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Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal
palegray.net writes "CNN is running an article on the notorious effects of caffeine withdrawal, a problem that seems to be affecting an increasing number of people. Citing numerous reasons why people might need to cut back on their caffeine intake (pregnancy, pre-surgery requirements, etc), the story notes a significant number of people who are simply unable to quit. I drink around eight cups of coffee a day, along with a soda or two, and I definitely suffer from nasty withdrawal symptoms without my fix."
You, sir, are a member of the Caffeine Underacheivers Club of the World. Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
I'm at that point, I admit it. Withdrawal, for me, starts after about eight hours without caffeine. I get a serious headache, quickly followed by nausea and a general flu-like feeling. Left unattended, it's damn-near incapacitating. Fortunately, a single cup of coffee vanquishes all symptoms within 30 minutes.
Anyway, is this caffeine withdrawal stuff really news to anyone? Anyone?
I have tried quitting before, and it just seems to kill my brain, both with pain and sluggishness. I'm not exactly sure why I tried to quit, because I enjoy coffee quite a bit. Today I've had 3 cups of coffee and a Starbucks Double Shot. I still have over half the work day to do, and will probably have a couple more cups of coffee & another double shot at the end of the day to keep me awake on the road. Tonight is date night with my wife, so we'll probably go to the local cafe and have a mocha after dinner.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
While I was in college I became addicted to caffeine. I would wake up tired, and have a cup of coffee, later in the day I would feel worn down and drink a "soda." In the evening I would have another cup of coffee so I could study without falling asleep. This put me in a downward spiral that just kept getting worse and worse.
I discovered that, even though I slept at night, I wouldn't get any rest. I would wake up just as tired as when I went to bed. There was a simple reason for this, that evening cup of coffee. If you want to cut back on your caffeine intake, I have one piece of advice:
Don't drink any caffeine for at least four hours before bedtime
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
well, to make caffeine useful again, for example.
i dring two cups of tea a day at most (no coffee at all because i don't like the taste) and when i really need a push, a cup of coffee or gyokuro is absolutely sufficient to awake me.
Exactly. I used to consume 6-10 cups of coffee worth of caffeine a day, and that was just to get me to normal. Now I have 0 caffeine on a typical day and I can very, very easily pull an all nighter on 1-2 cups. Also, I feel better when I wake up and go to sleep than I used to.
There's no benefit at all to caffeine addiction.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Already exists. It's used in pediatrics for bradycardia (slow heart rate). http://www.drugs.com/ppa/caffeine.html
You're seriously consuming a couple liters of bottled water daily? What's wrong with tap water? Hell with that kind of money, you could buy yourself a really nice filter that would pay for itself after a few months. $2 a day adds up, and bottled water is just about the dumbest thing you could spend it on.
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A cup on a coffee pot is 5 ounces, sometimes 6 but usually 5.
I did exactly the same thing 13 years ago.. Nursing a 4L/day Cola habit and going to bed vibrating from the buzz, I decided it just wasn't healthy, that I couldn't do moderation and decided to go cold turkey.
I still drink plenty of pop though... Diet Caffeine Free Pepsi is my friend.
the most painful, grueling thing I've ever done, and from what I can tell, compared to other /. residents, I didn't even drink that much. It was basically a two-week debilitating, disorienting migraine followed by rapid weight-loss (although the weight-loss was a pretty welcome development, to be honest). The nausea and pain were so bad I didn't even realize I was losing weight, and all of my friends thought I was sick or dying because I looked so pale and couldn't function. Now I have a cup of tea once a week or so and can't really tell much of a difference between my performance while drinking caffeine and with no caffeine, once I got over the first few weeks.
Nope, you're not alone. There's many of us who've gone on the wagon to be free from the stuff.
Get some exercise. Take multivitamins and get a good nights sleep.
In particular B vitamins can really improve your energy levels, especially B12.
Get some exercise. Run a couple of miles every other day, or bike regularly.
Don't code right up to the point where you go to bed. Do something different to take your mind off code for at least 30 minutes, then go to bed. Read a book. Watch a show. Clean the kitchen. Anything.
You'll find that you're tired on a regular schedule, and your mind will be less code-racy.
Tylenol is rougher on the liver than Ibuprofen. This is important because of all the alcohol users here.
In most of continental Europe, if you ask for a cup of coffee you get a watered down expresso, and it comes in a cup that is approximately the size of the "cup" you see on your pot. Drip coffee is almost unknown here and viewed with universal disgust. Can't figure out why; I prefer to have a longer drip coffee than to have a expresso and add so much sugar to it that it barely tastes coffee like many do.
Of course, when given the choice of what size they use to define "cup", manufacturers will choose the one that allows them to claim a higher number, even though no one uses a coffee pot for expressos.
I find that the best way to get away from caffeine addiction is to cut back. If you halve your intake every day, then you likely won't experience any withdrawal symptoms, but will have a logarithmic recovery time. Another option is to consume half a cup (or less) of coffee when you start to feel withdrawal. It doesn't take much caffeine to clear up the effects.
