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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I have always hated coffee so I've previously had some kind of energy drink in the morning for weeks at a time.

Those suckers are bizarrely addictive. It's one thing to have one shortly after you wake up, but I found myself craving them later and later in the day, and of course that makes it harder to sleep...which makes me more likely to have energy drinks the next day.

I stopped the daily consumption when I realized I was having around 800mg of caffeine a day, which couldn't possibly be good for me. I quit energy drinks cold turkey and just did Diet Coke, which I cut off at 2pm; even with that weening off I still got headaches and felt miserable for three days.

I will still occasionally consume an energy drink if I'm traveling and I need to wake up super early, but thankfully these are very outlier events.

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You're describing caffeine addiction. This also happens with coffee.

People at the office sometimes ask me how I manage to get up in the morning and be in a good mood without having a cup of coffee. I suspect that most of them are only in a bad mood after waking up because they have mild caffeine widthrawal.

That is likely true, but there are other factors. For example delayed sleep phase paired with fixed office work hours.

I bet many people that have a slight 1-2h shift compared to the average are using an early morning coffee to make things work.

Not sure why you’re downvoted, this is HUGE. Most humans have a circadian rhythm that tends toward slightly longer than 24 hours, and waking up at the same time every day can be very difficult for some percentage of us.

That's if they are in a cave experiment: without that the sunlight cycle regulates it back to 24hr. But not for everyone, and that's N24/non-24, not DPSD, delayed-phase sleep disorder.

Not everyone lives in a place with relatively consistent sunlight either

If you're far north you have really long days in summer and long nights in winter

I have a delayed sleep phase. In the modern working world that means I am not as effective as I could be, and it puts a lot of stress on my body to be awake when work requires.

The stigma is real, no one truly believes it, especially those who love work. But I don't choose it, I would rather be a morning person so it wasn't such a grind to deal with the trivial office bullshit surrounding start times.

Appreciate that some people may have suggestions on how to change and become a morning person. I'll ask this, with your job, your family and other responsibilities in mind, could become a night owl?

Sleep problems due to undiagnosed or subtle Sleep Disordered Breathing, or other fatigue-causing conditions not quite bad enough to either be disabling or diagnosed are extremely common.

It's easy to be tempted to blame it on people getting addicted to caffeine or whatever but the reality is that most people do those things to self medicate a real issue they have no better recourse against.

That turned out to be my case. I had at the time undiagnosed sleep apnea, and I think I was using caffeine as a crutch instead of treating the problem.

If you have a recent sleep apnea diagnosis, get your testosterone checked too. Years of poor sleep will crater your levels and CPAP will not help as much as it should.

It’s not just caffeine withdrawal, they’re also in withdrawal from reversible MAO inhibitors present in all coffee brews. Caffeine is a large part of it, but it’s the MAOIs which make the concoction strongly habit-forming.

Feeling miserable for three days seems ... unlikely after 800mg/day of caffeine. I say that to mean, it should be much longer (been there, done that, took many months) Caffeine use especially at that level massively grows the amount adenosine receptors your brain has, and they don't just disappear overnight.

A 500ml Diet Coke (assuming you don't mean the caffeine free version) also contains about 65 mg of caffeine, which is the same as an espresso. I'm not sure if you really quit. Caffeine is also in a surprisingly large amount of soft drinks you wouldn't expect.

Right now I think 800 mg/d of caffeine would send me to the ER lol. Discontinuing 800mg/d steady state, cold turkey... that would mean 3 weeks of migraine-like headaches

I couldn't even get away from 2 cups/day until i started hyperbolic tapering by slowly mixing decaf into my regular beans.

My goal wasn't to completely quit. The goal was to keep my caffeine intake less than or equal to 400mg (the FDA's recommended max) and to cut it off at 2pm. I didn't cold-turkey cut off caffeine.

I stopped getting acute headaches after about three days; other prolonged side effects are harder to quantify.

I should also clarify, it wasn't 800mg every day (which I realize I didn't make clear), it was just one thing where I saw that at least a few days of the last week I had consumed 800mg.

Everybody's physiology is different, but I drank a full pot of coffee every day, for about 15 years.

