Of course, don't go cold turkey, that's just stupid. You're taking a vasoconstrictor (something that makes blood vessels narrower), which results in a widening of the blood vessels as a compensation. If the vasoconstriction disappears suddenly then your vessels become too wide suddenly (this is what causes the headaches as far as I understand it). If you ease off slowly the compensation will also reduce slowly.

Last year I was getting really run down and lethargic over the course of a couple months. At one point I tried going for a jog, but couldn't go more than 20-30 seconds without having to walk. I was naturally drinking a lot of coffee to try and compensate for the apparent lack of energy. I was also experiencing anxiety bordering on feelings of panic, and for a while I thought it could have been caused by too much coffee. I tried taking a break for a week, but it didn't help. At one point I even tried to play a level of Tomb Raider and had to stop after 10 minutes because it made me feel anxious and panicked like I was going to pass out.

It turned out that my heart rate had progressively slowed down over a couple months, dropping as low as 21 beats per minute. I was acclimated to it at rest, but my heart wouldn't beat faster regardless of activity level. I had to get a pacemaker that instantly jumped my rate up to 110 bpm. My blood pressure also shot up to something like 160/110. I had the worst "caffeine" headache I can remember from that. It was a long few days until everything balanced out.

I cherish my morning ritual pour-over or aero-press.

21, wow...

Lol, yeah. I realized something was wrong when my resting heart rate was in the low 50s, but the cardiologist I talked to wasn't too concerned about it being an emergency, so just scheduled an echocardiogram and a treadmill test. When I went into the hospital for that, I was at 34bpm, but the echocardiogram technician kept a straight face and said, "all I do is take the pictures". When I went to the next room for the treadmill test, I gave the nurse practitioner a warning that I would most certainly black out after 20 seconds. She hooked me up to a 12-lead ECG, looked at the waveforms, then stepped out of the room nervously. She came back and said they were sending me to the ER on a stretcher! Being capable of walking, I negotiated down to a wheelchair. While I waited in the triage area with a portable ECG monitor on my lap, as various paramedics came in and out they glanced down at the display, got excited in disbelief about how I was upright and smiling rather than unconscious, then asked if they could glance through my chart for the learning experience.

21 bpm was measured while I was bundled up like a burrito in a microwave for a cardiac MRI. The machine has to synchronize to your pulse to only collect data between beats. Since my rate was so low, each scan pass took about 4x longer than usual, while having to hold my breath. That was a very long hour of my life.

For a while it was a bit of a Dr. House episode, between the root cause being unknown, and the pacemaker having a reliability issue that needed debugging. I estimate about a dozen cardiologists poked and prodded me. They even had a "conference" with something like 30 people, and it being a teaching hospital, they also did a case study.

I'm doing a lot better now, thanks to smart doctors and the marvels of modern medical technology.

I don't understand why people have to go cold turkey. That's brutal. When I need to wean off caffeine, I keep Excedrin handy. Yes, it has caffeine. That's the point. I take it when the headache cranks up, it knocks it down, I don't take it again until the next headache. I never get a truly bad headache that way, and it only takes a few days to be completely weaned.

I tapered off of energy drinks at the beginning of the pandemic (I didn't want to be dependent on them, just in case). I simply drank 1 fluid ounce (about 28g by weight) less per day until it was 0. I'm sure I could have cut down faster, but I didn't need to and it was easy enough that way.

Speaking of Excedrin, I chatted with a doctor online once, and he said he knew of people who were addicted to Excedrin and it was dangerous (presumably because of the acetaminophen, which can kill you if overdone) and people should throw it away. I can see his point since that medicine combines an addictive drug (caffeine) with a dangerous one. Probably a fringe opinion, but thought that was interesting.

That is interesting, I've never heard of anyone becoming addicted to it. It is hands-down the most effective headache pill for me (even though I have been completely off caffeine for years now). I would hate it if they outlawed it; though reconstructing an equivalent would be pretty straightforward.

I feel like people are slowly waking up to how insane our collective addiction to (and glorification of) caffeine actually is.

I feel that addictions are only a problem if they are a problem. As far as we can tell, non-crazy-quantity coffee drinking isn't bad for you, might be helpful for some things, and tastes delicious.

The only downside is that I have to be slightly prepared if I am not going to be able to easily consume my regular doses of caffeine. And if I want to cut/stop, it takes about a week or so to do so comfortably.

As for the glorification, I think it's really a glorification of workaholics, and 'needing coffee to get through yet another pile of TPS Reports' is more a badge of honor than anything else.

I think that many addictions can be ok, so long as you understand how much power they have over you and keep a wary eye on them.

An addiction can work well in some environment but completely destroy you if your environment changes.

