Caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee lower stress, depression and impulsivity
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There is an interesting effect in mood related studies where every group usually improves on average, even if they receive only placebo. The real measure of any depression study is therefore the improvement above and beyond the control group.
The effect is so predictable that it has become an easy way to produce studies showing positive effects from something: All you have to do is track some group of people and then give ALL of them your supplement, and their scores will improve. It makes great headlines because most people don’t know you could have given them sugar pills and the scores would also improve.
EDIT: As another commenter pointed out, this person has an unusual long list of financial affiliations with companies that produce drink products, too. This study should probably be ignored
And decaf is not caffeine-free. Decaf coffee still contains about 5-10% of the original caffeine content compared to the same beans but not decaffeinated.
And then there’s the tiny sample size :( and no control group. This is worse than useless. This is the kind of waste that news stations will pick and advertise.
The process was mostly without discomfort: I bought decaf beans and started cutting my coffee grounds with 50% decaf. After two weeks, 75% decaf. Then 87.5%, etc. About two months later I stopped experiencing withdrawals if I don't drink any coffee at all.
Before I started cutting I would get massive headaches and become irritable if I don't drink coffee in the morning. Now I'm free!
I encourage all heavy coffee drinkers try drinking less. At some point, it stops improving your cognitive functions but instead just maintains a mediocre baseline, which I suppose is the same as almost all substance reliance.
> In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jul/06/caffeine-coffee...
If so the difference when you are not drinking coffee might be more disorganisation/inattentiveness/impulsivity etc. rather than being less stimulated.
I have learned that I can have four Aeropress brews per day (about 12.5g coffee per cup) and it makes me calmer, more focussed and more able to be organised. I would notice discomfort and jitters at maybe six in a day. But I can fall asleep an hour after drinking one; it has little effect on my sleep and it may even make it a little easier for me to initially fall asleep.
And then I can have nothing the next day and be fine; I only notice withdrawal on day three maybe.
The reason is, it seems, I have otherwise very unmanaged "inattentive" ADHD. (Which is a stupid name for it; I don't have the slightest problem paying attention to things that capture my interest)
I was like you in my 20s, I could drink a lot of caffeine without any effects at all. I was diagnosed with ADHD around 28. At the time my doctor told me that my high caffeine intake was maybe an unconscious way of trying to wrangle with my ADHD, because the treatment for that is stimulants.
Once I started my meds, even a low dose, I basically didn't want coffee anymore. It made a huge difference in my life
Not trying to diagnose you with anything, I just always like to tell heavy coffee drinkers my story in case it might help them if they're feeling like something is off
It goes undiagnosed because we aren't hyperactive problem kids in classrooms, and if we're lucky enough to be interested in the subjects we can excel in school
If you're anything like me you've been called lazy a lot in your life when really you're just too bored by stuff to engage with it?
I tended not to get "lazy" too much because I guess I found a way to be interested (my father was good at pointing me to the fascinating bits of homework etc.). Though looking at my school reports in retrospect it is clear that I did much worse at things I did not care about, and if I think about times I was shouted at for doing a poor job, disinterest was why.
I do, however, fall down intellectual rabbit holes a lot because I need to be interested to get stuff done.
I am now in my fifties and the biggest problem is that I have fully burned out — very severely — because I endured such high levels of stress (caused by trying to freelance while having ADHD), that I ultimately became deadline-dependent to organise myself.
I've spent two years recovering and in that process I have learned that much of the typical advice (cut out caffeine) is wrong for me. Indeed cutting out caffeine left me depressed and eating worse. It is sugar I have to manage, which seems like an overoptimisation (I am quite skinny at times and I can forget to eat)
The fact that you say "time stops" if it's something you want to, and the fact that you describe starting a task you don't want to do as painful to engage with and you procrastinate until you find some pressure to start…
I don't think this is necessarily everyone's experience at all.
And one of the problems with inattentive ADHD is that because it feels so intrinsic to us we assume it must be much like what everyone else must feel, and we don't ever question whether it is.
Another is that the IT world is absolutely rife with AuDHD and inattentive ADHD — people who canfind the puzzle in something complex, learn the hell out of it and then dive into it with unbroken focus until it is solved tend to earn a lot of money.
(How many tech people do you know who have three or four other talents or obscure hobbies that have huge potential value but remain to them underdeveloped while amazing others — playing an instrument they taught themselves, really good photography, woodworking, etc.; this is an ADHD pattern!)
