And decaf is not caffeine-free. Decaf coffee still contains about 5-10% of the original caffeine content compared to the same beans but not decaffeinated.
And then there’s the tiny sample size :( and no control group. This is worse than useless. This is the kind of waste that news stations will pick and advertise.
The process was mostly without discomfort: I bought decaf beans and started cutting my coffee grounds with 50% decaf. After two weeks, 75% decaf. Then 87.5%, etc. About two months later I stopped experiencing withdrawals if I don't drink any coffee at all.
Before I started cutting I would get massive headaches and become irritable if I don't drink coffee in the morning. Now I'm free!
I encourage all heavy coffee drinkers try drinking less. At some point, it stops improving your cognitive functions but instead just maintains a mediocre baseline, which I suppose is the same as almost all substance reliance.
> In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jul/06/caffeine-coffee...
If so the difference when you are not drinking coffee might be more disorganisation/inattentiveness/impulsivity etc. rather than being less stimulated.
I have learned that I can have four Aeropress brews per day (about 12.5g coffee per cup) and it makes me calmer, more focussed and more able to be organised. I would notice discomfort and jitters at maybe six in a day. But I can fall asleep an hour after drinking one; it has little effect on my sleep and it may even make it a little easier for me to initially fall asleep.
And then I can have nothing the next day and be fine; I only notice withdrawal on day three maybe.
The reason is, it seems, I have otherwise very unmanaged "inattentive" ADHD. (Which is a stupid name for it; I don't have the slightest problem paying attention to things that capture my interest)
I was like you in my 20s, I could drink a lot of caffeine without any effects at all. I was diagnosed with ADHD around 28. At the time my doctor told me that my high caffeine intake was maybe an unconscious way of trying to wrangle with my ADHD, because the treatment for that is stimulants.
Once I started my meds, even a low dose, I basically didn't want coffee anymore. It made a huge difference in my life
Not trying to diagnose you with anything, I just always like to tell heavy coffee drinkers my story in case it might help them if they're feeling like something is off
It goes undiagnosed because we aren't hyperactive problem kids in classrooms, and if we're lucky enough to be interested in the subjects we can excel in school
If you're anything like me you've been called lazy a lot in your life when really you're just too bored by stuff to engage with it?
I tended not to get "lazy" too much because I guess I found a way to be interested (my father was good at pointing me to the fascinating bits of homework etc.). Though looking at my school reports in retrospect it is clear that I did much worse at things I did not care about, and if I think about times I was shouted at for doing a poor job, disinterest was why.
I do, however, fall down intellectual rabbit holes a lot because I need to be interested to get stuff done.
I am now in my fifties and the biggest problem is that I have fully burned out — very severely — because I endured such high levels of stress (caused by trying to freelance while having ADHD), that I ultimately became deadline-dependent to organise myself.
I've spent two years recovering and in that process I have learned that much of the typical advice (cut out caffeine) is wrong for me. Indeed cutting out caffeine left me depressed and eating worse. It is sugar I have to manage, which seems like an overoptimisation (I am quite skinny at times and I can forget to eat)
The fact that you say "time stops" if it's something you want to, and the fact that you describe starting a task you don't want to do as painful to engage with and you procrastinate until you find some pressure to start…
I don't think this is necessarily everyone's experience at all.
And one of the problems with inattentive ADHD is that because it feels so intrinsic to us we assume it must be much like what everyone else must feel, and we don't ever question whether it is.
Another is that the IT world is absolutely rife with AuDHD and inattentive ADHD — people who canfind the puzzle in something complex, learn the hell out of it and then dive into it with unbroken focus until it is solved tend to earn a lot of money.
(How many tech people do you know who have three or four other talents or obscure hobbies that have huge potential value but remain to them underdeveloped while amazing others — playing an instrument they taught themselves, really good photography, woodworking, etc.; this is an ADHD pattern!)
And then when they begin to burn out in any given job, they confuse the burnout with structural failures of the job (it must have got worse) or with wanting a better job, so off they go to a new one, and unless you keep in touch with them over several job changes you never see the actual pattern.
The defining questions about a diagnosis are whether this pattern has negative impacts on the rest of your life. In my case… it definitely does. But I still have not sought a formal diagnosis because at this point it's just paying to be allowed to take medication I don't really want to take.
You know, I've been diagnosed for almost a decade now and working on my ADHD with counsellors and my doctor and medication and such
It still really cuts deep to see my struggles laid out so succinctly by someone who doesn't even know me and can't possibly know my struggle. It's agony knowing this pattern is "known" and yet I went so long just bashing against it fruitlessly
When I was finally diagnosed and started seeing a counsellor about it, I described it like a ticking time bomb in my head. I find something new. A new job, a new friend, a new hobby. I throw myself into it, burn out, blow it up for some reason, get depressed for a while, find something new
It's an agonizing way to live
A mug of decaf has about 3% of the caffeine of a mug of non-decaf coffee, at most. It is negligible as a stimulant. The only people who would need to avoid it are those with an allergy.
There is an interesting effect in mood related studies where every group usually improves on average, even if they receive only placebo. The real measure of any depression study is therefore the improvement above and beyond the control group.
The effect is so predictable that it has become an easy way to produce studies showing positive effects from something: All you have to do is track some group of people and then give ALL of them your supplement, and their scores will improve. It makes great headlines because most people don’t know you could have given them sugar pills and the scores would also improve.
EDIT: As another commenter pointed out, this person has an unusual long list of financial affiliations with companies that produce drink products, too. This study should probably be ignored