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Caffeine is a dangerous drug
- btilly 17y agoYears ago I ran across some interesting research that said that while caffeine is a stimulant, we have a homeostatic response that acclimatizes us to it. Therefore when you start, caffeine gives you a boost beyond where you would be. After a month of regular use caffeine boosts you to about where you'd be without caffeine, but you wake up in far worse shape. This fits with my experience, and I'm glad I took the effort to break my addiction a number of years ago. (I sometimes miss the taste though.)
- chasingsparks 17y agoI just invested in decaf; I am hoping to trick myself into self-control.
- presidentender 17y agoFor me, the addiction gets really bad about every six months or so. So I go through a week of zombified detox and terrible headaches... and then I start all over again.
- btilly 17y agoHaving been through the headaches once, why on Earth would you risk having to do it again? I will never forget that week, and I never want to experience anything like it again.
- angelbob 17y agoI find that each successive withdrawal is less severe. I get maybe two days of headaches at this point, not a week, and they are far less annoying and painful. My body may be atypical, but it definitely reduced the severity of the withdrawal with every occurrence.
- keefe 17y ago"Life is pain, anyone who tells you different is selling you something." If you need the performance boost for a certain period of time, fuck the withdrawal. It's not that bad.
- yesimahuman 17y agoI'm thinking of quitting cold turkey again. I'm getting exhausted even a few hours after having caffeine and I'm very cranky in the afternoon. Also, I can't focus as well when I'm all juiced up.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoTwelve years ago or so I was up to 8-10 mugs a day. Not cool. After a year of this I quit cold turkey and went through two weeks of hell - everything was too loud, everything was too bright, I had a persistent splitting headache and was extremely irritable (even more than usual). I didn't drink any coffee at all for several years, and then we got a coffee machine as a Christmas gift and I started drinking it again, albeit in strict moderation. These days I stick to one or two coffees a day - one in the morning and sometimes one around 1-2 PM when I hit an energy trough. If I have more than two cups, I toss and turn all night and wake up exhausted ... which of course prompts me to drink still more coffee.
- gte910h 17y agoIt's silly to use caffeine in the morning. The neurochemicals it works on are the ones that make you tired late in the day, not in the morning. (It works as a adenosine competitive inhibitor). All it does in the morning is give you an adrenaline burst. You can get similar "wake up in the morning effects" by many other substances and activities. Caffeine is very effective come afternoon/evening though. Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/23184.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/23184.php "What we have shown in our study is that it's this prolonged neural activity of being awake that causes adenosine levels to go up, which in turn makes a person feel drowsy. It's the brain's way of achieving a proper balance between the neural activity of waking and the need for sleep. If something goes wrong with this adenosine system, you may end up with insomnia."
- keefe 17y agoI think you're kind of missing the point. Because caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, it prevents you from entering the deepest phase of sleep, so even though you sleep, you don't get your full rest. Caffeine half life is 6 hours, so imho it should be done ONLY in the morning so that by bed time, it's gone and you sleep properly. I have verified this in my own experience. It basically makes caffeine much, much less useful.
- gte910h 17y agoThe halflife is between 4-5 hours for a healthy adult not on oral contraceptives and not pregnant. You're significantly overstating (by 33-50%) the halflife and very vastly throwing off the amount that is still in your system after doing the decay function with your 6 hour figure. http://www.webmd.com/balance/caffeine-myths-and-facts http://www.webmd.com/balance/caffeine-myths-and-facts And (Deadtree): Barone, J.J. and Roberts, H.R. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 34, 119-129, 1996. It is commonly suggested to avoid caffeine 8 hours before bed to be able to sleep well. -- If it lasts that long for you (and you're not on birth control or pregnant), you may wish to get liver function tests done with your doctor to make sure you're okay in that department. Or you may just need to do other steps to put you into deeper sleep. Cold rooms with warm blankets, nothing but sex and sleep in bed (no reading, no talking, no snoozing), no spicy or sweet foods within a few hours before bed and block out all/most light to help.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoDrinking coffee for its stimulant effect is like cutting the end off a piece of string and tying it to the other end to make the string longer. That said, every day I tie one or two pieces to the end of my string.
