Slashdot Mirror
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?
Nothing beats the feeling of the first cup of hot coffee hitting the tummy early in a cold workday.
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.
Seriously dude, slow down. My wife used to drink about four Starbucks espresso drinks a day, and she noticed she was visibly trembling. Her doctors told her her heartbeat was erratic and racing, so she cut down to one or two coffee drinks a day. She's much more normal now.
The "geek chic" lifestyle, massive amounts of caffiene and Red Bulls, pulling all nighters to punch out code, scarfing down whole pizzas and gaming until all hours, it's not really good for you. Moderate. Get some exercise. Take multivitamins and get a good nights sleep. You can actually be as productive with healthy living and one cup of coffee as you are in stimulant and sugar overload, and you won't be burning the candle at both ends.
Plus, you really won't have to worry about withdrawal when you're stuck on an island with no WiFi, no coffee, but plenty of hot native girls.
I once visited a friend for a week and they didn't have any coffee. I wasn't too bothered at first as there was plenty of booze but I woke up after two days with a slight hangover (not that much booze the night before) and a pounding migraine. I had no energy and double vision, the migraine got so bad I was sick.
I thought a coffee would help me feel a little better so I dragged myself to the store round the corner and bought some. As soon as I'd drunk a small cup of coffee my migraine started to disappear and I could see straight again.
I was on around ten triple strength cups a day which would be about three grammes of caffeine. I've since cut down to three cups a day!
Nick
I used to consume a couple liters of caffeinated beverages daily. 4 or 5 years ago my wife and I decided to switch completely to bottled water. There weren't really any health reasons to our decision - we just wanted to try it. I remember having headaches for a few days, and feeling lethargic, but the withdrawal wasn't too bad.
We still primarily drink bottled water, but when eating out I'll drink a tea or soft drink. The nice thing is that if I have extra work to do, or am driving on a long trip, I can drink a bottle of pop and it actually is a stimulant for me, as opposed to something my body relies on just to maintain the status quo.
Better known as 318230.
I broke my caffeine addiction by plowing into it headfirst. I used to tear through soda like a man insane. Then, completely unintentionally, I went cold turkey for about a month. Result: increased sensitivity to caffeine. I now naturally limit myself to around two cans a day because anymore than that gives me jitters, a racing pulse, and headaches.
I can quit whenever I want!!!!
I stopped drinking caffeine in high school when the perma-shakes set in. I was having somewhere near the equivalent of 30-40 cups over the course of a 19-20 hour day and getting about 4 hours of sleep in order to keep full time school, full time job, and a very active social life all going.
The shakes quit after about 3 days. The headache after about 2 weeks. And somewhere about 2 years later I no longer felt permanently exhausted.
The nice thing now is that I find I can stay awake as long as I need to as long as I don't have high-sugar foods or have any alcohol. I just catch up the next day with little or no problem. I can't imagine going back to caffeine. As a computer-geek, I think it would be hard to do it just in moderation. Everyone else around me has the perpetual can of Coke next to their mouse.
If caffine is a drug, my office is the largest opium den this side of the mississippi...
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
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".
I too have experienced caffeine withdrawal many times. My internist recommended that when I choose not to ingest caffeine anymore, I should start taking 2000 mg of vitamin c daily for about seven days. I have subsequently done this everytime I decide to take a hiatus from caffeine and it has worked wonders - no headaches and no nausea!
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I must be one of the few that just doesn't touch the stuff. I don't even generally like the smell. Never drank it -- coffee that is. And I only drink soda for lack of better fruit juice.
I believe half of /. needs to check themselves into a clinic.
Drugs are bad, m-kay?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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)
During most of the year I have 18-24oz of coffee every morning, and sometimes another 6-8oz or a caffeinated soda/energy drink after lunch. So about 3-6 "cups" a day.
But during Lent I go cold turkey. Just stop on Ash Wednesday. (I give up alcohol at the same time, FWIW.)
