Caffeine Withdrawal Recognized As Real

Ben Sullivan writes "What many Slashdotters have long known looks set to become official: Caffeine withdrawal is for real. New research at Johns Hopkins should result in it being included in the next edition of the DSM, and recognized by the World Health Organization."

Comments

Bi-annual withdrawl

[linuxwrangler]

I generally stop drinking coffee every two years. That's I when I race from San Francisco to Hawaii in the Pacific Cup. Our watch schedules generally resemble something like 4 hours on, 4 hours off 24x7 for 10-12 days (depending on type of boat, wind, etc.)

Fumbling around to brew coffee just cuts into sleep time and drinking coffee on watch just makes it harder to get back to sleep. As one tactician commented about staying as rested as possible to be able to make good decisions and keep pushing, "sleep is a weapon".

Since I don't want to combine a massive headache with the inevitable seasickness that hits during the first 1-2 days I slowly cut back on the coffee so I'm off of it completely a week or two before the race.

Of course I start back up as soon as I get back from Hawaii.

I quit

[alexjohns]

I quit in April of this year. I don't really have an addictive personality, so it wasn't that hard. I do get cravings. I first cut my intake to one (big) cup in the morning. That was for about a year. Then I quit cold turkey. No coffee. No tea. No coke. Nada.

I didn't really have headaches, I had aches in my bones. It's hard to describe, but for at least a week I had this deep ache in all my bones. I assume this is the 'muscle ache' that the study talked about, but to me, it was really deep inside, like it was in my... bones. Very weird. I work out occasionally, so I know what sore muscles feel like. This was different.

Read a few websites and found other people who had felt the same thing. After a few days it went away and I've been caffeine free since. Sometimes I still really, really want that morning cup. It's not that difficult to say no. Like I said, I guess I don't have an addictive personality. Yay me!

Re:Anyone else find it funny...

[BrodyVess]

Perhaps its because the human body is tied essentially to them?

Spare me the vegan propoganda. No, really, just spare me. I have sharp pointy teeth for a reason. Our most closely related cousins, chimpanzees, regularly eat meat. They hunt small mammals, they steal eggs, they eat insects. Australopithicines are estimated to have needed around 35% animal protien in their diet.

And yes, it is possible to substitute in things like beans and legumes to get the same protiens, fats, lipids, and other nutrients that are found in meat. But please recognize that it is a substitution.

Only in western countries are we so priveleged that we can decide to exclude whole classes of food from our diets for reasons of weight managment or conscience. Being vegan makes no more biological sense than being atkin.

Oh, and to stave off the rebuke- yes, I know where my meat comes from. I've lived on a farm, I've seen the cows, I know how they're killed, processed and used. I can point to a living cow and show you where my steak comes from. Yes, hormones are put in cows. Your soybeans may just be GM. Even if they're "certified organic" (a term for which the FDA assigns no meaning whatsoever) the field directly beside them probably isn't.