Complete NAD maxxing guide (everything you need to know about NAD)

You’ve taken the NMN.

You’ve done the $300 IV drip, lying there for ninety minutes while someone in scrubs told you it was “basically liquid youth.”

You’ve got the sublingual tablets sitting in your cabinet, half-used, because you forgot to take them for three days straight and gave up.

And you still crash at 2pm. You still wake up at 3am and stare at the ceiling. You still feel, if we’re being honest, exactly the same as you did before you spent the money.

Here’s why: nobody ever told you NAD+ is one thing. It isn’t. It’s a bucket with three completely separate problems:

• how fast it fills,

• how fast it drains, and

• what condition it’s in once it’s there.

And every product on the market is selling you a fix for exactly one of those three while marketing it like it solves all of them.

I’ve been running this stack myself (precursors, an NNMT inhibitor, sirtuin support, the works), and the biggest lesson wasn’t which compound works best. It was that “NAD+ boosting,” as an industry, has been misleading people by omission. Not with fake compounds. With an incomplete model of the problem.

So let’s fix the model first. Then let’s build the actual protocol.

• Why NAD+ optimization isn’t one lever, it’s three, and which one you’re actually pulling

• Why “cytosol vs. mitochondria” might be the single most important concept nobody in this space talks about, and why it explains why the same protocol works for your friend and does nothing for you

• What’s actually consuming your NAD+ behind the scenes (spoiler: it’s not just age)

• Why sirtuins, not NAD+ itself, might be the thing you actually care about, and what really activates them (not resveratrol)

• The real relationship between NAD+ and your sleep as you age, including a personal experiment that went directly against the standard dosing advice

• IV vs. injections vs. oral: an honest cost-and-evidence breakdown of all three delivery methods, including the mechanistic problem nobody selling injections wants to talk about

• The specific misconceptions currently circulating in the NAD+ world, and why they’re wrong

I’ll also spend some time on a broader question:

• If total NAD+ isn’t the right thing to chase, what is, and how do you figure out, without an expensive lab test, which part of this system is actually your bottleneck?

Because ultimately, this isn’t a story about one supplement. It’s a story about matching the fix to the actual constraint, instead of matching it to whatever’s trending on your feed.

In the rest of this letter, we’re going to unpack all of the topics and questions raised above. Think of it as a one-stop shop for understanding NAD+, not as a supplement category, but as a system you can actually diagnose and fix.