After Getting Older™, I was noticing more and more effects that I didn't like, so I made the decision to (mostly) detox off caffeine using decaf beans. Cold turkey would have destroyed me. I went with the following schedule:

* Week 1: 75% caffeinated/25% decaf beans

* Week 2: 50% caf/50% decaf

* Week 3: 25% caf/75% decaf

* Week 4: 100% decaf

At week 4, I entered a full failure mode I hadn't yet experienced, namely migraines that were untouchable by OTC medications. Only caffeine helped. I tried to get through the week to "be done" with the weening but couldn't. So...

* Week 5: back up to 25% caf/75% decaf!

* Weeks 6-12: decreasing caffeine by half each week (to the point I was measuring beans using my home scale).

After week 12, I was able to go without caffeine, and now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.

My physiological dependence on caffeine was no joke, but I feel a heck of a lot less anxious and jittery after cutting it down to where I'm now at.

For about 8 years now I've been down to one caffeinated coffee per day, first thing in the morning. If I miss it, I have the start of a migraine by about 1pm. It's mad.

Yes completely!

I started drinking one small but dense cup of coffee every work day just after lunch to avoid being sleepy after the meal two years ago, and this year I noticed that I wasn't feeling good during the weekend, then I noticed that if I drank a coffee after lunch I'd be normal. Skip forward a few months, I notice now that if for some reason I forget to drink my coffee after lunch I wake up the next day with a migraine, each time.

I like the ritual of grinding my fresh grains and brewing my cup, but I think I'll move to decaf and a quick nap like I was doing before. The migraine is the proof of an addiction.

I had to avoid caffeine for some time due to medical issues. I really missed the morning ritual of waking up slowly with a cup of coffee, so I replaced it with decaf coffee which satisfies the ritual part of my morning at least. Definitely a 'YMMV' thing and it wouldn't solve the headaches of course, but it at least makes the morning a bit nicer.

Did you try Excedrin? It has some caffeine in it.

It does seem to be especially helpful relative to just Tylenol for me as a migraine sufferer. Specifically for helping to disperse the aura.

That was the only OTC I avoided, specifically because I was trying to tightly control and titrate down the caffeine dose (granted, measuring beans isn't precise dosing, but I didn't want to blow my work out of the water by throwing some Excedrin into the mix).

> disperse the aura.

What’s this mean?

Migraine auras - the additional disturbances that can accompany the pain (or, in some cases be present without the pain) [0].

[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22131-migrain...

Thank you!

I don't get migraines very often (once a year maybe), but the first aura was very strange not knowing what it was.

For me they start out as a bright point of light then spreads out into an expanding shimmering arc of rainbow colors. Sometimes the vision inside the arc is ok, other times it is kinda missing. The headache usually comes on as the aura is fading out. Sometimes I get an aura without the migraine.

Visual disturbance.

I get a blind spot near the center of my vision that looks a bit like what you see when you rub your closed eyes. It gets large enough to mostly obscure faces and prevent reading

I was going mad for a good chunk of time a while ago figuring out why those blind spots were forming, glad to see I’m not alone

Seems like this would have been much easier if you used plain old caffeine pills at the denominations you wanted to work thru, easier to measure (split the tablets) and also removes the other pleasurable aspects like flavor of the coffee and pleasing aromas—those kind of subjective cues that compound the preference and addiction

Isnt what you're doing now basically—what it would be called for almost any other drug—"kindling" or something?

Possible, yeah. I still wanted to drink coffee, though - decaf. I enjoy it. So, went the long route.

Tapering down using Caffeine pills (nodōz) has been really effective for me multiple times in the past.

I have found it tricky to find a good starting dose, and it gets a bit difficult to break tablets into very small amounts (1/10th pill) tapering down near the end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46417034

I would never try cold turkey again due to nasty headaches.

I've done it linearly over some weeks, but if anyone has tried non-linear tapering I would be interested to know what worked for you.

You can get powder and a digital scale, and there are relatively low caffeine pills. Alternatively, things like dark chocolate might be easier to cut to small doses.

