...then a few months later I decide to start again. Oh well. I've done the above about half a dozen times. It's fairly easy to defeat the chemical addiction which I experience as you describe (really awful headaches, fatigue, lack of concentration, etc), but eventually I'll pick it back up to get a little extra edge.
Point is, weighing beans and using the aeropress helps me keep my dosage consistent so I don't go overboard.
I did this because I was getting withdrawal headaches most mornings, which is an unpleasant way to begin the day- I wasn't even drinking that much caffeine!
All these fake coffees (I’m looking at you, chicory root) taste like ash-trays from the grimiest bar in town.
I didn't have a coffee maker at home at that time. So I started getting headaches on Sunday. I made the connection eventually, after my headache completely disappeared 20 minutes after drinking a cup of coffee with a friend.
This appears to be a pretty common scenario.
Just be careful not to double dose when taking the pills.
While I'm not aware of efficacy studies of different methods of quitting caffeine, cold turkey seems most effective for nicotine and a few other stimulants.
I wouldn't frame starting up again as a failure. Quitting short vs. long term are two different things.
I just tapered over the last two weeks, easier as an iced tea drinker. I measured what I drank one day in grams and then had 10% less the next day, decreasing by the same mass for the next 10 days. No side effects at all and it's there if I want to go back.
I have found the only thing with me is not drinking coffee after about 3pm. It can make sleeping harder.
It is surprising, but from my experience, there are some people that actually don’t realize it’s addictive.
If caffeine was illegal you and I wouldn't have acquired such addiction, so there is a very big + to prohibition; it will prevent future generations to fall into the same trap.
I was happily addicted to it for years and other than a couple withdrawal headaches when my routine got disrupted* the only ill effects was occasional morning crankiness.
I expect I'll become addicted again at some point in the future. Probably in the winter with a nice hot mug on a snowy morning. I'm looking forward to it.
I can't imagine any state or religion banning caffeine. It's the safest, most wonderful drug there is.
*Any restaurant or convenience store could fix my headache for me.
Coffee and tea have been banned for practicing Mormons for a long time. Caffeinated soda was kind of an "extra credit" ban for decades until the church more recently started pulling back on that.
https://www.npr.org/2016/01/03/461843938/can-mormons-drink-c...
It's not even that. It's just blocking the receptors that tell your brain that it's tired.
You are still exactly as tired as you were, you just don't feel it.
It's marginally less dumb than nicotine when ingested routinely.
For anything where you'd be concerned if an idiot was trying to do it, caffeine is not a great idea.
> Caffeine is a stimulant, which means it increases activity in your brain and nervous system. It also increases the circulation of chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline in the body.
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/caf...
I'm pretty caffeine sensitive and I get a crazy buzz from just one cup of coffee. It's not just not feeling tired, I literally get high.
That being said it's a very socially acceptable addiction, and the withdrawal symptoms are non-dangerous (and unless you drink a lot of coffee daily, mild), so people may not feel it's an "addiction" in the same way they think of e.g. heroin, alcohol, etc.
I agree it shouldn't be illegal, and that mildly addictive substances with safe withdrawal symptoms should be legal (i.e. not opiates, but marijuana, coffee, etc). Alcohol is a weird one! It's obviously horrible for you, addictive if you drink it enough, and the withdrawal symptoms are lethal, but our societies have socialized it enough that few enough people become alcoholics — and enough people want it — that bans are worse than allowing it legally, because the downsides of prohibition are a strong black market + gang/mob activities, whereas the downsides of legal alcohol are less widespread in their badness.
This hypothetical is not in evidence.
You don't get an addiction to a substance that has never been near your body.
Making a product legal increases its availability, affordability and reach. So, the number of people exposed.
Really, a prohibition argument made with a straight face?
North American governments famously failed to maintain a ban on alcohol. How well do you think they'd fare with trying to ban sales of caffeine, given it's reach is greater (and far more socially-accepted) than alcohol?
Don't forget the vast selection of caffeinated pop/soda, energy drinks, etc. You're talking about a wide ban here, as this is one of the world's favourite drugs, covering a very popular array of beverages. If you're daft enough to propose it, I suspect you'd be laughed out of the halls of legislatures.
Regulation of caffeine levels in energy drinks and pop is probably an easier sell, and some jurisdictions already do this.
