Best Nootropics

Choosing from the best nootropics is a tricky business. We set our nootropic expert James Dixon the task of shortlisting his favorites to help you choose the right option for your needs.

The supplement industry is a changeable thing. Crazes come and go. Some stick around. Though relatively new and still gaining traction (albeit very, very quickly), the nootropics market looks set to stand the test of time. And how could it not?

Nootropics, or smart drugs as they are often referred to, are a breed of supplements designed to aid cognition, boost mental wellbeing whilst supercharging executive function. They help you to keep up with the fast pace of modern life without burning out, reducing the suffering of brain fog, and stopping you from getting too stressed and anxious.

It’s a crowded marketplace, too, as newcomers take their shot seemingly every week. There are so many, in fact, that it can be a little baffling. How do you choose one from the crowd? Luckily, there are some outstanding nootropics that I really wouldn’t do without. Pick any of them and you’ll be onto a winner.

I’ve collated some of my all-time favorite nootropic supplements below, including a couple that I use on a regular basis, giving you the ins and outs on why I love them so much. These are the best nootropics that money can buy, all of them more than capable of improving your brain health, mental wellbeing, and cognitive function.

Our top nootropics

Every item in this list goes a long way to satisfying the above criteria, giving you all the benefits you would expect of a good nootropic. This includes greater clarity, improved mood, more energy, improved memory, lower stress and anxiety levels, and general improvements across pretty much every area of executive function.

I thoroughly recommend NooCube, as we will see. However, any item from this list will do its job incredibly well. You will do well on any of them.

NooCube 

NooCube is one of the best supplements money can buy in any category. It’s also my own nootropic of choice. I generally have a couple of bottles of it in my supplement cupboard at home and tend to dip into it fairly frequently – daily, during particularly stressful, taxing, or generally busy periods.

It will give you some pretty profound benefits to your mental clarity, focus, mood, and energy, aiding productivity and improving your overall outlook on life.

It works across five main strands of cognitive wellbeing: boosting memory, improving focus and concentration, diminishing stress and anxiety, improving attention span, and improving eye-brain connection.

It does all this and more using a blend of top-notch, high-quality ingredients, all of which enjoy robust scientific underpinning.

Firstly, you get a good dose of bacopa monnieri, one of my favorite nootropic ingredients. It’s a simple enough herb that has been shown to improve nerve signal reception. This will lead to enhanced cognition and improved reaction times. It will also improve working and long-term memory.

Our second ingredient, Alpha GPC (another firm favorite of mine), works well in conjunction with bacopa monnieri. It boosts the body’s acetylcholine production. Acetylcholine is a crucial neurotransmitter that plays a key role in learning and memory.

You also get a couple of very useful amino acids with each serving of NooCube. These are l-tyrosine and l-theanine.

L-tyrosine is there for its ability to fight stress whilst also holding the symptoms of fatigue and lethargy at bay. L-theanine, meanwhile, enables more dopamine and serotonin to be released into your brain. These will both boost your mood whilst improving your reaction times and attention span.

Huperzine A goes a long way to further improving your memory function. It also pairs with oat straw extract to further improve focus and concentration. Meanwhile, the polyphenols resveratrol and pterostilbene are rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, which will help you to fight oxidative stress and slow the aging process. They can help to delay age-related cognitive decline.

This isn’t a comprehensive list. There are plenty more ingredients in there that can work wonders for your cognitive and mental health and wellbeing. However, they are some of the most potent, most effective ingredients going in the nootropic world.

All told, they should keep your brain healthy, young, and functioning optimally whilst also giving you more energy, focus, and concentration, improving your mood, and giving you a clearer head far freer from the effects of stress and anxiety.

NooCube offer a 60-day money back guarantee when you buy it online through their own website. I would go with this. In the unlikely event that NooCube doesn’t really do it for you, you then won’t have lost anything.

For me though, NooCube edges the race as the best nootropic available with a fair price point and impressive range of well thought out ingredients that have been sourced for their high quality.

VyvaMind

I hadn’t come across VyvaMind until a little while ago – it’s not a market leader by any stretch of the imagination. However, I became intrigued when I began to look into its formula.

It’s solid, made for high performers looking for a significant boost to their cognitive abilities. But it’s dinky. It’s a small, small formula whose simplicity nevertheless speaks of elegance rather than meanness.

