Comment by JamesGi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesGi | Hacker News Reader

In my personal unscientific opinion, I am observing complete opposite - coffee is the modern evil of our society.

My gut feeling is telling me that coffee and digital devices are responsible for big parts of the population suffering from mental illnesses, caused via chronic sleep deprivation. Of course majority of those mental illnesses are under reported - being sleep deprived for months does not make you bipolar maybe, but depression can and does happen (as well as myriad of other issues).

There are too many studies who show relationship between sleep and all kinds of illnesses (majority - mental), and nobody can argue that coffee is NOT responsible for that at least partially.

When I recently quit on coffee, I had such strong withdrawal symptoms, I was unable to function for 4 days. I had strong headaches and was almost vomiting.

No study will convince me this is a good/healthy thing for a human body. It is drug which is so omni-present, if you look around it is scary.

> being sleep deprived for months does not make you bipolar maybe, but depression can and does happen

It shaves off 10 to 20 IQ points in me when I'm on a bad streak. I have failed FAANG interviews because of bad sleep. I still probably would've failed them, but it'd have been much closer. I literally remember one coding interview where I was thinking "if I just had enough sleep, I'd have a solid shot" (the other coding interview was so easy I could even do it in my half-ragged sleep-deprived state).

It's funny you should talk about sleep deprivation messing with your mind... I once remember trying to program a for-loop in C# about 8 or 9 years ago (I've been programming since the 90s) when my son was a baby. He'd been up and down for a couple of days as he was unwell and my sleep-addled brain wouldn't let me create a for-loop.

No matter what I tried I could not get the code to compile.

I still laugh about it now but it definitely highlights the importance of sleep.

About 10 years ago, I once didn't sleep a night and was solving a problem with a switch statement that was 200 lines long.

The next day, well rested, I realized I could do the same thing with a for loop because I already had all the data I needed.

Coffee does not really affect my sleep. I know this for 2 reasons:

1. I periodically go off coffee, for various reasons, but frankly never notice much difference to my sleep quality.

2. I have 2 kids that deprive me of sleep much more effectively. Or, put otherwise, no matter how much I drank during the day, I fall asleep like a log. And then it's not coffee disturbing my sleep, but crying children.

I can see though that coffee abuse _could_ lead to sleep deprivation and related issues. But it's like alcohol could lead to alcoholism, but doesn't have to. Though, incidentally, apparently deliberate sleep deprivation is one method of tackling depression - so it's not all bad.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sleep-depriva...

> apparently deliberate sleep deprivation is one method of tackling depression

Briefly and temporarily, but efficacy quickly drops off with near-term repetition. As (apparently) with psychedelics, it's good for a temporary change of perspective that can be leveraged with the right techniques into lasting improvement, but much more of an adjuvant to therapy than a therapy in its own right.

Please look up studies by Mathew Walker. They did numerous studies with people claiming coffee did not affect their sleep. What they found was while those people would fall asleep, and sleep throughout the night, the quality of the sleep (i.e. minutes in deep sleep) was substantially worse.

But I agree that abuse is what is causing majority of the problems (and it was in my personal case)

My confidence in Matthew Walker was enormous after reading "Why We Sleep", then dropped to around 0 since reading this: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

A lot of it doesn't require any domain knowledge to verify.

Doesn't change the information in his book about how it is genetically determined how quickly you digest the caffeine. My dad can easily have a coffee around 19:00 and still sleep well, while when I have a coffee in the afternoon I will have big trouble sleeping.

The alleged failures in "Why We Sleep" go as far as quoting papers and books claiming they say "X", where in fact they claim "not X". So to me, Walker saying or quoting something bears 0 informational content (almost).

But different rates of caffeine tolerance and digestion certainly conform with my personal observations, Walker or not.

I, too, am curious about the negative effects of coffee (or caffeine, rather). The potential positives are well known through many studies like the OP, but it is also well known that caffeine triggers a stress response (increased adrenaline, cortisol). We know that stress, beyond a short burst, is detrimental to health.

There seems to be a wide variety in different people's caffeine sensitivity, but for me, a coffee habit leads to a downwards spiral that ends with permanent tension and migraine episodes. I have tried this cycle enough times by now to know the cause and effect. I have to wonder what other effects the continued stimulation of caffeine has.

Sensitivity varies wildly for for different people. I seem to have a very low sensitivity - the only time I have felt the effects was on a barista course where I think I was up to 6-7 double espresso shots in the 90 minutes.

I drink espresso in the morning, black coffee through out the day and stop before dinner. It's around 4-8 mugs every day. On holidays I often go a days without any coffee for various reasons with no ill effects. I have gone an entire month substituting coffee with water to test the hypothesis that it doesn't really affect me and I felt no different. HR, BP, sleep quality, tiredness, mental performance, digestion all remained stable.

My neighbour gets a headache if he skips coffee for a day.

I like to think people can decide to kick coffee for themselves if they actually suffer from sleep deprivation.

I for one have coffee in the mornings and stare at my phone until I fall asleep, and I sleep like the dead at night. But, that's purely anecdotal.

I don't think people will listen to others saying 'stop drinking coffee!' or 'stop looking at screens!' if they don't actually have problems. On that note, one shouldn't start self-medicating with sleep hormones (currently available over the counter) to try and optimize their sleep. If you have to force yourself to sleep so you can min/max your day, you're heading to a crash and burnout.

That's why we need science and not opinions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Your experience suggests that your level of coffee intake may have been excessive.

I abstain from coffee (normally eight cups daily) and alcohol (normally three bottles of beer weekly) for a two-week period as a prescription against chemical dependency.

Typically this results in one day in which I am more irritable, nothing more.

Any consumptive habit can be evil in the absence of moderation and discipline.

Sleep is everything you heard, that is more likely sleep is new buzz word. So are the gut microbiota

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