Good idea. I didn't know about caffeine powder suppliments (for sports). Scales and gel-caps are something else I wouldn't think of without context.

You can dissolve a known amount of caffeine into a known amount of liquid, and then partition the liquid.

Caffeine dosage is strange, because a fraction of the regular dose can remove withdrawal symptoms.

Like Low Dose Naltrexone.

Very cool

My ears perked up when you mentioned linearly. Im curious now if an exponential or s curve would work differently or better

> now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.

FYI, unless we're talking double espresso, a typical shot of espresso contains less caffeine (up to half) than a typical cup of drip coffee.

Yeah, double (and I realize now my original statement wasn’t clear: that’s an occasional espresso in addition to my daily single cup of coffee in the morning).

Hopefully you were using very specific decaf for which you knew the values. Decaf coffee beans in the US vary from nearly zero to 30 or 40% of regular. Various sites and articles claim that there's a legal requirement for 97% removal in the US, but others call that out as coffee myth.

You weaned yourself off caffeine, but dependence on the other psychoactives in coffee still remains.

If I consume 1-2 canned coffees a day (which is around 300mg at most), it takes me around 7 days after I quit to stop getting headaches, body aches, or mood issues.

I think the actual threshold is when the withdrawal misery falls below the noise floor of the ambient misery.

I dunno. Caffeine doesn't affect me very much (I mean to say, I can drink regular coffee and go to sleep an hour later without difficulty), though it is somewhat pleasant. I used to regularly detox from caffeine to get that initial rush again, and that would mean 3-4 days of mild headache, and another few days of fuzzy-headedness, and then things were normal again. I'm aware, though, that some people can't have coffee or cola after early afternoon if they want to sleep well, so. Various people have quite different responsiveness to caffeine.

>A 500ml Diet Coke (assuming you don't mean the caffeine free version) also contains about 65 mg of caffeine, which is the same as an espresso.

that's for one shot of espresso, and most standard regularly-sized espresso drinks are served with two shots, so that's closer to 100-130 mg of caffeine

i've experimented with reducing caffeine and it's overall been a great experiment. but also i take a stimulant for adhd so you could imagine it's easy for me to overdose on caffeine while i already have other uppers in my system. when medicated, a coke zero is basically the perfect amount of caffeine for me if i need a pep without becoming a nervous wreck

I quit cold turkey and consumed around 1200mg/day, not by drinking energy drinks but coffee, 6 strong cups of filter or more. I made sure to also quit caffeinated sort drinks and switched to herbal tea.

The immediate withdrawal symptoms started after around 24h and consisted of headache, cold sweats and brain fog that lasted around three days and seriously impeded my ability to work. However, the psychological craving just... never really got better once it plateaued. I always felt a bit more understimulated than before I stopped, and a bit less motivated.

I kept it up for about 1.5 years or so before I decided it wasn't worth it. The first cup of coffee seriously gave me euphoria comparable to a low dose of amphetamine. That was so pleasurable that I tried to keep my consumption to one cup per week, but even with that spacing I felt the tolerance build up again.

I limited to 1-2 servings of coffee by switching to an aeropress and a hand cranked grinder.

When I brew one big carafe, then I have this compulsion to drink it, like every new task needs a prelude where I get up to refill my mug.

But now there’s too much friction to brew the 2nd or 3rd cup since I know I won’t even feel it.

I ended up brewing just one cup of filter in the morning, then drinking one more cup when I arrive at the office. I have a rule to stop before 9am which I found is the latest I can do caffeine without disrupting my sleep. I think I am one of the slow metabolizers.

I swore off energy drinks in high school after someone brought a case of them on the bus to a football game and I drank one and got horrible diarrhea and had to shit in the woods at halftime.

dude, don't even get me started on those bang energy drinks. I don't know what they put in them but monsters do not make me run to the bathroom like those things do. it might be a caffeine threshold thing I don't know. monsters have about 180 mg of caffeine bang drinks have I think 300 mg.

the bang drinks even used to have creatine in them which would actually make you sick if you didn't have anything to eat around the time you drank it. they have reformulated. so wouldn't it surprise me if the bang people were putting some weird stuff in there that was basically acting as a laxative. I have no idea.