The only side effect I ever experience is becoming a zombie from 1p-3p every day for the second week I'm off the stuff. The first week I'm fine. The second week I'm a zombie and completely unproductive for two hours in the afternoon. Weeks three to six I'm fine, though I start earnestly looking forward to resuming my morning ritual by week six. My sleep patterns don't change. My personality doesn't change. I don't experience physical pain.
I really recommend everyone try this. Give up something you love for six weeks. Detach. When you get back together your relationship will be healthier. You will have a new appreciation for what you gave up.
Of course, this requires sacrifice and introspection. Good luck with that, seriously.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Seriously why would anyone choose to quit? I periodically quit just to feel the pain of it but that is just self flagellation.
I had to.
A hand tremor as a surgeon is _not_ what your patients want to see. As an aside, to break the ice with some patients I do a variation of the Gene Wilder's deputy on "Blazing Saddles"....
Pt: So how steady are your hands?
[I hold up a steady left hand]
Pt: Good, steady as a rock!
[While bringing up a flapping right hand and with a southern draw]
Me: Yeah, but this here is ma' operatin' hand.
Usually get a good chuckle from my patients, but every once in a while I get a wild-eyed-jaw-dropping-looking-for-the-nearest-fire-exit look that totally makes the joke worth it.
I used to be addicted to the high, but I couldn't stand the lows - migraine-like headache for hours (sensitivity to light, sound, etc.). I tried taking more caffeine to keep the lows away, but that ended the same - once I crashed, I got a migraine-like headache that wouldn't go away until I got a good-nights sleep. The worst part was, I would crash DURING THE WORKDAY, so my work performance was actually suffering.
Once I understood that the migraines were from withdrawal, I decided to quit cold-turkey - nothing but aspirin and lots of water. I took a long weekend over July 4th: the first day was pure anguish and pain, and the second day was worse. But the third day, I could function, and I was feeling pretty good by the fourth day when I went back to work.
After a week, I felt better than I had for years, and I was surprised to find I didn't have the cravings anymore. I also had more get-up-and-go in the mornings than I ever did on caffeine. And YES, I could code just as well without the boost.
If you've got even an ounce of willpower, you can quit too, but I would recommend taking a long weekend away from the world.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Already exists. It's used in pediatrics for bradycardia (slow heart rate). http://www.drugs.com/ppa/caffeine.html
Luckily most serious caffeine addicts just sit in front of their computers 24/7 and have no muscle definition what-so-ever to worry about.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
You'll be a lot better off and your body will appreciate it.
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.
You stay away from the tub of happiness!
Isn't it interesting caffeine is legal despite the fact it is more addictive and causes more health problems than marijuana. So then why is marijuana illegal yet caffeine is still legal? Gotta love the double standards.
Caffeine should be regulated because your a weak willed moron? Piss off.
I think we should ban soda too... because that's bad for you as well, and it would solve your delima. Actually, lets just ban fast food, because that's bad for you too.
Grow up and take responsiblity for yourself, and don't tell others what they should be doing with their kids.
I am an anesthesiologist. I regularly see people who drink 6 cups a day and have to go without food or water before surgery.
Intravenous caffeine is available as a drug and I will give it to patients in a dose of 250-500 mg. to prevent bad withdrawl headaches.
If a heavy coffee drinker has his last coffee at 8pm and goes without until he wakes from surgery 18 hours later he will probably have a withdrawl headache.
Interestingly, IV caffeine is also used to lower the seizure threshold in electroconvulsive therapy for depression. It promotes a longer seizure.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Tylenol is rougher on the liver than Ibuprofen. This is important because of all the alcohol users here.
Like everything else cut back slowly. Instead of 8 go 6 for a week, and then push lower and lower, eventually you'll be down to 1-2 cups and home free. I went from drinking all kinds of pop(coke,pepsi) by downgrading to mineral water (yes it sucks) and then abandoning that for actual water. glad I got of that stuff.
did you forget to take your meds?
There is the concept of "maintenance dose" in addiction. I find that just one soda, small cup of coffee / Nescafe, or one No-Doz are enough to forestall the headaches. One or two days of this "maintenence dose" and I can go cold turkey.
