Caffeine is a dangerous drug
pathdependent.com
pathdependent.com
This fits with my experience, and I'm glad I took the effort to break my addiction a number of years ago. (I sometimes miss the taste though.)
I will never forget that week, and I never want to experience anything like it again.
My body may be atypical, but it definitely reduced the severity of the withdrawal with every occurrence.
I didn't drink any coffee at all for several years, and then we got a coffee machine as a Christmas gift and I started drinking it again, albeit in strict moderation.
These days I stick to one or two coffees a day - one in the morning and sometimes one around 1-2 PM when I hit an energy trough.
If I have more than two cups, I toss and turn all night and wake up exhausted ... which of course prompts me to drink still more coffee.
All it does in the morning is give you an adrenaline burst. You can get similar "wake up in the morning effects" by many other substances and activities.
Caffeine is very effective come afternoon/evening though.
Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/23184.php
"What we have shown in our study is that it's this prolonged neural activity of being awake that causes adenosine levels to go up, which in turn makes a person feel drowsy. It's the brain's way of achieving a proper balance between the neural activity of waking and the need for sleep. If something goes wrong with this adenosine system, you may end up with insomnia."
http://www.webmd.com/balance/caffeine-myths-and-facts And (Deadtree): Barone, J.J. and Roberts, H.R. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 34, 119-129, 1996.
It is commonly suggested to avoid caffeine 8 hours before bed to be able to sleep well.
--
If it lasts that long for you (and you're not on birth control or pregnant), you may wish to get liver function tests done with your doctor to make sure you're okay in that department.
Or you may just need to do other steps to put you into deeper sleep. Cold rooms with warm blankets, nothing but sex and sleep in bed (no reading, no talking, no snoozing), no spicy or sweet foods within a few hours before bed and block out all/most light to help.
You either A> are being inconsistent, B> Don't understand half-life or C> are overstating your case. Look, you said before you think it's only useful in the morning, then you say:
>If I don't stop 6 hours before bed it affects my performance the next day.
So either you go to bed at 6pm, or you aren't saying the same thing about when you find caffeine useful vs when it effects your sleep as you originally claimed it was only useful in morning.
Additionally, the crash from stimulants is from adrenaline rush and a dip in serotonin.
If you're taking a modest amount of caffeine, you shouldn't be suffering a downswing. Only heavy users (400+ mg a day, usually addicts) are likely to actually have a serotonin dip, and only large doses cause a large enough adrenaline surge for you to feel a crash similar to what you'd feel on a stronger stimulant like amphetamines.
The best use case for caffeine is: No daily usage, less than 400mg per day when used, used as late in the day as required to stay awake (and remember it lasts for about 4-8 hours longer than you are drinking it), but not in the morning. Get your heart racing in the morning by a set of jumping jacks or something else, and watch for signs of addiction and tolerance.
And now, I'm invoking XKCD and ignoring the rest of this thread so I can get some code released: http://xkcd.com/386/
There's two issues with caffeine for me : performance dip and sleep interference. If I drink a cup of coffee, I feel the boost but when it wears off, I feel a performance dip. Perhaps I am more sensitive to this than average, I don't care what the exact reason is. I can't comment on how this compares to speed or other drugs, I'm relatively straight edge. It's a relatively mild down, but enough to impact my performance. So, my inclination is to re-up caffeine to stave off the downswing, which cannot continue past lunch due to the impact on my sleep. So, that is why I comment on how it's only useful in the "morning". Different people have wildly different metabolisms, body compositions and reactions to drugs - I tend to be very sensitive to drugs... I got pulled over for suspected DUI once and blew a 0.03 :]
That said, every day I tie one or two pieces to the end of my string.
You may also wish to read the disclaimer of sorts at the bottom, and relax about a personal blog that has no sources, is purely anecdotal, and appears to be the author getting his thoughts down in writing.
paulbaumgart does point out something funny. I added 'dangerous' in an edit a few minutes after posting. It does make the post more precise; I am talking about caffeine being a danger to productivity as a consequence of dependence not merely the truism that "Caffeine is a drug." However, it didn't get views (as evidenced by up-votes) until I added dangerous.
In being more precise I was accidentally link-baiting.
Then I actually read the article and got a little peeved that I'd been link-baited (inadvertantly or otherwise)- hence my comment complaining about it. :-)
When you make a deceptive and link-baiting title, it'll get some more.
Caffeine tolerance develops very quickly, especially among heavy coffee and energy drink consumers. Complete tolerance to sleep disruption effects of caffeine develops after consuming 400 mg of caffeine 3 times a day for 7 days. Complete tolerance to subjective effects of caffeine was observed to develop after consuming 300 mg 3 times per day for 18 days, and possibly even earlier. In another experiment, complete tolerance of caffeine was observed when the subject consumed 750–1200 mg per day while incomplete tolerance to caffeine has been observed in those that consume more average doses of caffeine.
For reference, a grande drip coffee from Starbucks has about 330mg caffeine.
and on withdrawal: Withdrawal symptoms — possibly including headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints — may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to "normal" levels, uninfluenced by caffeine consumption.
http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html
The idea is that you should use caffeine when you're at your peak, because you want to maximize your productivity for doing really hard stuff that you normally would only accomplish when you're having a creative spurt anyway.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/RSNA/2238 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/472473.stm
It's interesting that anyone would presume that spindlier dendrites as a result of a drug will make the brain function better. It could be the equivalent of The Shining's 100s of pages of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." So the studies should attempt to show an actual increased or decreased facility in learning some task.
Basti and Jouvet (1988) describe a suicide attempt using 4500 mg of modafinil; the suicidee survived with no long-term effects but temporary nervousness, nausea, and insomnia.
An equivalent overdose of caffeine (45x typical dose) would be lethal.
The majority of caffeine is not consumed in pill form, as with most nootropics. In the typical ways that caffeine is consumed, it would take an impractical amount of consumption to reach LD50 (> 100 cups of coffee within ~12 hours, for instance).
Caffeine is, of course, inherently very dangerous as a raw substance, but the form in which most of us consume it prevents significant acute abuse.
Modafinil is not without its problems. If you check out a lot of the journalism about it, rather few of the experimenters seem particularly keen to continue their experiences with it, citing odd heart rates, mood swings, minor personality disorders, and the like. These things are not exactly "dangerous" in the classical sense but are clearly no picnic either.
I still drink quite a bit of tea, but the accumulated caffeine intake is much less. It's a possibly reasonable way of tricking the psychological dependence into submission.
A friend of mine actually told me about yerba mate. He's a big fan. However, yerba seems to have some other biological interactions that I would have to research. I had cancer before, so phrases like "some experiments showed an increase in oral cancer cell proliferation" are a bit terrifying.
Incidentally, caffeine itself may be cancer fighting. Caffeine is an mTOR inhibitor. mTOR has been implicated asa growth pathway in many cancers. If their are any bio-geeks on this site, I'd be curious to know what quantities are caffeine are comparable to a dose of rapamycin.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't pour sugar in that mate...
Arguably, our new "comfortable" lifestyles are less "healthy" than those of our distant ancestors, though this is a highly contentious subject.
However caffeine is a competitive inhibitor of adenosine, a neurochemical that builds up late in the day making us sleepy. So if you drink it in the afternoon, especially in smaller quantities, as you'd see in an espresso (Which while having a stronger coffee taste, actually has much less caffeine per serving) or tea, you will find it quite able to keep you awake.