Both Bang and Monster contain artificial sweeteners, unlike Red Bull. Maybe that could be what upset your stomach.

Sugar alternatives might be the problem, for me sucralose is a countdown to a space launch.

yeah that's absolutely a strong possibility and I thought about that. though I've noticed it doesn't happen with monsters and it happens every single time with bang energy drinks. to the point that they were very useful for getting regular again. strongly possible that monsters and bang use different artificial sweeteners. I'll see if I have a can laying around. maybe that in combination with the caffeine it's kind of like a train running downhill right out the butt.

pounding 300 mg of caffeine a can tho... as a 10+ year recovering veteran of the ephedrine caffeine stack, it's territory I don't ever want to get into again.

I like energy drinks, but I prefer coffee. I drink my coffee black. About the only time I drink an energy drink for these past few years is when driving long distances. I don't like the chemicals used in sugar free sodas/energy drinks, and I don't like consuming a lot of unnecessary sugar, I also really like the flavor of properly prepared coffee. I go through phases, but I generally just have 1-2 cups in the morning and that's it, but when I'm driving I might have 3-5 energy drinks over the course of 8-10 hours of driving. I understand the appeal, but it's just never hooked me the way people talk about them.

Consuming that much caffeine is terrible for your heart.

If you find yourself consuming a lot of caffeine regularly, you would probably be much better served by Adderall. You can get the same stimulant effect with much less wear and tear on your body. If you want to put it to the test without breaking the law or going through the hassle of getting a prescription, you can try taking 1 or 2 Sudafed (the real stuff that requires ID), which I've found to be functionally equivalent to a low dose of Adderall.

(The normal caveats about health risks of stimulants apply to this comment - avoid if you have a heart condition, etc.)

Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?

Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me. 'It seems you have trouble regulating intake of a weak stimulant most people have little issue with, how about you take one of the strong, seriously treacherous ones instead?'

> Why do you expect pseudoephedrine to be less nasty on the cardiovascular system than caffeine?

I'm not advocating for substituting pseudoephedrine for caffeine, but rather using pseudoephedrine as a one time proxy for amphetamine to see how well it works for you.

> Recommending going from caffeine to amphetamine comes across as rather weird to me.

With respect for the potential for abuse and addiction, that's a good point. My suggestion comes from a firsthand account of an adult with undiagnosed ADHD who self medicated with grossly excessive coffee drinking. Their doctor suggested getting assessed for ADHD and making the substitution out of fear for their cardiovascular health.

I assumed the parent commenter was overusing caffeine to self medicate for attention issues, but didn't think of the possibility that it was pure addictive behavior.

Pseudoephedrine is very different from amphetamine. If you must push caffeine users towards something else, go for nicotine. It is quite well tolerated, techniques for cessation are abundant, and like caffeine it is a cholinergic and would not be moreish unlike amphetamine.

For treatment of ADHD amphetamine is pretty much never the first reasonable option. It's reasonably among the last, way over there with meth, on the other side of reuptake inhibitors with a much nicer toxicological profile.

Amphetamine is no stronger or more treacherous than caffeine, when dosed properly. As someone with EXTENSIVE experience with both, I would say caffeine is probably substantially more treacherous.

I'll necro this even though I've been away for quite some time because this is such a motorheaded jaw clenched dum-dum of a position to take.

"When dosed properly" is basically a circular premise. When things are good, things are good. Great. Brilliant. This is the kind of solid ground we need for making judgements about psychoactives and health.

The thing is this, this ideal world does not exist. If you raise the dose or take an extra dose of caffeine, what happens? You'll probably feel sick and correct. What happens with amphetamine? In the best case you inch towards euphoria. At worst, if you really hit it on, you'll get a rush like little else and then euphoria.

Caffeine is very not sneaky, it clears the fog and you trivially find your equilibrium where you take roughly the same amount of a hundred millis per day. It carries very little risk for changes in personality and perception. Amphetamine is quite different. It affects confidence, behaviour and changes your perception so that the amphetamine starts to look like a solution to more and more problems. It does this in nefarious ways that usually aren't obvious to the newcomer. It's also way more potent than caffeine, therapeutic doses being in the few milligrams rather than hundreds a day.

