About two months ago I started experimenting with Piracetam, having read good things about it here. The results were very promising at first, but the promise was not fulfilled.
I ordered my Piracetam from Cognitive Nutrition (800mg capsules). The first day I took 3200mg (two pills, then another two after an hour or so, when I felt no effect). The results were amazing. I had to read some academic stuff for a class, and I found myself energized and interested to a degree that was almost unfamiliar to me. This lasted for most of the day. The following few days I repeated the dosage with similar effects, although the intensity began to taper off pretty quickly. Still, I was much more energetic, sharp, and sociable than I usually am (I tend to be lazy and somewhat apathetic), so I was loving it. I didn't supplement with choline at first, but after a few days added DMAE and later Alpha-GPC (300-600mg a day). I have to say neither of these made any difference that I could see.
So far, so good. After about two weeks, though, came the catch: I started suffering from monstrous insomnia. I'd wake up every night around 4AM and not be able to sleep until morning. This happened every night for a week. (I've had insomnia in the past, but never as bad as this.) During the day the effects of the Piracetam were still there, but not nearly as much as at first, and not enough to compensate for my increasing sleep deprivation. After a week of this I had enough and dropped everything I was taking. This still wasn't enough to get me to sleep again, so I started taking 5-HTP, which does the job quite well.
So lately I figured, well, if 5-HTP helps me sleep, and Piracetam was pretty good apart from the insomnia, maybe I could take both and get the best of both worlds. But it doesn't work - I don't get the same effect from Piracetam anymore. I've tried several times with various dosages; mostly I felt no effect at all, except once when I took 2400mg (less than my old daily dose) with 300mg Alpha-GPC and got a rather undesirable feeling of spaciness, as if my brain was only half working or working in slow motion - not what you want in a cognitive enhancer at all.
So now I'm puzzled. Why is Piracetam so hit-or-miss? If I could consistently get the effect I got at first, that would be lovely, but if I have to run the risk of getting a weird spacey trip instead, not to mention raging insomnia, then no thanks. Varying the dosage or the Piracetam/choline ratio doesn't seem to help, since the same dose can have completely different effects or none at all. Maybe the initial effectiveness was just placebo, but then I can't see why it would go away after a few days or weeks - if Piracetam was effective because I believed it would be, surely it should have continued to be effective later, when I had even more reason to believe it would be?
Thoughts and suggestions?
