Start from what you want to improve
Each goal ranks compounds by the grade for that outcome, and starts with the basics that beat any supplement.
Focus and attention
For focus, the basics come first: short-term total sleep deprivation impaired attention in a meta-analysis of 70 articles.
Memory and learning
Sleep, exercise and self-testing have meta-analytic support for memory and learning.
Mental energy and fatigue
Researchers have proposed that mental energy and fatigue are separate feelings, each rated on its own scale.
Mood and stress
Supplement evidence for stress is limited and short-term; many supplements have null, mixed or uncontrolled results.
Sleep
Supplements for sleep have modest results in placebo-controlled trials: in a meta-analysis of 17 highly heterogeneous studies, melatonin shortened the time to fall asleep by 4.0 minutes, and a 2026 review rated magnesium's evidence low to very low certainty.
Physical and athletic performance
An International Olympic Committee consensus statement names caffeine, creatine, specific buffering agents and nitrate among the few performance supplements with good evidence, and notes that responses vary between individuals.
Work and study performance
As of November 11, 2026 we found no randomized supplement trials in programmers or software developers (PubMed and Europe PMC).