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Caffeine use disorder

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Re: Caffeine use disorder

#31

Post by gus_massa »

cbd1984 wrote: post #20
creshal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For healthy adults, the FDA says 400 mg a day is OK. But consuming much more than that can have dangerous, negative effects. And the milligrams add up quickly. A medium-size coffeehouse coffee can contain more than 300 mg, and most 16-ounce energy drinks contain between 160 and 240 mg of caffeine… 3-4 cups might be on the high end of the safe spectrum, depending on what your idea of a "cup" is. (For the record, 3 h…

> (For the record, 3 half-litre beer steins of coffee a day turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea, even if hearing colours was briefly entertaining.) I've consumed caffeine to the point of serious gastric distress and very mild heart palpitations and I've never experienced synesthesia. I'm unwilling to push beyond that to higher doses, but two or three 12-cup pots a day of light roast filtered black coffee is abo…

IIRC, the only well documented case of synesthesia is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme_%E2%86%92_color_synes... . It's an interesting case because the color and letter recognizing parts of the brain are very close, so it's logic that some info may leak and get correlated.

Perhaps someone can design an (safe) experiment to measure the effect of caffeine in synesthesia ...

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#32

Post by randallsquared »

cbd1984 wrote: post #20
creshal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For healthy adults, the FDA says 400 mg a day is OK. But consuming much more than that can have dangerous, negative effects. And the milligrams add up quickly. A medium-size coffeehouse coffee can contain more than 300 mg, and most 16-ounce energy drinks contain between 160 and 240 mg of caffeine… 3-4 cups might be on the high end of the safe spectrum, depending on what your idea of a "cup" is. (For the record, 3 h…

> (For the record, 3 half-litre beer steins of coffee a day turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea, even if hearing colours was briefly entertaining.) I've consumed caffeine to the point of serious gastric distress and very mild heart palpitations and I've never experienced synesthesia. I'm unwilling to push beyond that to higher doses, but two or three 12-cup pots a day of light roast filtered black coffee is abo…

There must be. At a previous job, I regularly drank 2L of coffee a day (in ~10oz increments), and never experienced anything other than unpleasant slight jitteriness occasionally.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#33

Post by speeder »

mcculley wrote: post #8

I weaned myself off of caffeine entirely seven months ago. Being free of caffeine has greatly improved the quality of my sleep and made my mood more even throughout the day. I really appreciate being able to jump straight out of bed in the morning without depending on that coffee to get my brain working.

I tried a couple times to get off caffeine, never worked properly... I don't feel obvious caffeine effects, but I need it to not be a wreck.

Later I discovered I was self-medicating my ADHD...

Now I am taking proper ADHD meds, and this allowed me to greatly reduce my caffeine use (that was wandering into dangerous and expensive territory, with me needing to drink litres of red-bull clones to work), still need it sometimes though, my ADHD meds dosage is still too low it seems (my medic is adjusting my meds still).

Without caffeine + meds I can't do anything properly, I lose random objects (including a cup of coffee! I made myself a coffee yesterday, moved it somewhere in the house, and could not remember where, I spent 5 minutes wandering around looking for where I put my coffee), forget to do stuff, including important stuff, forget to eat/drink water/sleep, and all other sorts of not good behaviour.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#34

Post by jon-wood »

randallsquared wrote: post #27
danieltillett wrote: post #10

The thing to remember with caffeine is its half-life in non-smokers is 8 hours (it is 3 hours in smokers). I have a rule to never have any drink with caffeine after midday - if I break this rule even by an hour I suffer that night and the next day. Caffine is a morning drug.

This is highly personal, and there's no substitute for experiment. My rule is no (caffeinated) soda within an hour of bedtime, and no coffee within 3-4 hours, so the variation is wide. I don't smoke, by the way. As an aside, the whole "8 hour half-life" is astonishingly high, to me. Caffeine is nice, but it doesn't seem to have that strong an effect on me, and certainly nothing I notice 5-8 hours after. I drink quite…

As you say, the variation is wide. I can drink tea up until about 6pm without any problems, but if I have even one coffee after lunchtime I'm going to be up half the night regretting it.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#35

Post by enkephalin »

danieltillett wrote: post #10

The thing to remember with caffeine is its half-life in non-smokers is 8 hours (it is 3 hours in smokers). I have a rule to never have any drink with caffeine after midday - if I break this rule even by an hour I suffer that night and the next day. Caffine is a morning drug.

you may want to rethink that practice after having a look at this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7796154

short summary: 200mg at 7 a.m., and going to bed at 11 p.m. had following effect: "Compared to placebo, sleep efficiency and total sleep time were significantly reduced."

