Imagine taking a pill that makes you more productive at work, improves your relationships and beyond all that maximise your life potential!
Imagine taking a pill that makes you see the glass as half full, that helps you get out of bed each morning and face the day, that makes you more pleasant, less irritable to your family and friends.
Imagine journeying to the primeval Amazonia, there meeting a wizened mystic who gives you some rancid tasting herbs that jolt you into an internal journey where you gain insight and clarity about yourself and the universe, an awe-inspiring, life-transformation experience.
When we got to the doctors with a medical problem, we hope to be given some cure or treatment. We don’t need to know everything about how these treatments work, but we need to trust that the person we’re talking to knows.
When we have blood pressure problems, or infection problems, or pain problems, we are prescribed medications and we expect that these problems will be resolved. And we expect it because we trust the prescriber and the knowledge they possess: science. And when meds work, and they usually do, our problems improve.
What about when the problem is our selves? When we are the problem, we seek treatment in the hope that part of our personality, character or temperament changes. We often feel like we know what part of us is the problem, and we trust science, and scientific experts to know that their solutions work on that particular part.
It takes a lot of trust, putting our personalities into the hand of experts!
A Persistence Drug for Boring Things
An interesting article was published a few weeks ago in science-digest publication, Medscape. The article analysed research published in the journal, Cell, in December 2025, which compared the brain scans of 377 teenage boys who had taken stimulant based Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) medication, with the brains of boys who had not taken these medications.
The take home message from the study was that ADHD medications seemed to have the least impact of all on the attention areas of the brain. Rather, the scans showed the “greatest effect on sensorimotor and salience networks, which are responsible for keeping individuals awake and helping them decide what is worth doing”.
Thus, the researchers concluded, attention disorder medication does not actually help with attention. In the words of the boffins: “Essentially, we found that stimulants pre-reward our brains and allow us to keep working at things that wouldn’t normally hold our interest. It’s a persistence drug to help us keep working on boring things. It gives you nothing if you already like what you’re doing.”
A persistence drug for boring things!
But that’s not all, they also found a link between well-rested brains and stimulant-medicated brains. Essentially, sleep deprived kids seemed to be getting some pep in their step from the meds. Just like the adult coffee fiends (yours truly included), stimulant-taking sleep-deprived kids performed as academically well as early-to-bed-early-to-rise types.
Not at all surprising when you consider that coffee is also a stimulant.
The researchers again: “Stimulants even appeared to restore the cognitive deficits that accompany … (sleep deprivation). Sleep-deprived children who took stimulants had school grades equivalent to well-rested children who did not take medication.”
So, evidence that your ADHD meds don’t help you focus but rather make up for your poor sleeping habits and make you better able to suck-up drudgery.
To be fair, the Medscape article did interview an opposing viewpoint expert who said that the absence of attention-system activation in the study was based on the fact that there is nothing good to attend to in an MRI. Seems plausible.
However…
One of the quiet truths of modern psychiatry is this: many medications work, but we still don’t fully understand why.
Solving the Problem that is Me
A quarter of US adolescent boys are on stimulant medication!!!*
Probably about a third of my clients take some sort of psychoactive medications, usually antidepressants. Many of my closest circle take or have taken these medications. I have professionally recommended many times that certain clients speak to their GP or psychiatrist about taking medication.
I have had enough experience to tell me that these medications can work. Most of these common medications have moderate to strong evidence of efficacy above a placebo.
What about newer medications? In my time as a psychologist, I have seen an explosion of interest, use and research in previously recreational substances, such as cannabis, ketamine, psylocibin (magic mushrooms) and MDMD (ecstasy). Research is emerging for all of these treatments, and many of them have been legalised for treatment.
In a world where our personality and personal problems can be reduced to the level of neurochemistry or neural network, it makes sense to look for solutions at the cellular/chemical level.
There is a substance that seemingly is able to solve any of the problems that is you. This fantasy, so embedded in our collective unconscious, of maximising our abilities is most clearly seen in the movie, Limitless, where Bradley Cooper goes from loser to winner with the help of a little pill.
Don’t we all want to be limitless! And quarter of adolescent boys are on stimulant medication for ADHD in the USA. Get your head around that!
But rather than seeing the attention problem as a problem of the educational system, or a sleep/routine disturbance. We seek to bio-hack ourselves to better tolerate dullness.
Which is okay, in my opinion, because I’ve seen psychoactive medications work, improve lives, boost happiness and productivity.
But if you ask a deeper question — how exactly do they work? — the honest answer is more uncertain than most people realise.
* According to the Medscape article