No, Tylenol does not contain caffeine. You're probably thinking of Excedrin, which is aspirin/acetaminophen/caffeine.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Headaches and flu-like symptoms are merely the more common and benign aspects of withdrawal. In some cases (speaking from personal experience here), withdrawal symptoms can include paresthesia, akin to Bell's palsy, and vastly lowered heart rate (on the order of 20 bpm). These symptoms can appear weeks after the initial curtailment of caffeine ingestion.
My coffee maker doesn't say cup, it says servings. I think this is pretty common, and then people call them cups instead of servings.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Another point that irritates me: you said you took "aspirin"; I doubt it.
What makes you doubt the fact he took aspirin, and go into a rant about the different OTC pain medications available? If I tell someone I took aspirin, then I mean that I took Bayer aspirin, or a cheaper generic. When I'm experiencing caffeine withdrawal symptoms on the weekends, I take an aspirin/acetaminophen/caffeine pill (Excedrin Extra Strength), and I'll tell folks I took an Excedrin if it comes up in conversation. I know damn well that it has caffeine, which in combination with the pain meds, will do wonders for the symptoms.
If I'm trying to quit caffeine cold turkey, I'm going to be taking aspirin and acetaminophen, I'll tell folks I took Tylenol and aspirin, and that'll be the truth. Just because some idiots call a fork a spoon, doesn't mean "spoon" no longer actually means "spoon".
aaaand...whee!
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
Oscar Wilde
Water is tougher to drink quickly in large quantities than coffee/soda for somebody who's used to the caffeine. Same with beer for somebody who's used to the alcohol. Caffeine & alcohol are diuretics and tend to move through the system more quickly than water.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You're mostly right there. If a pain-killer is marketed as a 'headache' drug, it's probably got caffeine. Several times over if it's marketed as a 'migraine' drug, as caffeine is an effective vasoconstrictor and combats the vasal dilation that causes most migraines. But if you're just taking aspirin, it's probably just aspirin and possibly a buffer.
I don't usually buy 'Advil' or 'Bayer'. I buy 'ibuprofen' or 'aspirin'. I have little need for a brand name attachment to the drug I'm after. (We do however buy Tylenol - I've never seen a bottle simply labeled "acetaminophen".) It sounds like a peeve of yours and it may be a common mis-speak (I've never knowingly run into it, but it could be). But when somebody tells me they take aspirin, I assume that they're taking aspirin. If they're taking something else, it's usually a "pain-killer" or just "I took something".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Decaffeinated coffees have finally gotten to taste pretty good over the last couple of decades; it's much better than the evil days of powdered Sanka. Rather than cutting off cold-turkey, you can start brewing your coffee with half decaf, and gradually decreasing the amount of real stuff.
I've done cold turkey on occasion - I'd been working on a death-march programming project, and by a couple of days before we had to ship our demo, I'd reached the point that coffee wasn't making me more awake, it was just making me more jittery, so I quit. Bad headaches for two weeks - it was a couple of years before I started caffeine again. Normally if I'm doing too much caffeine I'll cut back gradually.
Unfortunately, I picked up a tea habit a couple of years ago, and decaffeinating tea takes out most of the tea flavor. Herbal teas are fine some of the time, but black tea tastes good and gives me a nicer buzz than coffee because it's a somewhat different mix of alkaloids.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But I can painlessly quit whenever I feel like it. I use a modified binary exponential backoff algorithm. For example, if I'm drinking 1 cup a day:
Backing the dosage off slowly completely avoids headaches. For me. YMMV, but give it a shot. If you usually drink more, you might want to take a few more days (2 days per binary step).
Sometimes its labeled "Non-Aspirin Pain Reliever"
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"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Acetaminophen seems to be a North America thing (it's the United States Adopted Name and is also used in Canada and probably Mexico). It's otherwise known as Paracetamol (the International Nonproprietary Name) in most of the rest of the world.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It's generally not great to get too much water. Your body can't use large quantities of water by itself, it has to be balanced with electrolytes and other stuff to be of any use. Drink too much water, and you start diluting down the electrolytes that keep your muscles working. You're prone to muscle cramps and other annoying things from overhydration.
Because of bottled water going big corporate in the 90s, in the US at least, many people got brainwashed by Coke, Pepsi, and other water distributors that humans need a ridiculous amount of water everyday...pair that up with the way our govt works vis-a-vis lobby groups, and you had the govt endorsing this nonsense. Drink 8 12oz glasses of water everyday! they said. Hook a garden hose supplied with Dasani up to your mouth and don't turn it off until it starts coming out the other end! Yeeeeaaa.
But if you've ever had a bout of continuous vomiting or diarrhea and tried to stay hydrated with just water, you have firsthand experience that that approach only works for a short while. Many people smart enough to try to stay hydrated after getting food poisoning or some other condition with these symptoms show up in ERs saying, But I don't understand—I was drinking tons of water to stay hydrated!, after they're diagnosed with dehydration. And what is the remedy? An IV of saline, not water. What would have kept them out of the ER? Pedialyte or some other oral rehydration solution...even flat 7-Up is better than water.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.