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Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

I think this kind of information is funded by the caffeine industry. This is pure insanity. It took me a month to quick coffee (IT professional here) and to stop hating my life. Another 5 months to finally get completely over it where I didn't feel like I was dragging every day.

Now, I am free from coffee addiction and happy as I have ever been. No way in hell is that stuff good for you.

Read Caffeine Blues, it will wake you up for real.

https://www.amazon.com/Caffeine-Blues-Hidden-Dangers-America...

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It’s possible that you could have been addicted to something good for you.

Its effects vary. My programming productivity drops when I'm on caffeine because I get anxious. It makes me procrastinate a lot more because I get intimidated by the work I need to do.

Yes, coffee increases anxiety. I only learnt that recently. I'm cutting down on it!

Thirded. One of the ways I thought/tried I could stop caffeine is by drinking only on the weekends, when there is no work pressure...

But then you sleep 5 hours on sunday, and monday we are happy again on the coffee train.

I find that green tea is often more useful than coffee if you just want a mild push, since it’s basically low dose caffeine. It also has L-theanine which is a mild anxiolitic and can counter caffeine’s anxiogenic effect. Some also find that taking an L-theanine supplement (OTC) along with coffee can also counter most of caffeine’s anxiogenic effect while keeping the wakefulness and focus.

Just like milk, there is probably a sub population of people whose body chemistry is not compatible with caffeine or coffee. You may fall into that category.

I developed a stomach condition in 2014 that prevented me from eating fried foods, caffeine, alcohol and red meat.

It took almost a year before my cravings went away but after I never felt so good.

"I completely changed my lifestyle and never felt so good, therefore coffee is bad."

Maybe you're sensitive to caffeine, or coffee itself. I've tried going off coffee and feel about the same after a few weeks of normalizing.

Another anecdote: having even a little bourbon makes me feel completely terrible, however I feel fine after drinking any other spirit. It's just my bodies adverse reaction to some chemical component. Perhaps similar with you and coffee.

I heard stories like this, but I have hard time relating. I don't have problems not drinking coffee, I just like to drink it.

There were periods when there was really good tea at the office, and I would drink that, or mineral water.

Anyhow, believe you but can't relate as I and many others don't have issues with coffee drinking.

Yeah, what I find weird is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_chemicals

More than a thousand chemical compounds in coffee, area of active research. Does this imply that we don't know much about coffee yet?

And more anecdotally, what I find weird is that when I switch from coffee drinking to tea and soft drinks, there seems to be no amount of caffeine intake that make the withdrawal symptoms go away. For me, there certainly is something in coffee besides caffeine that hooks me.

Its also worth considering the strength of the coffee may be more than anticipated. For instance, a 20oz cup of Starbucks coffee has _more than double_ the caffeine found in 20oz of red bull. It always gives me a laugh when the "5 hour energy" commercials advertise "only as much caffeine as a cup of the leading premium brand of coffee" -- aka Starbucks. A 5 hour energy _also_ has more caffeine than a red bull. I always bring this up in these conversations because it was all such a surprise to me.

There are more than a thousand chemical compounds in anything you eat that came from nature.

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