In fact, you only get six ingredients with VyvaMind. This sounds like cause for concern at first. However, even the best nootropics out there rely on only a couple of star players in their formulas. Everything else is sort of the icing on the cake.

Each ingredient is also perfectly dosed at a clinically useful, entirely optimal amount. It’s pretty much a perfect blend of everything you need and nothing much that you don’t. Nothing wasted.

You will get 200 mg of citicoline per serving, alongside 300 mg of l-tyrosine and 150 mg of l-theanine. This is an automatic win. There are other ingredients I might like to see in there, but nothing truly necessary. This is supported by a good B vitamin complex, with 2.5 mg of vitamin B6 and 50 mcg of vitamin B12, and 75 mg of caffeine anhydrous with each serving (about the same as a strong single espresso).

Citicoline is the winner in the VyvaMind formula though. It has been shown to significantly improve productivity over time in those who take it.

It is a brain chemical that is found to occur naturally and that gives longer lasting, clearer energy levels than something like caffeine, alongside a good boost to your focus and concentration.

You also get a good antioxidant dose from it, which should help to ward against age-related decline whilst promoting neurotransmitter repair and growth. The B vitamins add to this, improving memory and mood whilst protecting longer-term brain health.

The two amino acids, l-theanine and l-tyrosine, often come as a pair. There is a good reason for this. Together, they bring about a wide range of benefits, that include fighting stress and anxiety, aiding focus, concentration, and attention span, and even livening up your creativity.

Then there is the caffeine anhydrous (a particularly high-quality caffeine form). It should give you a good energy spike when you most need it, without going overboard. It’s a modest serving, just enough to work, not enough to increase anxiety, give you the jitters, or lead to any great mood or energy crashes.

This stripped-back approach makes VyvaMind low cost without sacrificing any quality or efficacy – it works perfectly well with just a few superstar ingredients and is suitably placed in position two on my shortlist.

Hunter Focus 

We’ve started strong with VyvaMind and NooCube. Luckily, with the current nootropic market being what it is, there’s no need to stop – we can stay strong for a good while yet!

Case in point, Hunter Focus, our next offering. It’s another top-notch nootropic that really should go a long way to improving cognitive and mental health and healthy functioning.

It takes a different approach to VyvaMind. Where the latter gives you a stripped back, streamlined formula, Hunter Focus go for plenty of support through plenty of pathways, using plenty of high-quality ingredients, all dosed towards the higher end.

These ingredients are all grouped into three distinct formulas, Concentration Activation, Memory Matrix, and Mood Amplification, which all combine to give you everything a good nootropic should.

Their names are all fairly self-explanatory and fairly accurate – they do what they say they’re going to do.

Concentration Activation’s benefits mostly rest on citicoline, which we’ve already seen. Our brains don’t produce optimal amounts, while optimal amounts can lead to far greater cognitive health and function. A top up is always welcome. You also get the two amino acids l-tyrosine and l-theanine. As we have seen, each brings pretty startling nootropic benefits to bear.

The Memory Complex uses lion’s mane, which I always love to see in a nootropic supplement. Lion’s mane is very rich in erinacines and hericenones, both of which are highly regarded nootropic ingredients known to support cognition functioning and brain health in the long term.

They stimulate nerve growth factor (NGF) production in the brain. NGF in turn enables improved maintenance of the brain’s nerves and pathways. This should improve both long- and short- term memory, whilst mitigating stress- and age- related damage to the brain.

You also get a good dose of maritime pine bark, one of my firm favorites. It’s amongst the most well-researched nootropic ingredients going, resting on a solid, solid base of clinical data. It has been proven to benefit cognitive functioning tremendously, with particular benefits to attention. Hunter Focus uses a pine bark extract that is standardized with 95% proanthocyanidins. This means it’s one of the better quality, more potent forms of it going.

The Memory Matrix relies heavily on bacopa monnieri, the benefits of which we are familiar with. Again, it’s a good choice with a great deal of research showing the benefits it can bring to your cognitive ability and mental wellbeing.

You get two ingredients in the Mood Amplification, but they are two of the best ingredients that can be added to a nootropic – phosphatidylserine (PS) and ashwagandha. I wouldn’t consider living my life without the latter. The former is also an incredibly useful tool to have in your belt.

