> Coffee? every day is fine

/r/nootropics, common thread is as follows:

OP: "Help, I have bad anxiety every day, what should I take for it?"

re: "Do you drink coffee?"

OP: "Yes, about 4 cups a day."

re: "Stop drinking coffee and come back in a week and tell us how you are doing."

1 week later.

OP: "My anxiety is gone!!"

Caffeine has negative side effects. For some people those side effects are really bad.

Also caffeine messes up sleep cycles. After seeing sleep study results, I won't touch the stuff after 10am or so, if even that late.

Alcohol is even worse in this regard, it will just ruin your sleep cycles at night.

Edit: Let me emphasis this for anyone reading:

YOU WILL NOT GET DEEP SLEEP IF YOU HAVE A NIGHTCAP.

Yes, you will get drowsy, drink enough and you will pass out. The restorative quality of the sleep you get that night will NOT be good. I've seen first hand the sleep study results from this. The effect is so obvious that even the questionable sleep quality results that wrist based wearables give you can easily and consistently show this effect.

Does caffeine have negative side effects, or does caffeine, taken in excess, including in late hours of the day, have negative side effects?

It's an important distinction to make in this discussion, which largely boils down to "off label use", whether we're talking about drinking simply too much coffee or people with developing brains getting too much thc.

> Does caffeine have negative side effects,

Caffeine has negative side effects. It is an addictive psychoactive drug. Its effects are mild, but, to repeat, it is an addictive psychoactive drug.

Even moderate use can cause sever anxiety in some people. L-theanine is a great counter to this. Green tea naturally has L-theanine in it and that is likely why people who drink green tea do not report anxiety (at least in significant numbers) while coffee drinkers do.

FWIW Matcha has even more L-theanine that green tea.

Note: L-theanine binds to glutamate receptors and that can mess with psychotropic medications like mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics.

From personal experience, it caused my medications to stop working.

> Note: L-theanine binds to glutamate receptors and that can mess with psychotropic medications like mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics.

Now that I did not know. Given that l-theanine is a natural constituent of green tea (though I don't know offhand in what amount) I figure there would be more mention of this! A casual search doesn't reveal much, and even examine.com (https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#pharmacol...) doesn't have anything listed. Ugh.

Then again almost no one mentions that 5-HTP can cause horrible things to happen to your heart. :/

Most drugs and drug reactions are still very unexplored

> It is an addictive psychoactive drug

I just quit cold turkey three days ago and suffered through two days of horrible headaches. I don't want to ever get hooked again.

this is rhetorical right?

Just piggy-backing on this comment; a great book about sleep is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The author does seem to fall into the "everything is a nail when all you have is a hammer" trap, but they do know a lot about sleep and the points in the above comment are backed up in the book with solid studies and references.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

All my knowledge comes from reviewing sleep study data we did to train the Microsoft Band on sleep recognition. I'm not an expert by any means, just someone who got slapped in the face with a bunch of data that loudly screamed "THIS IS UNHEALTHY STOP DOING IT."

As a bit of a caution on the book, it's probably worth a look at this article: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Even these aren't universal though. For me, with ADD, my anxiety goes up when I'm not on stimulants, and the thing that destroys my sleep is intensive, creative coding. Alcohol doesn't do much to my sleep.

I think the most universal things everyone should be doing are: get more exercise, and get more sleep.

> Coffee? every day is fine

I wonder how people will look back on coffee hundreds of years from now. "Almost everyone used to constantly drink an addictive stimulant. Shops on every block sold it. People stated that they couldn't function (or even talk) in the morning until they had consumed the stimulant. At work, people needed to take constant stimulant breaks. If someone went a day without it, they often suffered debilitating headaches." It sounds like dystopian science fiction.

(To be clear, I'm not opposed to coffee. It's just one of those things that seems strange if you think about it from a distant perspective.)

It only sounds like a dystopian science fiction if you describe it as such.

Language is really interesting in that way. You can positively or negatively frame literally anything without actually being untruthful.

On the other hand, it's not like coffee houses are a recent invention.

https://livesandlegaciesblog.org/2017/05/24/coffee-a-revolut... https://blog.publicgoods.com/a-brief-history-of-coffee-in-am...

Check on the section on WW2, "An average of 20 pounds of coffee were consumed a year per adult. ... This amount was cut in half to 10 pounds a year, as one pound of coffee was allotted to each person over 15 years old every five weeks."

It's even stranger when you look at how I chug decaff.

I hate what caffeine does to me, but I like the taste of black coffee.