You're not supposed to use nootropics if you don't have your shit together. If you're trying to self-medicate, then you're better off getting your diet, exercise, sleep, and hygiene in order first. Perhaps adding meditation, journaling, and a personal workflow system too. Once you have self-discipline, self-knowledge, and a method of tracking personal changes, then you should begin trying nootropics. They're meant to incrementally increase what is already top performance, and they're often hit-and-misses for everybody, since the effects can be highly variable depending on brain chemistry, source, etc., if not totally based on placebo/nocebo responses.

A lot of people, including myself, have generally been nonresponder to most nootropics. What each person responds to, however, can differ drastically. But most of us agree that the most important changes in our lives have been learning and implementing better foundational habits, since lacking them was often what caused the problem in the first place. Getting your shit together will improve your cognition more than any single nootropic. Naturally, if you already have self-discipline, and you take a cautious and measured approach to nootropics, then you can slowly develop a small stack of what works for you.

Of course, if you're like many fanatics here who are desperate for any improvement in their life, and you take all sorts of crazy stacks without even trying each component individually, let alone trying different combinations and trying to ascertain interactions/synergy, then you're going to be spending a lot of money for little gain, perhaps even exposing yourself to risk. But the disciplined approach will always leave you with benefits.