Really, cut down on the sodas. The coffee is fine, but as soon as I started working at a place without free sodas, I lost ten pounds and my blood sugar went down 20 points.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I used to have a caffeine addiction from drinking lots of Coke for many years. I got over it by having a cold. For 3-4 days I couldn't stand the taste of Coke, so didn't drink any. And, already being ill, the withdrawal symptoms didn't bother me. By the time I got over the cold, I didn't need caffeine any more. Simples!
Doesn't work. I'm addicted to code.
What's worse is if I've been doing math. That gives me really horrible dreams of numbers trying to combine and interact in different ways. I always dream as if I can find some new better way they should work but of course I never can get a better result. Ick. At least with the code my brain actually can find better patterns while I sleep.
What's weird is when you code without fully waking up. You can accomplish some amazing things but trying to understand the code you've written is all but impossible sometimes. When I was working more with AI I'd come up with some pretty good mental leaps and have no memory of having woke in the night much less having coded anything and trying to untangle the code to see how it worked was a total no-go because it just didn't seem like it should work at all.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
Assuming people don't know what they're taking shows you as a noob. Yes, there are pain remedies out there other than aspirin (ASA for you non-US folks), and some of them like Excedrin contain caffeine. But many of us grew up with old-fashioned aspirin, and when we want it we buy bottles that say "Aspirin" on them; if we mean Acetaminophen we'd probably say Tylenol. It's particularly important to people who have high blood pressure because aspirin helps reduce risk of strokes and heart attacks (and low-dose aspirin is generally recommended for old people even if they don't have high blood pressure, so get off my lawn, punk!) On the other hand, hospitals primarily use acetaminophen (aka paracetamol) because many people have aspirin allergies or stomach irritations, so the risks of aspirin are usually higher than the risks of liver and kidney damage from acetaminophen.
Aspirin developed by Bayer in Germany, and after the War To End All Wars, the US, France, Russia, and a few other countries ripped off their patents and trademarks as part of war reparations, so Aspirin and Heroin are not trademarks of Bayer in the US. Bayer's still the best-known brand here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Before my friends and I aged, with most getting married and having a kid or two by now, we use to LAN about once a month. At first we'd have a few cases of Mt. Dew in order to stay up all night... but I'd start getting headaches around 3 or 4am which I usually attributed to being tired.
Then once I decided to just drink water all night. I was able to game til 7am and still feel pretty good. While I have no actual evidence, I think my headaches and drowsiness were caused more by becoming dehydrated than by being tired. What I learned that is I should go with water first if I'm feeling fatigued. I still enjoy a coke once or twice a week, along with a couple cups a tea once or twice a week.. but drinking 80-100oz of water a day normally keeps me feeling good and alert.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
By that logic, why do we have laws against cocaine and heroin?
Good question.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I had to give up caffeine. Long story short, I fell while working on a roof and hit my chest hard on a pile of bricks. Most likely damaged my pericardium.
While it healed up, anything that made my heart beat harder made the pain worse. So that meant caffeine - all of it - had to go.
Week long headache. A whopper too, right in the temples. Miserable. But once it's gone, it's gone for good. You can beat it if you have to.
Some advice if you're willing to try. Avoid Excederin. It's a caffeine pill mostly - that's why it cures headaches. It gives you another fix and postpones the withdraw another 8-12 hours. Then you need another one. Avoid chocolate. Read labels. And avoid yerba mate - it has caffeine. If you're going to do it, the only way to do it is cold turkey, 100%. Even the slightest sprinkle of caffeine will halt ALL your progress and you'll have to start from scratch again. And that means another week's worth of headaches.
Anyways, after I healed up I never went back. I am a decaffeinated programmer. Rarest of the rare. It feels great, too. No nervousness, no sweats, my nails look great. And I sleep better than I ever have. That's one of the reasons computer types stay up late - they have to come down off the caffeine before they can sleep.
Once it's out of your life and you have that reference to make a comparison from, you realize just how big of a drug caffeine actually is. It's messing with you more than you probably think it is.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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).
