Substances will never bring you to the degree of awareness that can be cultivated directly through practice and training. That said, there are certain things we can take to help:
There is a reason that every spiritual tradition of mankind included celibacy or chastity as part and parcel of their initiation training. It is because a person starting out on the path is very much distracted by sensory pleasures, and is compulsively driven by them. In spiritual training, we do not want the body to rule the mind, we want the mind to rule the body.
Said another way, if you get a feeling, a craving, an impulse from the body, you have the choice whether or not to act on it. Usually people do not have enough mindfulness to see that this is actually happening and immediately just act with compulsion. By training thinking to control feeling, by mindfulness meditation and also specific mental exercises, you begin to increase the gap between stimuli and response, and you also begin to lead the body, instead of the body leading the mind.
By incorporating celibacy into your training for at least 100 days (for most it is longer because they have used pornography heavily or are very compulsively driven by sexual desire) you reach a higher level of hormonal and neuro-chemical balance (if done correctly, which means not-dwelling in thoughts or sensations, but simply letting go and transmuting those desires into higher virtues such as your own development for the benefit of humanity) which will gradually turn into higher levels of energy, higher levels of cognitive performance, and overall a rejuvenated body.
This is not something one should just read about. It's something every man deserves to experience for themselves if they desire greatness.
Diet is important for the maintenance of the body. Many eastern traditions speak about a non-meat diet, but usually that is for non-westerners and people that already have a healthy body. I say use what the body needs. This requires some degree of tinkering and a lot of awareness. Intermittent fasting, or fasting one day a week, can be part of building that awareness of what the body needs. It depends on body-type and overall health however, so there is no reason to stress this. Just by aware.
Many herbs and supplements can be helpful depending on the predominant issues for every human being who wishes to attain greatness. One of the first things noticed by most is that they're not really healthy. In the Daoist tradition all human beings are unhealthy, only immortals, that is, perfected human beings, are healthy. Perfection here meaning both a perfection of body and of mind - a complete unceasing non-grasping non-dwelling awareness.
Most people, as they begin right and proper meditation, which involves simply resting their bodies recognize certain aspects such as being fatigued and burned out, of being restless and anxious, of having certain ailments. These are simply the beginning of diseases that were already present in us due to wrong use of body and mind.
It is recommended one either studies the traditional medicine schemes, or finds someone who knows what they're doing to help balance the body during the initial phases.
Most of the also nootropics that would be recommended here would be here: mitochondrial boosters (PQQ, CoQ10, Shilajit, etc.) and adaptogenic herbs (Rhodiola, Ashwagandha, Gotu Kola, Ginseng, Reishi, He Shou Wou, etc.)
For anyone serious about their meditation training, I highly recommend the book called The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace. It describes, based on Kamalashila's 10 stages, the progress of meditation to reach shamatha (calm-abiding) before one can begin insight-training (vipasyana).
It is an excellent book and describes the dedication needed to see genuine improvement in meditation ability. I recommend meditating 1-3 hours per day at minimum for best progress. That does not need to all be seated meditation. It could be standing meditation, some Qigong or TaiQi, and then an hour of seated meditation. The importance is to do specific things that bring about an increased awareness.