And then when they begin to burn out in any given job, they confuse the burnout with structural failures of the job (it must have got worse) or with wanting a better job, so off they go to a new one, and unless you keep in touch with them over several job changes you never see the actual pattern.
The defining questions about a diagnosis are whether this pattern has negative impacts on the rest of your life. In my case… it definitely does. But I still have not sought a formal diagnosis because at this point it's just paying to be allowed to take medication I don't really want to take.
You know, I've been diagnosed for almost a decade now and working on my ADHD with counsellors and my doctor and medication and such
It still really cuts deep to see my struggles laid out so succinctly by someone who doesn't even know me and can't possibly know my struggle. It's agony knowing this pattern is "known" and yet I went so long just bashing against it fruitlessly
When I was finally diagnosed and started seeing a counsellor about it, I described it like a ticking time bomb in my head. I find something new. A new job, a new friend, a new hobby. I throw myself into it, burn out, blow it up for some reason, get depressed for a while, find something new
It's an agonizing way to live
A mug of decaf has about 3% of the caffeine of a mug of non-decaf coffee, at most. It is negligible as a stimulant. The only people who would need to avoid it are those with an allergy.
I feel these disclaimers should be posted under every post about nutritional research that's linked on here. Not saying it proves anything in favour or not, but it's good to know who's getting paid to say what.
So it could easily just be cessation of withdrawal symptoms.
The point I'm making is that a non-coffee drinker won't have "withdrawal symptoms", so OP's suggestion that the beneficial effects they observed were just "cessation of withdrawal symptoms" doesn't make any sense. As in literally nonsense: "a non-coffee drinker's withdrawal symptoms" is nonsensical in the same way the idea of a square circle is.
I have been experimenting with reducing/abstaining from coffee and I am well aware of its effects, and I doubt you can reach very strong conclusions. There are times where I have experienced no headaches during my abstinence week, others where I've felt terribly, this last one during the heatwave I actually felt pretty good staying away from coffee, and I have been enjoying the slower pace of my thought.
Nutritional research is, as always, as rigorous as astrology.
Personally, coffee makes me much more anxious, more impulsive, more able to bruteforce through things I hate, but reduces creativity and contemplation; just like amfetamine BTW.
As such, the improvement seen when they start drinking coffee could simply be a placebo effect. Coffee making is a nice daily ritual that helps being grounded in the present, as do sents, tastes and the feeling of a warm beverage.
The study is also fairly low power, as you have 62 people in four groups: coffee drinker with caffeine, coffee drinker with decaffeinated, non-coffee drinker with caffeine, non-coffee drinker with decaffeinated.
(Again, a big problem in many human studies is that it is very hard to recruit enough people, both for financial and organization reasons, so don't read this as a knock against the research team).
And is the effect chemical, or there's also something about the ritual?
Has anyone compared groups that either drank coffee or took the same quantity in pills?
> "Our findings reveal the microbiome and neurological responses to coffee, as well as their potential long-term benefits for a healthier microbiome. Coffee may modify what microbes do collectively, and what metabolites they use. As the public continues to think about dietary changes for the right digestive balance, coffee has the potential to also be harnessed as a further intervention as part of a healthy balanced diet."
That would explain why it works for decaf too. i.e. it's healthy gut, healthy mind.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drinking-morning-c...
>The study also found differences in gut bacteria between coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers, including increases in species such as Eggertella sp and Cryptobacterium curtum, which are thought to play roles in gut function and metabolism.
>Cognitive effects varied depending on coffee type: decaffeinated coffee was associated with improvements in learning and memory, while caffeinated coffee was linked to reduced anxiety, improved vigilance and attention, as well as a reduced risk of inflammation.
The actual journal article has a lot more information, the clickbait headline doesn't really do it justice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71264-8
Fun fact: on the same day I noticed and stopped taking it coffee, 5 days later I had terrible muscle pain in my lower back (I could hardly sleep). 2 days later I had no more pain. I researched later and saw that this type of pain could also be caused as an effect of caffeine withdrawal.
> In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jul/06/caffeine-coffee...
Although, it doesn't make me feel anxious on most days, it's really only if I already have a prior reason, it just exacerbates it.
>In CD participants, indoles such as indole-3-propionic acid (IPA) and indole-3-carboxyaldehyde (ICA) and the neurotransmitter γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) were significantly decreased.
GABA is an anti-anxiety neurotransmitter, it's what benzodiazepines mimic.
This is a terrible sentence. As I understand it, you can't "reintroduce" coffee to non-coffee drinkers.