The Deep Work Problem

Here's the job description for most knowledge work, when you strip away the meetings and emails and administrative nonsense: sit with hard problems for long stretches of time until something useful emerges. Essay writing. Debugging code. Strategic thinking. MCAT prep. Exam studying. Dissertations. The work that actually matters requires sustained cognitive effort. Not 25-minute pomodoros, but four-to-six-hour blocks where you hold the entire structure of a problem in your head.

Our brains do not want to do this. And we don't think that's unusual.

The phenomenon is familiar to anyone who does demanding mental work: you sit down to write, and within minutes your brain is generating escape routes. Check email. Look at that dataset. Get coffee. Scroll Twitter. Open another tab. The resistance is the natural byproduct of the cognitive noise we face. Too many signals competing for attention, and the hard thing you're supposed to focus on keeps losing the competition.

If you've ever stared at a blank page for twenty minutes, opened your phone "just for a second," and looked up to find an hour gone, you know exactly what we're talking about. If you've ever had a task on your list for three weeks that would take fifteen minutes to complete, but you still can't make yourself start it, same thing. The problem isn't motivation. It's that your brain won't quiet down long enough to let you work.

We've been obsessing over this problem. Not just experiencing it, but actually trying to understand what's happening and whether there's something better than the current set of bad options.

The Current Solutions Are Bad

Here's what people actually do to get through demanding cognitive work:

Coffee works for about 90 minutes. Then you crash, feel worse than before you started, and face a choice between another cup (hello, 2pm jitters and 2am insomnia) or accepting that your productive day is over. If you're a student during finals, you know this cycle intimately: the 11pm coffee that gets you through your notes, the 2am crash, the 6am Red Bull to finish, the exam you take feeling like garbage.

Energy drinks are coffee but worse. The fact that they're marketed to students should tell you something about how desperate people are.

Adderall genuinely works. It's also a controlled substance with real side effects, and acquiring it ranges from "see a psychiatrist regularly" to "commit light felonies." Not a sustainable solution for most people. And if you have ADHD and Adderall actually helps you function, you know how frustrating it is that the discourse around "study drugs" makes it harder to access something you legitimately need.

Nicotine—and we'll be honest here—also works. The focus is real. You can lock in for hours. Walk into any tech office or trading floor, and you'll see the little Zyn tins everywhere. The problem is that you're now addicted to a tobacco company's product, and the cardiovascular effects aren't great, and stopping means your baseline focus is worse than before you started. The popularity of nicotine pouches in knowledge work is a signal: people are desperate for something that actually helps, and they're accepting serious tradeoffs because the alternatives are worse.

Nootropic supplements are mostly garbage. Proprietary blends with pixie-dusted ingredients, "supports brain health" claims that mean nothing, and absolutely no feedback loop to tell you if anything is actually happening. The supplement industry has gotten away with hand-waving for decades. Most of these products exist because the marketing works, not because the compounds do.

None of this is good. The fact that smart, health-conscious people are choosing nicotine addiction as their least-bad option tells you something about the state of the market.

What Actually Matters

We've been reading the research on sustained attention, and we've been experimenting, and here's what we've come to believe:

The problem isn't too little stimulation. Coffee, energy drinks, Adderall—they all work by turning up the volume. More alertness, more arousal, more signals. But for a lot of people, the issue isn't insufficient signal; it's too much noise. Your brain is already running a hundred tabs. Adding more stimulation doesn't help you focus on the one tab that matters.

This is especially true if your brain tends toward the scattered end of the spectrum. You don't need more energy—you need less chaos. The reason you can't start that fifteen-minute task isn't that you're tired. It's that every time you try to focus on it, seventeen other things demand attention, and you end up paralyzed, doing none of them.

The goal should be quieting the noise, not amplifying the signal. This is a different framing than most focus products use. Not "get wired" but "get quiet." Turn down the background chatter enough that the thing you're supposed to be working on can actually hold your attention.

Delivery matters more than people think. Pills take 30-45 minutes to kick in. By the time you feel anything, your focus window is half over—or you've already lost the battle and opened YouTube. Sublingual absorption is much faster—10-15 minutes. That's the difference between triggering focus when you need it and hoping you timed your supplementation correctly.

Ritual matters. There's a reason nicotine pouches work so well for focus, beyond the pharmacology. The physical act of putting something in creates a cue: okay, now we're working. It's a state change you can feel. Pills don't have this. A pouch does.

What We're Building

We're building a focus pouch. Not another capsule with a proprietary blend and vague claims. A sublingual pouch designed around a specific goal: quiet the background noise long enough to do real work.

The format is intentional. Fast absorption so you can trigger focus on demand. A physical ritual that cues your brain to shift states. Something you can use for a writing session or a long study block or a three-hour coding sprint—and then stop using without withdrawal.

If you're currently using Zyn or nicotine pouches because they're the only thing that actually works, we're building this for you. Same ritual, same fast-acting format, same locked-in feeling—without the addiction and without funding tobacco companies.

If you're a student who's been cycling through caffeine and crashes and wondering if there's something better, we're building this for you.

If your brain runs a hundred tabs by default and you've never found anything that helps you just start, we're building this for you.

We're calling it NeuroShift.

Why We're Writing This Now

The honest answer is that we've been thinking about this problem long enough that we needed to write it down. Partly to clarify our own thinking. Partly because we suspect we're not the only ones frustrated with the current options.

If this resonates—if your brain fights you during deep work, if you've tried everything and nothing quite works, if you're tired of choosing between "functional but jittery" and "calm but useless"—we'd genuinely like to hear from you. What have you tried? What worked? What made things worse? We're not pretending to have all the answers. We're trying to build something better than what exists, and input from people who share the problem seems useful.

We'll share updates as this progresses. If you want to follow along, you're in the right place. If you have thoughts, we want to hear them.

The gap between "the thing that actually works" and "the thing that doesn't destroy your health" shouldn't be this wide. We're trying to close it.