Firstly, PS is an aminophospholipid. It can help your brain to repair itself, renewing neurons by eliciting greater NGF output. It also boosts glucose metabolism, which in turn means more fuel for your brain to use. Ashwagandha, meanwhile, is just about the best ingredient going for fighting stress. It is a traditional Ayurvedic treatment for stress and anxiety whose properties and uses are being borne out by modern clinical data.

It is also useful for boosting your cognitive abilities by repairing and reinvigorating your brain’s dendrites and axons. This will lead to increased natural choline output as well as improvements to your memory.

There are few supplements out there as well-thought-out or potent as Hunter Focus. If you’re looking for something to keep your brain healthy and your mood balanced, you really would do well to consider investing in it.

Mind Lab Pro

There are a couple of supplements that lead the nootropic market. Everything on this list has its place; many play a unique role, fulfilling criteria that others can’t. However, in terms of getting the job done with quality and aplomb, there are only two. We’ve already seen the first, NooCube. Now it’s time for the second, Mind Lab Pro from Opti-Nutra.

It’s an incredibly high-quality, potent nootropic with few (if any) side effects. It plays on several different pathways in the brain to give you some of the best results this segment of the supplements market has to offer. It’s one of the best-researched, most clinically robust, data-driven supplements I’ve ever come across. Certainly, it’s one of the better nootropics in this regard.

In fact, I’ve always considered it to be a bit of a 3-in-1 nootropic. Or a whole-brain supplement, maybe.

Firstly, it is great for your long-term brain health. It elicits optimal brain regeneration and protection. Secondly, it helps to maintain healthy brainwaves and chemical balance. Finally, it is a cracking nootropic that should do everything you want a good smart-drug to do.

Let’s break it down a bit.

For starters, you will gain plenty of neurological benefits from Mind Lab Pro. It should help to improve your short- and long- term memory, aiding both recall and overall information retention. These memories will stick around and they’ll come back to you much quicker, meaning nothing more stuck on the tip of your tongue. Focus and clarity should improve, as should your ability to multitask.

You should also experience a bit of an energy boost – quite an impressive one, actually, for a supplement that doesn’t contain any stimulants. Energy, motivation, and mood should all pick up, without any of the ups and downs associated with stimulants like caffeine.

In the long run, Mind Lab Pro should help to optimize your brain’s plasticity. This will mean greater cognitive health as you age, with a great deal of protection against cognitive decline.

This all comes from an incredibly smart blend of eleven top-tier nootropic ingredients, all of which combine to bring a great amount of well-rounded health benefits to bear. 

It uses lion’s mane mushroom, of which we have already seen I am a great fan of. It’s a great ingredient for improving NGF production, keeping your brain functioning optimally in the long-term.

You also get citicoline with Mind Lab Pro, whose benefits we have already covered – it should lead to improved energy levels and braincell regeneration. Then there is bacopa monnieri, PS and a form of maritime pine bark that is particularly high in antioxidants.

Cumulatively, these should all improve your mental clarity, fight stress and anxiety symptoms, improve your memory and learning, give you greater focus and attention, all whilst warding against age-related cognitive decline.

Mind Lab Pro is rich in amino acids, too, with a good complement of l-tyrosine and l-theanine. These should combine to further the benefits to your mental performance, warding against stress and anxiety whilst boosting focus, attention, and cognitive clarity.

This is a solid baseline. It doesn’t quite explain my love for Mind Lab Pro, or at least not fully. It’s a good example of a very good nootropic, with plenty included that we have already seen. Everything is high quality and well-done. But the cherry on the cake comes from a serving of rhodiola rosea, which is a herbal adaptogen, and finally a solid vitamin B complex.

Rhodiola rosea enables you to better maintain an optimal level of cognitive energy, all whilst boosting attention span and mental processing ability, learning, and both short- and long- term memory. As an adaptogen, it can also further mitigate the damaging effects of stress. This will combine to give you improved clarity under pressure even as it elevates your mood and executive function.

Meanwhile, vitamins B6, B9, and B12 are all vital for keeping your cognitive processes working optimally. They work especially well to combat age related cognitive decline, giving you improved mental performance and mood both now and in the long run.

There are few supplements out there that come close to giving you the kinds of benefits on offer with Mind Lab Pro.

CentraPeak 

CentraPeak is a clever nootropic supplement. Though there are better straight nootropics out there – Mind Lab Pro, NooCube etc. – this carves out a great little niche for itself. CentraPeak is aimed primarily at men and performs a couple of tasks. Firstly, it is a decent enough nootropic. Secondly, it helps to optimize testosterone levels – hence why they pitch it as a ‘male vitality booster’.