- keefe 17y agoThis is how all drugs work... my understanding is that 300 mg per day for three weeks leads to full caffeine tolerance and you need to cycle clear at that point.
- unignorant 17y agoI rid myself of a 6+ cup a day habit by switching over to tea (well, yerba mate at the moment, which I suppose is technically (and oddly) a kind of holly). I still drink quite a bit of tea, but the accumulated caffeine intake is much less. It's a possibly reasonable way of tricking the psychological dependence into submission.
- chasingsparks 17y agoI tried that for a while, but for some reason, tea stains my teeth far more than coffee. A friend of mine actually told me about yerba mate. He's a big fan. However, yerba seems to have some other biological interactions that I would have to research. I had cancer before, so phrases like "some experiments showed an increase in oral cancer cell proliferation" are a bit terrifying. Incidentally, caffeine itself may be cancer fighting. Caffeine is an mTOR inhibitor. mTOR has been implicated asa growth pathway in many cancers. If their are any bio-geeks on this site, I'd be curious to know what quantities are caffeine are comparable to a dose of rapamycin.
- hernan7 17y agoI guess it depends how you drink it, but I found yerba mate to be more stimulant/jitter inducing than coffee. At least if you drink it the Argentinian way with the gourd and straw. The official story in Argentina is that yerba has "mateine", which is basically indistinguishable from caffeine if you ask me. So not sure if you are really combating the caffeine addiction by switching to mate. Oh, and whatever you do, don't pour sugar in that mate...
- petercooper 17y agoBut still a lot less dangerous than most of the other "nootropic" drugs people people were discussing on HN the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211959 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211959
- AngryParsley 17y agoCaffeine is more common, but it's not always less dangerous. Drugs like ethanol and caffeine would never get FDA approval if they were discovered today. Modafinil (one of the more common study drugs) is quite safe. From the Wikipedia article on Modafinil: Basti and Jouvet (1988) describe a suicide attempt using 4500 mg of modafinil; the suicidee survived with no long-term effects but temporary nervousness, nausea, and insomnia. An equivalent overdose of caffeine (45x typical dose) would be lethal.
- petercooper 17y agoAn equivalent overdose of caffeine (45x typical dose) would be lethal. The majority of caffeine is not consumed in pill form, as with most nootropics. In the typical ways that caffeine is consumed, it would take an impractical amount of consumption to reach LD50 (> 100 cups of coffee within ~12 hours, for instance). Caffeine is, of course, inherently very dangerous as a raw substance, but the form in which most of us consume it prevents significant acute abuse. Modafinil is not without its problems. If you check out a lot of the journalism about it, rather few of the experimenters seem particularly keen to continue their experiences with it, citing odd heart rates, mood swings, minor personality disorders, and the like. These things are not exactly "dangerous" in the classical sense but are clearly no picnic either.
- paulbaumgart 17y agoWhat's with the "dangerous" in the title? The word doesn't appear anywhere in the article, and the article doesn't even come close to implying it.
- mey 17y agoThe author is stating Caffeine is dangerous to productivity if incorrectly used. You may also wish to read the disclaimer of sorts at the bottom, and relax about a personal blog that has no sources, is purely anecdotal, and appears to be the author getting his thoughts down in writing.
- chasingsparks 17y agoThat is what I meant. It's dangerous to my productivity. paulbaumgart does point out something funny. I added 'dangerous' in an edit a few minutes after posting. It does make the post more precise; I am talking about caffeine being a danger to productivity as a consequence of dependence not merely the truism that "Caffeine is a drug." However, it didn't get views (as evidenced by up-votes) until I added dangerous. In being more precise I was accidentally link-baiting.
- paulbaumgart 17y agoI usually understand "dangerous drugs" to be ones that have the potential to cause permanent organ damage. So my first thought was, "Oh shit, I drink a lot of coffee. Now you're telling me it's dangerous?" Then I actually read the article and got a little peeved that I'd been link-baited (inadvertantly or otherwise)- hence my comment complaining about it. :-)
- Semiapies 17y agoWell, yes. When you state a medical fact they teach you in elementary school, it's not going to get much attention. When you make a deceptive and link-baiting title, it'll get some more.
