It's also great for totally messing up your brain chemistry and your reward wiring. Wouldn't touch it myself.
I'm sure if you did it once or twice a year it'd be fine but let's be real, anyone who's willing to take it in the first place (outside of having a genuine medical reason like narcolepsy/ADHD) will want to take it a lot more than that.
Besides, in the long run - measured over weeks or months - these absolutely will not give you a productivity boost anyway comparable to sorting out your sleep/exercise/diet/mental health.
ADHD stimulants promised a lot in terms of motivation -- but only made me do the thing I already wanted to do instead of work... more.
So instead of plugging away on house work or chores or my employer's boring work, I was building compilers and databases from scratch at 3am, unable to sleep.
And then I checked my blood pressure. Oops.
Also seemed directly implicated in a loved one of mine acquiring an eating disorder.
Sad! It mush have been something amphetamine-based. Ritalin, from experience, makes me visibly grumpy, because everything is wrong! Everything should be properly fixed! The desk should be cleaned. The code should be reviewed, bugs fixed, tests expanded and enhanced. That ticket is annoyingly obvious, it should be done in 10 minutes, dammit. Well, more like an hour, but now it's fixed for real. The chair squeaks, it's insufferable, where are my hex bits? Etc, etc.
It wears out quickly enough though, maybe in 3 hours.
I'm sure if you did it once or twice a year it'd be fine but let's be real, anyone who's willing to take it in the first place (outside of having a genuine medical reason like narcolepsy/ADHD) will want to take it a lot more than that.
Besides, in the long run - measured over weeks or months - these absolutely will not give you a productivity boost anyway comparable to sorting out your sleep/exercise/diet/mental health.