This is an incredibly good idea. Plenty of the issues that nootropics look to solve are also caused by low testosterone levels.

Low testosterone can affect your mood, leaving you lethargic, unmotivated, unfocussed, anxious, and depressed. It can give you pretty bad brain fog. Optimizing levels can therefore represent a great leap forward for both your cognitive health and mental wellbeing.

It will also give you many other benefits associated with optimal testosterone levels – the ability to maintain healthy musculature and body composition, good sexual and reproductive health, and so on.

All men should think about taking natural testosterone supplements, especially as they age. We all begin to lose testosterone year on year after about the age of thirty. Modern life, diets, and environmental concerns are also chronic for lowering testosterone levels, leaving levels lower than ever.

We’ve already seen plenty of the ingredients included in Centrapeak’s formula on this list. It includes high quality nootropic botanicals like rhodiola rosea and it also contains vitamin D3, which is key to optimizing testosterone levels.

I take Prime Male daily, of which vitamin D3 is a key component. Vitamin D3 is the sunshine nutrient, so should also help you to overcome Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

You also get plenty of ashwaganda, which as we have seen can relieve the symptoms of stress and anxiety. It can also improve testosterone output and sex drive. CentraPeak contains pine bark extract, too, as well as the two amino acids l-theanine and l-thiamine, giving you a good, solid nootropic baseline.

There are some additional, cleverly combined vitamins included. You get a good dose of vitamin B6, as Pyridoxine HCL, which should boost natural testosterone levels in a couple of ways.

Firstly, it should stimulate testosterone-producing androgen production. Secondly, it can help your body to better manage estrogen production. Vitamin K2 is there, too, mostly for its more general ability to improve men’s health. It can lead to improved bone health, which is nice. More relevantly, though, it will also likely contribute to optimized testosterone levels whilst also preserving cognitive and mental health in the long term.

It wouldn’t be a testosterone booster without including zinc. Zinc is just about the number one ingredient you need to optimize your natural testosterone output. Most of our dietary zinc comes from red meat and shellfish, so if you’re on a vegetarian or vegan diet plan, you should definitely consider taking some form of it.

This is hardly the only worthwhile mineral included in CentraPeak’s formula, however. It includes boron and magnesium (as highly bioavailable magnesium citrate). Boron has been shown to improve free testosterone output whilst also boosting physical and athletic performance. It also works well in a nootropic context, bringing improvements to both long- and short- term memory, as well as brain function and attention. Meanwhile, magnesium has been linked to higher levels of total and free testosterone, in part by preventing testosterone binding by SHBG.

CentraPeak includes Korean ginseng, too, which is one of the better testosterone optimizing botanicals out there. It can also improve your circulation and contribute to healthy libido and sexual function.

Finally, Centrapeak includes Indole-3-Carbinol (I3C) and Mucuna Pruriens, or velvet bean, which are both very clever additions. I3C is a fantastic anti-carcinogenic and is an antioxidant rich nutrient in its own right. It also works to inhibit estrogen levels, which tend to enjoy an inverse relationship with testosterone. Meanwhile, velvet bean inhibits the testosterone reduction by lowering prolactin production.

I would recommend CentraPeak to any man over the age of 30, especially over the age of around 40, looking to protect their long-term health whilst improving their cognitive and mental health.

It’s an excellent offering as a nootropic (if not the best). It’s a solid offering as a testosterone booster (again – if not the best). There are better individual products out there – as above, NooCube or Mind Lab Pro as nootropics, or something like Prime Male for testosterone. However, getting something that does an admirable job of looking after both is really quite special.

Brainzyme Focus Pro 

If you’re looking for a good energy kick from your nootropic, you might want to look at Brainzyme Focus Pro. It gives you clarity, improved cognition speed, improved short and long term memory, whilst also giving you plenty of energy.

The manufacturers’ focus in their branding revolves around this energy boost, alongside mood support. For example, they claim that Brainzyme Focus Pro can give you up to 8 hours of heightened energy. Having looked into the ingredients, this is probably actually quite an accurate claim. And, of course, you will see your focus and concentration improved a great deal, alongside your memory and recall.

The formula is quite intensive, with a full twenty active ingredients. They’re all natural and plant based, as you would expect in a good-quality nootropic, with few side effects noted. It’s a fast-acting supplement, too, so you should begin to see at least some of the benefits almost immediately.

