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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

I must be weird, but coffee (or caffeine) doesn’t really “wake me up” in the mornings and I could drink it in the night and still sleep well. Because of that I don’t drink coffee; I prefer tea

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I find that the effects can be pretty subtle, and if I'm already tired there's usually no coming back. What I think has worked best for me is to re-up on caffeine a few hours before I think I'll be tired, or around when a previous dose is wearing off. Also, if trying to stay awake, food and entertainment are also quite important. If I hit a point where I'm hungry, cold, and tired, and going to the kitchen to eat sounds like a chore, it's usually too late for me. When the bed's closer, it's hard to resist.

I've also noticed that I have a sort of natural energy in the morning. I think of it as being similar to how a seed has enough energy in itself to sprout and then get sunlight. It's probably so I can make myself eat and whatnot. I don't really need caffeine to "wake up" as much as I need it to stay awake later in the day, and even if I do have a coffee with breakfast, I'll often get tired before the normal day is over.

I also don't find that caffeine wakes me up or keeps me alert. I used to have it a ton because I like the taste but then mostly stopped because I was having some anxiety issues and wanted to be sure caffeine wasn't a factor. Stopping it was zero problem at all for me, which doesn't align with what others say about stopping consumption. I don't know if my body's metabolism of it is super fast or if my brain is weird in some undiagnosed way that prevents the caffeine from working "correctly"

I think this description is often associated with ADHD memes.

Falling asleep after a can of energy drink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction#Caffeine

This absolutely happens to my father, who uses coffee as a sleep aid but the science is sketchy.

It is documented but I don't know if it is scientifically valid

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

I can't find it now but I once read that people who report the "paradoxical reaction" to stimulants have a significantly better outcome from stimulant medications, and both those values seem to have higher heritability than ADHD as a whole, possibly even linked to a single gene.

tea also has caffeine, although in smaller quantities. Maybe you mean that you don't care so you go by taste, just specifying because there's a common misconception about tea not having caffeine.

Some tea has caffeine, most has don't.

all tea has caffeine unless it's decaf. some things that aren't tea are called tea casually, but they aren't tea, for instance peppermint "tea" is not tea. by the same logic that one would call peppermint a tea, one would have to call coffee a tea. and beef broth.

That depends on culture. All camelia s. teas have it (green etc) but almost none of common herbal teas in Europe have it (chamomile, menta, sage etc.) They are not called casually teas.

> They are not called casually teas.

are you saying chamomile isn't called tea but it's one of the teas without caffeine? if so that's very confused.

camelia sinensis is tea. when i said that other things are casually called tea, i mean that what chamomile tea, for example, ought to be called is a tisane or an herbal infusion. casually, people might call it a tea; some people are so casual about it that they think it actually is tea. but it isn't.

no true scotsman tea. Tea is what is called tea. You can not just decide that you don't like some teas so they are not tea anymore.

did you check wikipedia and found it agrees with me before you came up with that?

"tea" is a word that many use to indicate anything infused. But tea is anything that comes from camelia sinensis, while other beverages are more correctly called infusions. Camelia sinensis has caffeine.

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