You want to come to the East End of London, me old china, and I'll show you tea that isn't weak! Proper builders brews.
I'm telling you, you could stand a spoon in some of the brews you get down the proper caffs. Proper traditional places with a big tea pot always on the go, they pour you a couple of inches from that into a mug and then top up the other 2/3 of the mug with hot water. I swear the tea in those big tea pots is some sort of nuclear brew that's been stewing in there since the days the Cutty Sark used to sail up the Thames, they just top it up with a couple more spoonfuls of leaf tea every Christmas and it gets heavier and heavier and more and more evil.
My first job was in a hospital with a couple of retired Navy guys, they'd been through the war, I was the youngest so I was "the boy" and any time we had a problem I was sent to make a pot of tea so we could stand there with our mugs and suck our teeth and sip our tea and work out how to get the box through the door or whatever. Taught me how to make proper strong brews those lads did.
I think your green tea is the happy asian gentle stuff*, nothing wrong with it but not for yer average British builder, you know... you'd get laughed off a site if you tried bringing that along...
cheers though! Nothing like a lovely cup of tea eh? (or 10 or so).
*no disrespect to asian builders, I bet if you're on a building site in Singapore or Tokyo or wherever the lads there can probably brew green tea to some frightening level of intensity too...
I notice that when I hear the word, "Addicted", I feel a slight subterranean urge to start acting.
--That is, to put myself through the drama of addiction. The cravings and the various difficulties. I wonder how much of this is really based on chemical addiction and how much of it is based on behavioral programming.
Coffee and tobacco are interesting. I've played with both. I wanted to try tobacco for a number of reasons and it was pretty cool. "Quitting Smoking" is this buggaboo of a thing in our society, so after I'd been smoking this pipe for several months, (and really quite enjoying it), I said, "Okay. Let's see what this Quitting Smoking thing is all about."
I was a little disappointed. Quitting smoking is pretty easy. It takes seven days for the chemical addiction to be overcome. After that it's entirely a question of behavior and brain chemistry. (Some people are naturally attracted to tobacco because it balances out their neural chemistry. There's a reason why cigarettes are so popular among those with various imbalances. It's self-medication and it helps. A lot. --For these people, I imagine that "Quitting Smoking" is probably much more challenging.)
It's basically like having a mild flu. It gets worse and worse until withdrawal symptoms peek somewhere between day 3 or 4, and then it smooths out. After 7 days are up, you're pretty much in the clear. The difficult part is this: Imagine having the flu, not the worst you've ever had, but pretty uncomfortable. Normally, you'd just tough it out because you have no choice. But with nicotine, you can make the symptoms vanish instantly. Hmmm! --The other part I found really entertaining was seeing the kinds of tricks my rational mind tried to play. As the symptoms progress, your mind will concoct all kinds of logical-seeming arguments for just smoking one more time. Coffee doesn't do that. --Coffee addiction is child's play. Two days, one head-ache, no real cravings to speak of, and you're back to normal. Big deal.
So overall, the whole notion of "Addiction" seems much overblown from my perspective. (Drugs are different for different people; you can't choose your base brain chemistry defaults, --not like behavior programming, which with enough work can be altered.) --Addiction is just a bodily reaction to a substance which you can measure and take into account. Knowing that quitting is just a process with a recognizable cost, I have no fear of using coffee when appropriate, and if I ever go through a period of extreme, prolonged stress, I'd certainly consider using tobacco again. It's really a pretty amazing drug, --though it does make you smell funny and if you smoke the crappy kind, it screws up your breathing. (That was another thing I wanted to learn about. All arguments of toxic additives in big tobacco products aside, the paper in cigarettes is soaked in a weak bath of salt-peter or something akin to it. Take all the tobacco out of a cigarette and light the paper and watch what happens. It's almost like slow-motion magician's flash paper. I found that cigarettes made me cough up fleghm, but that pipe tobacco, organically grown did not. Hmm.)
My current 'addictions' include Coffee and downloads of sci-fi TV. But with no current Doctor Who and Dollhouse heading for the axe, I guess that issue will resolve itself.
-FL