We’ve seen plenty of the ingredients on this list already, as the same trusted favorites crop up once more. These include the amino acids l-theanine and l-tyrosine, alongside a great vitamin and mineral complex. It gives you a good dose of choline, as well as gingko biloba for mood support.

Then there are the ingredients we haven’t seen yet. Notably, Brainzyme Focus Pro includes plenty of guarana seed, which is where we see that immediate and long-lasting energy pick up come into play. Guarana works in a very similar way to caffeine, though it is slower release and a lot steadier. You get the energy minus the buzz, the jitters, the anxiety, and the energy crash.

The manufacturers also claim that Brainzyme Focus Pro includes ‘polyphenols.’ Well, it will do, I’m sure. And this is a good thing at first glance. They are micronutrients taken from plant sources and you typically see them a lot in nootropics. However, there are thousands of varying types of polyphenols, all of which have different properties and give different benefits. We need a bit more information on exactly what goes into Brainzyme Focus Pro, here.

Brainzyme Focus Pro also includes maca root and bromelain. This is really quite clever. Firstly, maca root is great for mental health and wellbeing. It can mitigate symptoms of anxiety and even depression whilst also giving you lasting energy and a bit of a libido spike. It’s also great for improving cognitive functioning and motor skills. Meanwhile, bromelain has been shown to improve memory function whilst also giving anti-inflammatory properties.

Brainzyme Focus Pro is a bit similar to CentraPeak. It’s far from the best straight nootropic on this list. However, it performs a very specific function incredibly well. If you’re looking for something that will support your cognitive health and healthy functioning whilst also giving you a great, long-lasting energy boost, it will likely be a great addition to your supplement regime.

It’s one of the more cost effective nootropics on this list and it deserves its place here.

Alpha Brain 

Lat but not least, we end with Alpha Brain by Onnit, a nootropic I particularly like. I didn’t really want to like it when I first came across it a few years ago. Joe Rogan, the podcaster, is heavily involved with Onnit. He is a shareholder. He’s also not particularly well known for his scientific rigour – his podcast has been known at times for being a hotbed of pseudo-scientific, or even anti-scientific, information, with a fair dash of conspiracy theories thrown in. He is not a trustworthy source.

So I tried Alpha Brain a few years back with a healthy degree of skepticism. It nevertheless won me over. Bowled me over, in fact. It’s a great nootropic that managed to get my vote when I really didn’t want to give it.

It should do everything it claims to do, which is a lot – it’s a well-rounded nootropic offering all the benefits you would expect.

It uses three proprietary blends alongside cat’s claw to get these results. This is where I part ways with it a little. I don’t like proprietary blends. They basically mean that you will never know how much of any given ingredient is included in a supplement.

Though all the individual ingredients are listed, their quantities are hidden. You should always know what you’re putting into your body – this includes how much of anything you’re putting in there. It’s a big mark against Alpha Brain.

Cat’s claw is also a little suspect. There is very little clinical data backing it up.

However, the three blends themselves regain a fair amount of lost ground. They are Onnit’s Flow Blend, their Focus Blend, and their Fuel Blend, and all largely do what they claim. Their names are pretty self-explanatory, of course. Together, you will find flow states easier to come by, find yourself with improved focus, and find your brain well-fuelled for lasting energy.

Collectively, these three blends improve serotonin and dopamine response. They also boost your body’s acetylcholine levels (a form of which, choline, we have already seen in this list). As we have seen, this should lead to many of the benefits we would expect of any good nootropic.

Alpha Brain also makes hefty use of l-tyrosine and l-theanine, whose efficacy and utility mean they keep turning up in this list. They should support elevated levels of serotonin and dopamine, adding a good mood boost to the cognitive enhancements already on offer.

You also get another firm personal favourite supplement of mine in Alpha Brain’s formula, in the form of oat straw extract. It’s a natural botanical with a long history of use in various forms of traditional medicine. It has been clinically shown to bring cognitive benefits to bear. It does this largely by improving vascularity, bringing more blood to the brain. This means more oxygen and nutrients to the brain, which should keep it functioning optimally.

The Alpha GPC choline form found in Alpha Brain (one of the best forms, if not the best, often found in the best nootropic supplements) combines with phosphatidylserine and bacopa to improve communication both within your brain and between your brain and the rest of your body.

