Your personal best nootropic that helped with anxiety and depression

Late to the party here, but I need to chime is as well. The entire reason this company exists is because I went through a bad depression and almost killed myself multiple times. I hit absolute rock bottom after years of worsening depression, and no doctors were able to help me, or even work to get me to understand my brain. I held a gun to my head on more than one occasion. I almost pulled my steering wheel over to hit a wall multiple times. I was mere moments from ending my life too many times for me to even be comfortable admitting. I am lucky that I had a loving family and friends that kept me here. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I would have destroyed them if I ended it. I could not ruin their lives by taking that way out. However, if I didn't have the family and friends that I do, I would not be here right now. There would be no Nootropics Depot. This subreddit wouldn't exist. My son wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have gotten to experience all that this amazing life has to offer. I don't just understand where people like OP are coming from. I know from experience. I lived it. That experience is what has shaped every facet of my life to date. When I started coming out of my depression, I wanted to understand why. I wanted to learn how my brain and body worked, and figure out ways to not only prevent other people from going through what I went through, but to figure out how to enhance myself beyond what I had come to understand was possible. This is what set me off on the path of nootropics, and what has been the foundation of everything I have done since.

No prescription drug or treatment any doctor tried helped me. It only ever made it worse for me, including SSRIs. Everyone's depression is different, so we can't generalize to each person, but my depression was just pure nothingness. That's the best way to describe it. Some people get sad. Some people get anxious or have mood swings. Mine was just pure emptiness. No sadness. No joy. No anger. No fear. Just nothing. Not once did any medical professional try to understand me, or help me to understand me. Every drug they put me on just made me feel more empty, which made me feel more of a failure. For some there are triggers. People's home life is bad. They have no friends or support system. That was not me. This made it worse for me. I seemingly had it much better than most, so why was I depressed? There was no trigger or reason I could point to, so that made me spiral down even more. I think sometimes when we have an external reason to point to, it can help rationalize things. For me there was none, so it all had to be me. I was broken. I was the one who's brain just didn't work, and nobody around me understood why, or could help me to work through it. I now know that my brain just works differently than a lot of people. I am very analytical. I have to analyze things in great detail. This was actually part of my downfall, because I would constantly try to analyze the why of my depression. As the analysis kept coming back with the fact that I was just broken, it made me spiral down. I would just shut part of my brain off as thing made less and less sense. It truly was a spiral looking back on it. As I spiraled down, it became harder and harder for my family and friends to understand, so they pulled back as well. That's when I finally hit rock bottom.

Luckily I didn't make that final mistake of ending it. What made the difference for me coming out of it was multiple things. Most crucial, I had to make the choice that I was going to work to come out of it. That's the first step. You have to make that choice and know that it is a choice to work towards pulling yourself up. As part of that, I started working out 5 times a week. I improved my diet and set off on a plan to improve myself physically. That's a common thread for many coming out of depression. If you can set yourself on improving yourself physically, then the mental piece can often come a bit easier. As I got healthier, the physical drag down on my mental state eased up. As I started making progress, it reinforced that improvements can be made; that nothingness wasn't a universal state I had to live in. I realized that I didn't always have to have a reason to be happy. I could just choose to be happy. Sure, it didn't always work. You can't always will yourself out of depressive states. However, I knew that ultimately happiness was a choice. You can either choose to be happy, and work towards achieving that, or you could give up. Having been moments from giving up multiple times, I knew that was not the path I was going to take, so my path was one of choosing to work towards being happy. At no point in any of this process did one single thing "cure" me. No drug, supplement, workout, or diet cured my depression. I don't even believe those words have meaning to people who are going through it. What is curing a depression anyway? What I was able to do was being to understand my brain and how it worked. I started to realize how my brain analyzed things, and how it could spiral out of control. I started to understand that it was up to me to break those spirals before they could overtake me. This is what led me to neurochemistry and psychopharmacology. I knew underneath all this thing was a complex world of chemistry that I didn't fully understand. As I started to understand myself on a better level, and how to consciously control my mental state, I wanted to understand what was happening on a physiological level. This is what started the journey that has led us here today.

As part of that journey I have experimented with more things than you can possibly imagine. I have taken more things than 99.9% of the people in the world, that's for certain. Many of those things have been natural, but many have not. I have learned both a lot about how the body and brain works, but also a lot about myself as well. My brain is still the same brain that led me to holding a gun to my head so many years ago. I am still that same person I was then. We don't actually change who we are on the inside. We grow and learn. We smooth out the edges, or in some cases let them spiral out of control. However, the core of who we are is still there. I still have to deal with the same brain I did then. I just understand how a lot better now. As part of that, I use many supplements to help me do so, like saffron and Cognance. These are not cures or crutches, but are tools in my arsenal that I can use to help make things easier. If I had not made the choice years ago to work towards happiness, no supplement or drug would help. The only thing that "cured" me of my depression was me. This is I think the biggest realization that people going through similar things need to come to. You are in control of your life. You make the decisions. You can choose to elevate yourself, or you can choose to ruin yourself. That's the extremely high level structure to it all. The rest is just the details. How those manifest is going to be different for everyone. However, it really all does boil down to the simple choice: are you working to better yourself, or are you working to ruin yourself?

So I guess my point in all this is multi-fold. For one, I have been there dealing with depression like OP. I agree that if someone is trying to use anything, whether that be a drug, supplement, treatment, group, religion, or any other outlet as a cure or crutch, it is doomed to failure. Antidepressant drugs didn't cure my depression, just like saffron and Cognance didn't. Anyone going through depression is going to need to make that same choice I did, then follow their own path. For some that means using SSRIs. For others that might mean using saffron or doing yoga. The real key is that choice, and it can only be made by that person. However, the idea that coming on here and telling people none of these supplements will help them is certainly not part of the solution. Spreading the idea that people coming on here and reporting life-changing effects are just grossly exaggerating things, or experiencing placebo, is more harmful than anything. It's also extremely arrogant, as you don't know the individuals here or their situations. You don't know their brain chemistry or what they are going through. You don't know the effects they are or are not getting. It is intellectually dishonest to rule them all off as delusional, just as it would be to tell everyone they can cure themselves with a specific supplement. I have spoken to thousands of people over the past 12 years of me running this company. People have opened up their stories to me like you would not believe. I have heard it all... from people literally crying because they were in the same position as me, and about to take their life, but then found that one thing that worked for their brain. And yes, I have spoken to people still in the thick of it, because nothing they have tried has worked for them. None of this is magic. Nothing is a sure thing for everyone; especially and including prescription antidepressants. If the thought is that supplements are not useful, and you need to be on drugs, you need to speak to some people actually going through it. Speak to the people who have been on 5 different antidepressants and still want to kill themselves. Speak to doctors about the success rate of the prescriptions they put people on. Then speak to naturopathic doctors, and hear their stories of helping people to finally find that balance they need. Don't write off what you hear from people on here as gross exaggerations, but then take the pharma industry's marketing as gospel. We are all on our own journeys. Those are hard enough without everyone trying to tear each other down in the process. Sure, we need to stick to science and reality, and ensure people are using evidence and data to back up their stances. However, that doesn't mean discounting personal anecdotes as pseudoscientific embellishments.