faster and longer.
For some people, they're an effective way to treat a real underlying condition.
For some, they're a great health risk.
Without medical guidance and proper care, amphetamines can turn you into a terribly on edge, anxious and unpleasant version of yourself.
They are an easy but also a short-term fix and probably not a sustainable long-term solution if you do not have an underlying condition.
You can brute force your mind and body to do what you want them to right now, but amphetamines are not helping you to acquire better habits or to grow and become a better version of yourself.
But we're not the health police.
You do you.
But hopefully, you do so as informed and responsibly as possible.
Luckily, there are other ways to supercharge your mind and become a sharper version of yourself.
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