Perhaps you've eaten more pills than I have, but I'm sure you didn't pay as much attention as I have. I like amphetamine as a very sporadic recreational drug, but that's on a hiatus because I have kids that depend on me. I'd never take it on a casual basis because I'm not disabled in a way that makes up for the risks. And there are risks, for one it's neurotoxic due to excitotoxicity. How much can't easily be predicted but chronic exposure is unlikely to be safe in the sense caffeine is. As far as I can tell this is more pronounced with dopaminergic than noradrenergic effects, i.e. if this is the case then dextroamphetamine is likely worse than the levo enantiomer.

Then there's the issue of mixing drugs. In many users amphetamine will not lessen or stop the consumption of caffeine.

I agree it's not good for my heart. I keep my caffeine intake considerably lower now, always less than the 400mg max that the FDA recommends, usually less than that.

I'm not sure that adderrall is significantly healthier for the heart. I did take it for a bit but I found adderral to be unbelievably terrible. I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night, and when I did get sleep it didn't feel terribly restful. I was only on it for about a week and that was enough.

Obviously if it works for you, don't let me take that away from you.

> I would take a small dose at like 7am, and I still would have trouble getting to sleep at night

Was this an extended release verson like Vyvanse? I had an absolutely terrible time with that for the same reasons. If that was your experience with plain dextroamphetamine, totally sounds like it's just not meant for you!

I tried the three big ones: regular Adderall, Adderall extended release, and Vyvance. None of them really helped my focus and all three really screwed with my sleep.

Kind of ironically, it turned out that a lot of my focus issues were due to (at the time) undiagnosed sleep apnea. The caffeine and the adderall sort of became band-aids that covered up the real problems.

Good Lord no. Sudafed is nothing like Adderall and Adderall is nothing like caffeine, for starters.

I was on a low 10mg time release dose of Adderall for about 6 years. I had a lapse of insurance and could no longer afford it. I weaned myself off over a month and the withdrawals were absolutely fucking terrible.

Just fucking bad advice dude.

> Consuming that much caffeine is terrible for your heart.

He's talking about 800mg, and I doubt it. 400mg is well known to be a safe daily level. I doubt by doubling it you will experience massive negative side effects.

Here in Finland (possibly highest caffeine consumption per capita in the world?) there are people who have been drinking well over >1000mg/day for decades and life expectancy and heart health among the population is normal.

I make my own all natural energy drink. I too don’t like coffee much, no matter how hard I’ve tried, but also those things have a lot of chemicals other than caffeine in them.

You can buy powdered caffeine derived from green tea. I do bottling including my own sodas so I have ready access and you might have to buy at least 1 lb, which is a lot of caffeine, but it’s worth it for your health.

I don’t drink more than 200mg in a day and usually not even that much so maybe I’m at a gram a week-ish. So a lb would last me for over 8 years.

Get a jewelers scale and you’re good to go

Pure caffeine is dirt cheap to produce at the enormous scale that it is consumed worldwide. Appeal to nature is a logical fallacy.

Just get some perfectly fine caffeine if that's what you want, nothing wrong with it.

> Those suckers are bizarrely addictive

Caffeine and sugar, both are addictive.

For me personally, I find sugar much harder to drop, than caffeine. I wonder how it is for other people.

> I quit energy drinks cold turkey

https://wondermark.com/c/389/

coke etc will destroy your teeth, if not cleaned off regularly.

( don't "ask me how i know" ! )

> if not cleaned off regularly.

Just rinse it off with water?

It's an acid, which softens your enamel. You should ideally rinse with something that remineralizes the enamel, i.e. flouride.

I've been drinking loads of coke Zero (up to 3 liters a day, these days it's about 2 liters), and my teeth are fine. I'm 40 and have been drinking it for most of my life, it started when I was about 16, with regular coke back then. Maybe I'm lucky.

Hope you don’t have diabetes

I'm regularly afraid of things like that, not only for drinking too much coke but also for not having exactly the healthiest lifestyle overall. I've tried reducing coke a few times with some luck here and there, but eventually got back to it everytime. For now, my annual checkups are good.

