7 Brain Compounds I Take For Superhuman Focus

Dave Asprey (0:00)

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There are seven supplements that can help you focus and think like the top 1%.

I know this because at 26, I was a young millionaire entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, but I weighed 300 pounds and had the most profound brain fog of my life. I felt like the dumbest person on the planet, so I spent the next two decades hacking my own brain so I could finally think again. Today, I can go eight hours nonstop. And I even wrote a New York Times bestselling book on how I got my brain back. After 25 years of hacking my own brain, I can tell you the problem is not age or stress. It is brain energy. The first way to fix your brain energy is with something most people have never heard of. But researchers have been studying versions of this since the 1960s. Studies have linked it to improved mental performance in certain groups. Some research even found improvements in memory and attention when it was added to treatment programs for cognitive decline. Athletes started using it to perform better in their sport. Biohackers started calling it one of the most underrated compounds for brain energy. The compound is sulbutamine. Sulbutamine is related to vitamin B1.

When vitamin B1 is low, your focus can fade faster and your brain can feel foggy. The problem is that regular vitamin B1 is water-soluble, which means your body uses some of it, filters out the rest, and only a small amount reaches the brain. Sulbutamine was designed to solve that problem. Unlike regular B1, sulbutamine is fat-soluble, which means it can move through fatty tissues much more easily.

Once there, it helps the brain's dopamine system. Sulbutamine helps make dopamine receptors more responsive, which means your brain can get more value from the dopamine it already has. It helps your brain use energy better. It helps you feel more awake and motivated, but it does not help fix our next brain-energy problem people struggle with. There are a lot of high-performers who cannot feel enjoyment like they used to. Researchers assumed this was mostly a dopamine problem, but as scientists looked deeper, they discovered that it's much deeper than that. Researchers even have a name for it, anedonia. It's when everything feels a little less colorful than it used to. And while scientists were searching for ways to improve this condition, they became interested in a small amino acid derivative that most people have never heard of before.

That compound is sarcosine. I've been taking it for years because it targets one of the most important communication systems in the brain. To understand its importance, imagine your brain as a city filled with billions of messages moving between different locations every second. Those messages help you think and experience the world around you. One of the main chemicals responsible for carrying those messages is called glutamate. Glutamate gives your brain mental clarity and cognitive performance, but for glutamate to work properly, it relies on another compound called glycine. This is where sarcosine comes in. Sarcosine helps keep more glycine available around brain cells, which allows this communication system to function. People struggling with depression often showed improvements when sarcosine was added to treatment programs. But the problem is, sarcosine cannot give your brain the raw materials it needs to focus. That's why this next compound is interesting, because it's already hiding inside some of the best brain-boosting stacks on the market. It's been studied for years for brain health. People keep coming back to it because it supports long-term mental performance without feeling like a stimulant. In animal studies, it has shown to promote neural connections, which are linked to brain energy. The compound is urodine.