Then there is huperzia serrata, an ingredient capable of allowing for significantly boosted levels of acetylcholine. It inhibits acetylcholinesterase production, a catalyst that works to break down your body’s acetylcholine content.

I could go on. The list is actually quite extensive. However, we begin to see the unscientific muck I generally associate with Joe Rogan after this point. The above ingredients are the only ones with any kind of clinical underpinning. Everything else is pseudo-science at best, with no scientifically justified merit to them.

It’s a shame. It doesn’t undo the good work that the actual active ingredients do. It’s still a great nootropic.

It’s just quite pricey for what it is, and a large part of this bloated price comes from an ingredients list bloated with largely useless, unnecessary additions. They could have cut costs and made it more affordable without sacrificing any kind of quality or efficacy simply by following the science.

Verdict

Nootropics form a core part of my supplementation regimen. I’m a writer with hard deadlines and hefty word counts to keep to. This is taxing and stressful. I’m also only able to do a good job of it if my brain is in gear – my brain is, in essence, my livelihood. I want to look after it any way I can.

I’m always eager to try anything to improve my cognitive and mental wellbeing. Aside from a healthy diet, plenty of sleep, and an active lifestyle, nootropics are the most profound way of doing this.

I’m always happy to spend money on a good one. However, if I’m going to, I want it not just to be good. I want it to be the best. For me, as above, this is NooCube. I don’t use it exclusively – or, at least, I’ve used other nootropics to good effect. Notably, I’ve always found Mind Lab Pro to work incredibly well. However, NooCube is sort of an old reliable for me – it’s the only supplement I know will do the job every time, to the highest possible standard.

NooCube is the best-quality product on this list. And when you’re up against the likes of Mind Lab Pro and Alpha Brain, that’s a hell of a claim. It’s the best in a line-up of brilliant offerings. The science is sound. The ingredients are well-dosed, intelligently blended, and high-quality. It doesn’t cost the Earth when measured against the benefits it gives. And it gives real-world, noticeable benefits that really can change your life.

Any item on this list represents a good use of your time, money, and attention. However, if you want to skip to the best, go with NooCube.

What Do Nootropics Do?

The nootropic marketplace is something of a broad church. There is a lot of variation. Indeed, the products below share some DNA whilst still varying from one another in some really quite profound ways. Each one’s benefits will depend entirely on the ingredients blends they contain (which we will of course run through in detail).

But what is the shared DNA? What do they all have in common?

Well, they each seek to fulfill a few key goals. In a very general sense, they all aim to improve cognition and cognitive wellbeing. However, this is a vague enough statement that it doesn’t mean all too much.

Most nootropics – at least all the good ones – will increase the action of useful neurotransmitters such as glutamate to some degree. They will also generally inhibit the expression and action of depressant neurotransmitters such as GABA. This means that they will give you more energy, make you more alert and clearer headed, and generally aid clarity and recall.

Most will also offer benefits to your memory. This will largely focus on your short term memory, including that recall. However, many have been shown to potentially safeguard your longer term memory. Citicoline, a common ingredient, can for example protect the integrity of nerve membranes. Another, cerebrolysin, can promote nerve fibre regeneration.

All told, this will all lead to improved signal transmission between neurons, and thus clearer thinking, more energy, and far greater memory.

A lot of nootropics will also actively aim at improving energy levels. Even those that don’t will likely improve your natural energy levels by virtue of their benefits to your cognitive health and clarity.

Some will rely on caffeine, others will rely on improved blood flow; there are plenty of ways of achieving this effect, most of them well-represented in the nootropic market and in the high quality nootropics I have shortlisted for you in this article.

It isn’t all about performance, of course…

Mental wellbeing is a cornerstone of nootropic usage. Alongside the above benefits, which should all contribute to your overall mental health, most nootropics will elevate your mood whilst simultaneously lowering your stress levels.

In many cases they can manipulate dopamine production, your brain’s reward chemical. It is dopamine that makes you happy – dopamine is released when you eat chocolate, make love, work out, anything that makes you feel happy.

Dopamine will also often lead to greater relaxation. This will go hand in hand with a slew of ingredients aimed directly at mitigating the effects of stress and anxiety, which most good nootropics will include in workable, potent doses.

This will mean better sleep, too, which will compound the cognitive benefits offered by nootropics themselves to take your cognitive health and healthy functioning to a truly optimal level.