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Comment by proactivesvcs | Hacker News Reader

I went from drinking 6-10 mugs of coffee a day to zero. I'd usually have a few cups of tea as well, but now drink decaf tea around 2-5 times a day. The only withdrawal symptoms I had were finally getting quality sleep and feeling much more vital. Only a few days after stopping, the smell of instant coffee, beans or ground make me recoil. They smell like poison.

I'd been drinking that much coffee for maybe ten years and I think my sleep quality had been going downhill for a long time. I'd get to sleep without a problem, but woke up late, always felt tired and hated mornings. I'm now a morning person.

I'm glad it was so easy to kick. Thinking back at how I felt and for how long leaves me with a sense of loss of self.

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I often wonder what level of exposure you need to become addicted, and how much is controlled by individual variability.

Speaking for myself, I'm a 2-3 cups a day on the weekdays kind of person (up until about 2-3pm at which point I cut myself off). But on weekends I often have none (just too lazy to make a cup), and I've never experienced any associated withdrawal symptoms.

> I often wonder what level of exposure you need to become addicted, and how much is controlled by individual variability.

The half-life of caffeine definitely has a lot of individual variability (3-7 hours is apparently the reference range, but I think the overall observed range is wider with e.g. other drugs or liver dysfunction). I'm not sure whether a longer or shorter half-life would be more conducive to addiction.

Generally speaking, greater tolerance of a drug is correlated with higher rates of addiction, but... "correlated", so...?

Tolerance and half-life are related but not the same.

A person may have low tolerance/high sensitivity (due to fewer adenosine receptors) but metabolize quickly.

I actually find I have high sensitivity and metabolize slowly, which is why it's important I don't have coffee after mid-afternoon.

My bet is that long half-life/slow metabolism increases predilection for addiction (due to longer duration of exposure), but that's just a guess.

I'm interested too as I drink 2-4 a day even on weekends but have sometimes gone without for random reasons like travel and stuff and I've never gotten withdrawals or even headaches.

I find 3 cups (24 fl oz) to be a sort of tipping point where if I have been drinking more than that I notice when I don't have any (no headache though). I try to make fairly strong coffee.

I drink 8 ounces almost every morning at work. Some weekends, I have coffee. Some weekends, I have none. No headaches, nausea, etc. I enjoy the taste, and I do get the stimulant-like benefits, so my best guess is that I'm walking the razor's edge, or that I'm blessed with a relatively low sensitivity to the drug, or something.

At night, I can have a espresso, coffee, or caffeinated soda at 9pm and be ready to sleep at 11. I've stopped drinking it for weeks at a time before, with no difficulty doing so. All of the stories about caffeine's extreme effects are completely alien to me; I've always considered it a fairly gentle substance.

I drank 4-5 cups (5 oz) of coffee each workday for quite a few years now. Somehow I only associated the whole thing with work, so it didn't even occur to me to drink coffee on the weekends. The end result was two days of constant sleep with headaches and general grogginess, followed by a workweek of OK-ish performance.

I am now at week two in the process of quitting, because I'm getting increasingly concerned about being in the withdrawal zone as well as being "fully caffeinated". The first week was much worse than the second one. Hopefully I get back to my old self soon.

You should be there soon. I've quite numerous times throughout my life and it took me exactly seven days each time. But those seven days were hell.

The funny thing is how hard it is to avoid caffeine after you quit. In the fast food restaurant there are almost no decaf diet drinks. So do you want caffeine or diabetes?

I am curious because I think I am in the same boat as you are -- did you try first seeing if you experienced the benefits (better sleep) if you cut caffeine at a certain time during the day, i.e 3p.m seems to be the magic number for a lot of people.

I am very curious about this topic because I am considering dropping caffeine, but then again I have read so much scientific literature about coffee's antioxidant properties, and caffeine being good for memory, etc, plus I love the taste of coffee, and always prefer to drink it black (I can just eat coffee beans)

I went straight to zero coffee, and from being someone who really enjoyed the smell and taste, to finding it unpleasant. I eat a balanced diet and exercise often so I have no worries about losing whatever benefit caffeine may have given me.

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