All of these likely got better due to the overall effect of decreased anxiety and not making ADHD worse. I'm not myself when on caffeine. Nikola Tesla quit all caffeine/other stimulants for a reason.

I tried doing this for almost a full year, and while the improved sleep and generally improved mood was fantastic, and even toward the end it was so much harder to get any focused work done.

I'm not sure my overall focus over time is higher with caffeine, but it does allow me to nudge more of it into the useful part of my day. However I'm a fast metaboliser of caffeine, and it doesn't impact my sleep at all, so could be that there's a genetic component to one's experience here.

Going to argue here, this is wildly bad advice. Decaf practically has no caffeine, it has 2-7 mg from what I can tell which is less then chocolate. 2-7mg is like impossible to notice and might aswell be water with how little there is.

My comment was predicated on the belief that we wildly underestimate the negative effects of caffeine, as well as its activities at lower doses.

I'd add that my ability to sleep naturally was negatively affected as side effect of medication. I tried a various combos to induce sleep and found the best solution to just be... exercise.

No caffeine, exercise, sleep lead to a significantly reduced anxiety and more.

I gave it maybe 2-3 months and decided it's not worth it.

Tempted to give it another shot!

Can you describe what else you tried? Other supplements? Any other non-food/supplement techniques like journaling, breathing, etc.? Any therapy and other similar human interventions?

After all those - is it / was it still the case that cutting caffeine drove the best outcome?

Things like journaling / breathing / etc calm the nervous system while caffeine stimulates it. I would say caffeine is counterproductive to those practices.

I briefly quit caffeine once but it as well before any realization of anxiety. So, hard to extrapolate forward from that experience.

What feels different to me (compared to you) is this: sometimes I'll drink 2 cups of coffee in the morning and be awake but useless. Sometimes totally productive. Caffeine in some form is there - recently sometimes substituting coffee for a Celsius.

[1]: https://www.nespresso.com/us/en/order/capsules/original/arpe...

Those are two different things. Cutting out caffeine can help with anxiety but not ADHD. It's the opposite for ADHD, stimulates help significantly.

Also there’s a growing trend of diagnosing every focus problem as ADHD when many patients might have focus problems secondary to another condition like anxiety. It’s sadly all too common to find someone who believes they have ADHD due to TikTok self diagnosis or even a lazy doctor’s diagnosis but their core problem is actually anxiety. For these people, stimulants of any kind can actually worsen focus even if then provide a short term perception of helping due to the energy boost.

I’m quite sensitive to caffeine, yet I can drink green tea all day without noticing much effect, while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable. I can also drink tea before going to sleep without any problems.

You can absolutely get high doses of caffeine from tea if you really want to. It comes down to the type of tea, how much is used, and how strong it’s brewed.

There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine. It comes down to the content of the leaves, quantity, and extraction into water.

> while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable

Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI. Even light coffee drinkers can be caught off guard by how much caffeine is in a typical off the shelf caffeine pill.

There's definitely something special, just poorly studied: typical "how much caffeine is in X?" tables show tea having caffeine levels similar to coffee, but I never feel the same effects.

> Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI.

I use 200 mg tablets split into quarters for doses of 50–100 mg. Yet, they produce a much milder curve than coffee (which I no longer drink) and, as a side effect, cause no gastrointestinal side effects!

I have never seen a caffeine comparison table that shows tea and coffee at the same level.

It’s common knowledge that typical coffee brews are in the range of 2-5X higher in caffeine content than typical tea brews.

Tea is widely used as a lower caffeine alternative to coffee.

Im on week 3 of no coffee now, I will maybe give it a month or two more to make a judgement call if I want to continue with coffee or not.

It is unfortunate as I really enjoy coffee, but it causes some issues for me with anxiety and stomach problems.