Also, I'm not convinced that caffeine addiction is completely overcome in the week or so it takes for the physical withdrawal. Even for myself when I decide to go through long periods of decaffeination, I find that my energy and motivation is significantly deteriorated from when I regularly caffeinate. Sometimes I wonder if my regular use as a college student permanently altered my brain chemistry. On the flip side, maybe this use set me up for the early career success that I might not otherwise have achieved.

Another option is that you have one of a handful of atypical neurologies for which caffeine is a form of self-medication.

Again, the problem is availability, and we've decided in this country (and most countries) that caffeine should be widely available. So it's not a significant problem, and is easy if slightly time-consuming if you need to update your context.

It's probably worth tying this discussion into applications to e.g. the war on drugs, but the language there tends to be so hyped up that it's too hard to have a good discussion about it.

Caffeine is a drug that generally increases energy and motivation so it makes sense that those levels wouldn’t be as high without consuming it.

Isn't that the primary difference between an addiction and a dependency? Something can be done/used regularly that would be considered a dependency (e.g., coffee), but only elevates to addiction-level severity when said behaviour becomes problematic.

Yes. E.g. https://www.hss.edu/conditions_understanding-addiction-versu...

Which makes you wonder how much drug use would be merely 'dependence' if we had free and easy access. I suspect it is a drug-by-drug case, depending on length of trip, relative incapacitation, physical dependencies (/withdrawal), rate of tolerance increase, etc.

I'm addicted to coffee, but I am never gonna stop drinking coffee.

Coffee is just too delicious, especially a well-made cappuccino. I think coffee as a guilty pleasure is not that bad to be honest. There are worse things to be addicted to.

The best way to enjoy a good cup of coffee, for me, is staying at a nice sea view condo.

And then early in the morning sit outside on the balcony, slowly sipping, enjoying the taste of coffee in my mouth, listening to the waves crashing on the beach, feeling the sun on my skin all while looking at the sea.

For me, there's no better way to start a day.

I drink a lot of coffee. 8 to 15 cups a day. I always have. I have an insane caffeine tolerance.

One day (I was about 20 at the time) I wondered "am I addicted"? So as an experiment I quite cold turkey. I didn't drink any coffee or tea for a week. I didn't get any headaches, and I didn't feel any kind of withdrawal syndrome. Yes on the first day I really felt like some coffee in the morning, but after not drinking it my body just accepted it. And I went on with my day.

After about a week of literally no changes, I concluded that I cannot be addicted. I went back to drinking coffee at the same rate and never stopped. It doesn't provide me much benefit (like concentration or energy) due to my very high tolerance. But I just really like coffee so I'm going to carry on drinking it.

I wonder if I am a weird exception, or if there are many others like me. We really like coffee but we are not actually addicted to it.

I suppose the same could be said about alcohol. Some people react very differently towards it and get easily addicted, while others don't even though they drink a lot and just do it for enjoyments sake.

At least with cigarettes, it takes 2 - 4 years to really cement your addiction.

Plenty of younger people (well I guess it's with juuls now) tell themselves they can quit whenever they want, and take break during a week of family vacation. No problem, so they keep on smoking.

5 years later when they try to quit they realize that maybe they weren't as bulletproof as they thought. I know for sure it happened to me.

Of course caffeine could be totally different addiction wise, and thankfully not nearly as deadly, but just some food for thought.

I had already been drinking coffee for at least 6 years by that time.

But I was actually thinking of trying it again for a longer period of time (~ 6 months) and seeing what happens.

Replace caffeine with the name of many other drugs and in this thread you'd hardly notice a difference.

Caffeine is a highly socially acceptable drug. Doesn't mean it's all that different from them.

Yeah, debilitating headache is a classic caffeine withdrawal symptom. Nevertheless it's a walk in the park compared to getting off from other legal drugs like SSRIs, alcohol or benzos ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Benzodiazepines are such cursed drugs. Their withdrawal symptoms can be so severe, I don't understand why they would be used for anything other than a last resort.

People clear caffeine at different rates, which has some impact on quitting stories.

I drink like 50 fluid ounces of strong black coffee a day and don't really have a problem on days I drink a lot less. One thing I do is avoid consuming significant amounts of caffeine after noon. That way it's a normal thing for my body to have cleared most of the caffeine.

Do you drink the 3 cups throughout the day?

I had a similar experience. 3 drinks of coffee is what I and my family can go through in a meal, let alone a day. A typical day for me was easily 8 cups of _strong_ coffee, morning to night, daily. But I also quit coffee cold turkey when I got tired of how much time I was spending on coffee (brewing, cleaning, drinking, etc). No issues besides a slight headache for a day.

Yeah I normally drink two in the morning and one in the afternoon