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#36

Post by bryanlarsen »

randallsquared wrote: post #30
bryanlarsen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're addicted. You're dependent on it to wake up, and when you don't use it, you get withdrawal headaches. You may need to go about a month caffeine free to see the benefits

If it takes longer than a week to be completely free of withdrawal symptoms, there's something else wrong, I'd think. Two or three days is a more normal recovery time.

Yes, the worst withdrawal symptoms were over in a week. It took about a month to see the benefits of a caffeine free life.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#37

Post by Pitarou »

I've given up caffeine for Lent[1]. It's been hard.

Beforehand, I knew I had a bad coffee habit. In a typical day I'd drink, maybe 6 or 7 mugs of strong coffee. I'd tried to cut down many times, but never succeeded; there just seemed to be too many reasons in my life to have another coffee.

So when Ash Wednesday (the start of Lent) came, I thought, "Now's the time to quit."

The first day was fine. I didn't notice anything. I guess I was still flushing the remaining caffeine out of its system.

The second day certainly wasn't. I had a headache, and felt tired, dizzy and confused.

The headache didn't last long, but the other symptoms persisted for about ten days. In hindsight, I should have consulted a physician before attempting this, because it could have aggravated other medical conditions I have.

I now have twelve days left of my caffeine fast. Do I feel healthier? Do I sleep better? No, not really; I feel pretty much the same as I did before, but without the urge to drink coffee all the time.

I think the real benefits will come when I let myself drink coffee again. I intend to only use it when I really need a pick-me-up. The less often I use caffeine, the more effective it will be.

[1] Lent is a period of 46 days' self-denial observed in many Christian churches.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#38

Post by rodionos »

eterm wrote: post #13
rodionos wrote: post #12

This discussion about coffee has become too scientific. When I was a child, my parents would not let us drink coffee, but tea was not only allowed it was part of daily routine as long as I remember. We didn't question. When I grew up someone told me the story about two life-term prisoners in medieval times, one of them allowed to drink only tea, the other coffee. The coffee-guy lived longer. That was enough for me to…

If you're basing decisions off a single anecdotal* data point from "medieval times", I can see how anything else would seem "too scientific" in comparison. * And fictitious

I made a lot of good decisions based on incomplete data, and I'm not sure why you labeled this story fictitious. Here's some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_III_of_Sweden's_coffee_...

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#39

Post by mdip »

I discovered that if I only consumed caffeine when I had a Migraine headache, that it was the most effective medicine I could take provided I didn't already have a tolerance built up so I gave up caffeine in my 20s.

Frankly, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I was plagued with minor but persistent headaches for almost a month and was exhausted most of that time since I was used to grabbing a cup of coffee to get me started in the morning. I avoided caffeine for almost 15 years until about a year ago when I finally found a medicine that has successfully prevented Migraine (completely). Now and then I enjoy a cup of coffee (or a Coke -- I'm a skinny guy) but I've not gotten to the point of it being a regular thing.

The difference is huge. I am convinced that Caffeine is a much more powerful stimulant than we coffee drinkers think it is. When I am feeling tired, a cup of coffee will completely wake me up and I'm full of energy. I can't see how I managed to drink two of these every morning and still barely feel the effects. If I have two cups now, I'm overwhelmed with jittery feelings, my mind races, and I go from the heightened concentration of one cup to not being able to concentrate at all due to my mind going in every direction at once.

Re: Caffeine use disorder

#40

Post by soft_dev_person »

creshal wrote: post #16
soft_dev_person wrote: post #3

Excessive use of anything tends to be bad. "Normal" intake of coffee [1] may have plenty of health benefits, so why quit? Because self control? I'll drink my 3-4 cups of black filtered coffee a day with a good conscience. [1] Not including other high-caffeine drinks (energy drinks) or mixing your coffee with lots of sugar and milk, which would be bad mostly for other reasons than the caffeine itself.

> For healthy adults, the FDA says 400 mg a day is OK. But consuming much more than that can have dangerous, negative effects. And the milligrams add up quickly. A medium-size coffeehouse coffee can contain more than 300 mg, and most 16-ounce energy drinks contain between 160 and 240 mg of caffeine… 3-4 cups might be on the high end of the safe spectrum, depending on what your idea of a "cup" is. (For the record, 3 h…

I think my cups are closer to 200 ml, which apparently is approaching 100 mg caffeine per cup, so I guess you're right.

A "medium-size coffeehouse coffee" (at Starbucks) is 16 fl.oz. Here in Europe, that's not really a normal cup of coffee.

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