Despite this, the fact that the substance is illegal or controlled, made that less people have been exposed (and eventually addicted) than if the substance was freely circulating.
Singapore was well known to have a strong opium problem. Now they have death penalty, no opium problem anymore.
Clear example: If cannabis cakes (space cakes) were legal, I'd consume them but they are not, and I do not trust + do not want to fund dealers. So I don't buy them.
Another example: Alcohol is forbidden to 12 year old kids. Yes, some of them may find a workaround, and a way to buy it, but because of that you are still helping a large segment of the kids to not get early into addiction.
If tomorrow you say to the kids that they can drink wine (in French schools it was possible before for kids!), then they are more likely to get addicted.
Yes, there is still a small % that will get exposed, no solution covers 100% of the population, but if you can save 6 out of 10 addictions by regulating the substance, then you are doing a good job.
> Now they have death penalty, no opium problem anymore.
Hardly a policy that I think makes sense in the US.
We could solve 6/10 instances of obesity by a strict governmental intervention into diets. I don't think that would be "doing a good job", even if the health outcomes would be improved.
We could eliminate tons of cancers by banning both tobacco and alcohol. I don't think we should (as a non-user, I hate everything about tobacco; I could easily reduce my ~20 drinks/year to 0).
We could eliminate a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and heart disease by banning the farming, sale, and consumption of animals. I don't think we should.
And I mean, if you have to use Singapore as some shining example of your vision of the world, you're pretty far into crazy land already. There is no way to meaningfully enforce drug legislation without violating human rights en masse. History has proven this again and again.
Chronic pain is a strong predictor of opioid addiction, but the opioid crisis is mainly caused by wild overprescription of and over-reliance on these drugs in the medical industry. This is also why it's so specific to the US. This is a question of regulation, not legality.
Gambling addiction is not something I'm willing to comment on, because I've not studied it nearly as much as I have drug addiction. But I can see the same points applying there; regulation is also an important topic, not just legal status.
My country has a state monopoly on gambling. It's not perfect, but it's not terrible either, and I could easily see a completely hands off approach being much worse.
This is true, but this argument can be made for anything with downsides.
If cars hadn't been made legal, maybe commutes wouldn't be so bad. If TV hadn't been made legal, maybe people would get out and get more exercise. If the internet hadn't been made legal, maybe fraud would be less widespread.
But at the same time there's valid debate over whether that should be classified as an addiction rather than a mere normal dependence. Because for most people, it's relatively simple to taper down their caffeine intake by e.g. 10% per day and end it after a month and they're fine. They don't find that psychologically difficult, they don't need to go to rehab, they're just slightly tired and maybe intermittent slight headaches during the process. That's all -- which is why it's generally much better than cold turkey.
Addiction is often associated with something that normal willpower has no control over, that adversely affects your life. That's not generally the case for caffeine. Everyone I know who has wanted to stop drinking coffee has managed it when they decided to. Which is not the case with things widely understood to be addictive in some people, e.g. alcohol, tobbacco, heroin.
So there's an important distinction here that I don't think we want to erase. Dependency != addiction.
The main cause of headaches in caffeine withdrawal is believed to be the fact that caffeine affects the blood vessels in your brain, and that cutting out caffeine therefore changes blood flow, and your body takes a few days to readjust to that.
Water is irrelevant here. Which is easily demonstrated by the fact that caffeine withdrawal is the same whether you've been drinking large, hydrating American-style coffees, or tiny Italian espressos, or been taking caffeine pills without water at all.
https://hubermanlab.com/using-caffeine-to-optimize-mental-an...
A few takeaways:
* stopping caffeine ingestion 8-12 hours before you plan to sleep is beneficial to your sleep. Even for people who can drink coffee late in the day and still go to sleep.
* delaying the first dose 90 minutes after waking up can help mitigate the “afternoon slump” many people experience.
Interesting, I also have the same symptoms as you, including insomnia even if I limit coffee to early AM. I think these effects are characteristic of "slow caffeine metabolizers," e.g. people for whom caffeine has an unusually long half life. My hypothesis is that for these people blood caffeine levels stay relatively high 24/7, so the body never gets to adapt to functioning without it, making addiction more likely.
It's weird to me that people seem adverse to the idea that peoples bodies and genetics vary, and one persons experience isn't going to be the same as another.