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Comment by _lbaq | Hacker News Reader

Caffeine is also linked to panic attacks, anxiety and sleep loss (and loss of quality of sleep), I would recommend staying off caffeine all together, having tried both, I by far more like working in the calmness of not having caffeine circulating in my body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-induced_anxiety_disor...

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Wow, this is actually a thing! I thought it was just me.

As someone who used to drink a LOT of cola-cola during their teens, caffeine really fucked me up good. I only noticed I was dependant (addicted) on caffeine after a friend pointed out I only felt good again on certain days after coming back from a client where there was no cola available. I took a little bottle with me to the client and felt "normal" that day. Didn't even know it had caffeine. Had fairly bad anxiety and panic attacks at the time.

I then quit caffeine cold turkey. Couldn't even sit upright when I woke up after 2 days of not taking any.

I've now tried it on and off and noticed my anxiety / panic attacks happened out of nowhere, somewhat related to consuming caffeine. I think it happens a couple hours, sometimes a day after consumptions. Really took a couple years link it to caffeine. I've been to doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, physical therapists, blah blah blah. It was just fucking caffeine.

If you read this and think consuming coffee or cola all day is fine see what happens when you stop taking it for just a couple days. Yeah I get it, you just use it to "boost" your energy during the day right, you're definitely not addicted, right? Yeah, headaches in the weekend are normal - everyone has them..

I regularly stop drinking caffeine for days at a time and have been unable to notice a difference. It's a shame because I was really hoping to find that my headaches had an easy solution like not drinking caffeine, but they don't appear to be correlated.

How many days at a time? I used to drink a lot of coffee on weekdays but none on weekends and didn't notice it making any difference. Stopped drinking coffee altogether and after a few days I was really noticing the difference, and it took about two weeks for the withdrawals to wear off.

Six weeks, once (mostly to prove it for conversations like this), more often something like 2-6 days. I can really take it or leave it as caffeine, but keep drinking stuff for flavor and enjoyment - if they made decaf red bull I could give up caffeine tomorrow :)

Fair enough, it does seem like different people react to it in sometimes markedly different ways so I don't disbelieve you.

(As an aside, it's an interesting problem how long is 'long enough' when proving you can go without something.)

I find it necessary to stop caffeine for 14+ days before I get to experience improved energy levels. For about 1-2 days i feel really tired after discontinuing coffee, then for the next couple weeks I feel OK but not as good as when I was drinking coffee. After a couple weeks I start feeling like I have more energy than when I’m drinking coffee daily.

I still choose to drink coffee just because I love the taste and the ritual so much. I limit myself to 1 cup in the morning daily.

The drinking of soda also strips the body of magnesium. If you're a heavy soda drinker (or coffee), try supplementing with Magnesium Glycinate and you will feel a world a difference in your calmness. https://www.iherb.com/pr/KAL-Magnesium-Glycinate-400-400-mg-...

(try to get 1000mg a day)

Could you elaborate about the headaches in the weekend? I also noticed I can not do much during the day without coffee but I never linked my headaches to caffeine.

The suspected mechanism for caffeine withdrawal headaches is that more blood is flowing to your brain than it's accustomed to [1]. Caffeine works as a vasoconstrictor, reducing cerebral blood flow (CBF) by an average of 27% across users with varying levels of dependency. [2] When you reduce or eliminate caffeine, CBF spikes, causing "weekend" headaches and migraines.

In my personal experience, weaning yourself off caffeine over the course of a couple of weeks is drastically easier than attempting to quit cold turkey. My preferred method of reducing or eliminating caffeine dependence is to reduce intake by 25% every 3-4 days. Once you're down below 50mg per day, you can switch to tea or quit without any physical side effects.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9170342 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19219847

Counter-point: I once quit coffee altogether, weening myself off with tea at first. After about 3 months of total caffeine "sobriety" I hated it. I found I enjoyed myself more and was more productive with some caffeine rather than none. It did help me cut back (I went from ~8 cups a day to ~2-4).

I think the level I'm at now -- still ~2-4 cups -- is perfect. I find I'm productive and still sleep well.

Note: 2-4 cups still sounds like a lot, but I mean 1 cup = 250ml not 1 mug.

Nothing wrong with that, we are all different. I think its just important to talk about the drawbacks, especially in the software industry where coffee often is seen as some sort of fuel to do great things, while it may be the cause for all sorts of meltdowns.

If you run any type of startup/company, you are already in a very stressful position, no need to make it worse.

I was life-long anti-caffeine, except the occasional soda. Then I started drinking more and more of it as I drank more and more soda.

Eventually, I realized the soda was doing bad things to my system and got off it. I didn't drink coffee or tea, so that mean almost zero caffeine as well.

Lately, I started drinking chai twice per day at work. I've found that I'm a lot more productive and active, both at work and at home, though I do tend to get really sluggish a couple hours before bed.

I don't know drinking so much caffeine permanently altered my metabolism/body chemistry so that I need caffeine, or if it was an inevitable consequence of aging. It's weird to find that I now "need" caffeine just like everyone around me, when I definitely didn't just 10 years ago.

8 cups?! You should drink that much water - but coffee..

2-4 still seems like a lot - this is coming from someone who doesn't drink at all anymore, but before 1, maybe 2. Now I only drink if I know I need the alertness. More effective for me considering the caffeine tolerance is gone and even a little has full effect.

Why did you hate it?

It's pretty easy to hit 4 cups. Large cups of coffee are 20 fl oz which are ~570ml. So 2 larges in one day, which I have from time to time, will get you there.

I can't really explain why I hated it with complete accuracy -- I think I just felt overall less energetic. And I felt this way when I was definitely over the effects of caffeine withdrawal.

Same. I was off all caffeine for a month and I much preferred going back. However I stick to tea now and save coffee for emergencies.

I realised this after consuming two coffees a day - one in the morning and one after noon. I used to struggle with insomnia and used to sleep only by 2:00 AM frequently. After a few days of missing out my afternoon coffee, I started to notice that I felt much better and calmer. As someone who is fighting depression and anxiety, cutting off my coffee completely has helped.

I now substitute with a tea in the morning if necessary.

Reading this paper, I got a similar sense that all of this was suboptimal when compared to working towards and maintaining a healthy sleep cycle. When maintaining a healthy sleep cycle, there is no drop off in performance throughout the day, right? Or if there is, it's nothing nearly as bad as the drop off shown in even the best dosing strategies shown here, right? This paper makes the assumption that getting enough sleep simply isn't an option, but for many of us, that's not true. We choose to sleep poorly, and all of this is us trying to minimize the consequences of that poor choice.

I don't know a lot about this topic, so feel free to correct me.

It's a CNS stimulant, those are sensibly some of its side effects. I'd say moderation of use is an effective way to limit those side effects, as the pros/cons tend to change the more used to caffeine the body becomes.

There is also a genetic variation in receptors/enzyme configurations, think of it like the global options/settings. One person may react quite differently due to slight changes in the shape of their receptor due to a different genetic allele.

Fwiw: my doctor once told me that at two cups a day, he thinks it would be irrelevant. That's a bit higher than the 200 mg cited in the wikipedia page.

It definitely is a consideration if you're drinking a lot of coffee.

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