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Comment by OliveMate | Hacker News Reader

I've been on the decaf wagon for a good few years now, I can't say it helped me out with anxiety or productivity but I can echo the sentiment that I can sleep within minutes. Also not relying on caffeine to keep me going pretty much forces me to sleep at a reasonable time.

The hardest thing about giving up caffeine has to be the immediate effects. Your body takes it as a massive shock and you're stuck with what feels like a migraine for 2 days. Not fun.

I know decaf still has some caffeine in it, but it's a compromise for something different – for a month of cold turkey I thought I had cravings for caffeine, but it turned out it was hot drinks I was after. I think it's the one luxury I couldn't be without.

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> Your body takes it as a massive shock and you're stuck with what feels like a migraine for 2 days. Not fun.

Yup, but you can wean yourself off gradually and it's fine. I've done it several times -- just reducing it by 10% of your original amount each day, so you spread the effect out over 10 days. At least for me, zero headaches.

Not gonna lie though -- there is a generalized feeling of a little bit of extra "grogginess" each day. But much less than if you've come down with a cold, for example. And it's far less painful than going cold turkey.

Because you're right -- otherwise the 2-day migraine is awful.

>And it's far less painful than going cold turkey.

As stupid as it sounds I forgot that it was an option. There's something clean about saying "I won't have any more of X after this date" and sticking to it. Although I could've tapered off beforehand!

I quit cold turkey and had bad headaches. What helped for me was having a decaf coffee. Just one would make the headaches go away. So the jump from say 300 mg to 10mg of caffeine was somehow much better than 300 to 0.

The mistake that people make is that they expect to be 100% wired the second they get up from bed, while in actuality it takes an hour a two for the (enzyme that wakes you up) to start being produced in your body.

Also: caffeine doesn't make you more alert, it just borrows alertness from the future by blocking the receptors where Adenosine attaches to. The enzymes are still produced, they're not going anywhere.

I think tapering off caffeine is a lot more gentle than going cold turkey. And if you are in a hurry for whatever reason, plan to have one ~50mg dose on day three or four when the headache gets distractingly bad. You can use Tylenol Ultra Relief or Excedrin Migraine if you don't want to deal with coffee or soda. That should get you over the hump with minimal disruption.

I stuck with 7 or so months of dandy blend and roibos to make sure it wasn't just an addiction to the caffeine - and I eventually came back to decaf coffee. The problem is I want hot drinks with body and complexity - and dandy blend comes close, but is so flat compared to a coffee or a black tea. :(

a cup of decaf has less caffeine than an ounce of dark chocolate. lots of things have caffeine; it's a naturally-occurring substance.

i also got headaches when i quit caf coffee, though i didn't realize that it was because of that at the time.

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