- nollidge 17y ago
- proee 17y agoHow many cups of coffee do you (HN Reader) drink per Day? http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/876846-244527 http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/876846-244527
- stcredzero 17y agoIsn't the coffee high just like a surge of adrenaline? How is that not unhealthy like frequent rage or stress? Flipping your body into an "emergency" mode again and again just strikes me as unhealthy.
- petercooper 17y agoIt depends on the circumstances. The ability to quickly flip into and out of "emergency" mode is a significant benefit for hunter gatherers such as humans. Arguably, our new "comfortable" lifestyles are less "healthy" than those of our distant ancestors, though this is a highly contentious subject.
- gte910h 17y agoA large burst of caffeine does cause an adrenaline surge. As a matter of fact, that's all that does anything to wake people up who drink it in the early morning. However caffeine is a competitive inhibitor of adenosine, a neurochemical that builds up late in the day making us sleepy. So if you drink it in the afternoon, especially in smaller quantities, as you'd see in an espresso (Which while having a stronger coffee taste, actually has much less caffeine per serving) or tea, you will find it quite able to keep you awake.
- whyenot 17y agoYou build up a tolerance to caffeine very quickly. Much more quickly than I think most people realize. From the Wikipedia article on caffeine(which cites original research): Caffeine tolerance develops very quickly, especially among heavy coffee and energy drink consumers. Complete tolerance to sleep disruption effects of caffeine develops after consuming 400 mg of caffeine 3 times a day for 7 days. Complete tolerance to subjective effects of caffeine was observed to develop after consuming 300 mg 3 times per day for 18 days, and possibly even earlier. In another experiment, complete tolerance of caffeine was observed when the subject consumed 750–1200 mg per day while incomplete tolerance to caffeine has been observed in those that consume more average doses of caffeine. For reference, a grande drip coffee from Starbucks has about 330mg caffeine. and on withdrawal: Withdrawal symptoms — possibly including headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints — may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to "normal" levels, uninfluenced by caffeine consumption.
- lutorm 17y agoAn interesting and very different take on caffeine consumption strategy was posted here a while ago: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html The idea is that you should use caffeine when you're at your peak, because you want to maximize your productivity for doing really hard stuff that you normally would only accomplish when you're having a creative spurt anyway.
- furtivefelon 17y agoDrinking even one cup of coffee in the morning makes me extremely jittery during the day, unable to concentrate. As the direct result, i now avoid coffee as much as possible. Preferring green tea as it makes me more alert without inducing jitters.
- xiaoma 17y agoCaffeine consumption improves short-term memory and even makes dendrites in the brain spindlier. I'll accept the downsides. http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/RSNA/2238 http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/RSNA/2238 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/472473.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/472473.stm
- jongraehl 17y agoThe second finding isn't very recent or reliable (it's in vitro); I assume it's the same as http://www.rense.com/politics5/caff.htm http://www.rense.com/politics5/caff.htm. Live rat studies find that caffeine reduces hippocampal neurogenesis - e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17400186 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17400186 - which is apparently either a cause or effect of certain types of learning (they actually measure performance on various learning-dependent tasks). Unfortunately I don't understand precisely what kinds of learning are dependent on the observed growth in the hippocampus (this article: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/22/3/635 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/22/3/635 tries but fails to satisfy my curiosity). It's interesting that anyone would presume that spindlier dendrites as a result of a drug will make the brain function better. It could be the equivalent of The Shining's 100s of pages of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." So the studies should attempt to show an actual increased or decreased facility in learning some task.
- cheald 17y agoI consume a startup-typical amount of coffee, but I've never had a hint of dependence or withdrawl, which is somewhat puzzling to me. Given how much I consume, I should; I'll go weeks at a time without any coffee because I forget to make it, and then I'll go for a few weeks going through 3+ pots/day. Sometimes I switch to hot chocolate, tea, or apple cider vinegar tea - I think I just like the idea of sipping a hot beverage while I think - but there is at least a placebo effect in play in regards to my ability to focus and be productive.