> and my teeth are fine

says the dentist? or says you?

after a check-up i was strongly recommended to stop taking soft drinks...no symptoms whatsoever but the teeth are weakening

My dentist, annual consultation.

As long as its a rinse thats fine, you shouldn't brush your teeth immediately after.

You probably don't have to do anything special, your saliva is surprising effective at repairing trivial damage from minor acids as long as you give it time. Pounding acid after acid all day long is how you get in trouble.

Also, an effective drink after soda is unsweetened tea! The tea plant is extremely efficient at extracting fluoride from the ground and tea always has fluoride. Thats why consuming gallons of cheap tea can give you floridosis!

Life hack: get your teeth replaced with metal fillings, and that acid will remove any oxidation that forms on them.

I mean, you could say the same thing about coffee.

Drip coffee has ~40-50% more caffeine per 8oz serving than Red Bull (about 90-100mg vs 65mg). The nice thing about coffee is that the mouth-puckering tannins make it harder to absolutely pound them, like one can do easily with cans of Red Bull.

Yeah, the real problem with Red Bull is that it's caffeine-spiked Gatorade. So you're drinking to satisfy cravings but also just because you're thirsty.

A 12 oz can of Celsius has 200mg of caffeine.

You could but you'd be quite disingenuous if you did considering that coffee delivers caffeine without a bunch of added sugar.

I was drinking the sugar free energy drinks, so I wasn't getting a ton of sugar.

Still not saying it's healthy but it wasn't because of too much sugar.

Sugar-free energy drinks aren’t rare (at least here in Europe), and people are putting fat and sugar in their coffee as well.

Sugar free/low sugar energy drinks are really common, and most coffee drinkers I know are mixing in sugar or creamer or something in their coffee, so I don't think they're that different. Personally, as someone who is super sensitive to bitterness, coffee has never worked for me, so if I need a caffeine boost, I go for a sugar free Red Bull or a white Monster

Probably. As I said, I've always hated coffee so I've never really had any desire to consume large quantities of it, so I can't speak to that.

I will say, though, energy drinks do become a relatively expensive addiction. A Monster energy drink can easily cost 3-4 dollars, so if I had three of those a day we are talking $10+ of cost. If you get off brands they're cheaper, but even still I think they're overpriced.

I know it's a meme that people pay like $6 for a coffee at Starbucks, but I think if you buy the coffee beans yourself or instant coffee it's relatively cheap.

$3-4 is a lot. They are 0.99 € here (tax included).

It very much depends on the brand. I was initially buying the Monster drinks at a local gas station where I believe they were $3.25.

Eventually I transitioned to the Aldi brand which was I think around $1.

I meant specifically the Monster drinks. Red Bull for example is closer to 2 € here. The cheapest Aldi energy drinks are 0.29 €.

You pay a significant markup getting it at gas stations, but looking at a Monster on Walmart.com, it's still like $2.68. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Monster-Energy-Zero-Ultra-Energy-...

I guess it's cheaper in Europe.

As a coffee drinker the "bizarrely addictive" comment does not resonate with me at all.

I don't really have trouble keeping myself to, like, 1.2 coffees a day. I can't imagine drinking 6-7 coffees in a day to get to 800 mg caffeine.

Unless you add ice or sweetener it's bitter and hot, so it's a lot harder to slide down the slippery slope of just drinking it whenever you're thirsty and simultaneously getting addicted to the caffeine and the sugar. To say nothing of whatever else is in the energy drinks.

Although I guess plenty of people who drive a lot do this with the sugary Starbucks drinks in the giant mugs.

I don't particularly like coffee, so it's not addictive for me as well. But neither are the energy drinks that I actually like. Conversely, there are people heavily addicted to coffee, whether you want to call that "bizzarely" or not.

So, we can haggle over details, but overall I don't see a dramatic qualitative difference.

Coffee is also slightly diuretic, so it's not a "drink to quench your thirst" drink, at least not to me. Water (plain or fizzy/flavored), milk, diet sodas, etc. fill that niche.

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