5 ms·

I was hoping that the article would also mention some approximate amounts you have to drink per day to start to get withdrawal effects. Are there no studies of

I was hoping that the article would also mention some approximate amounts you have to drink per day to start to get withdrawal effects. Are there no studies of this? As one personal data point, I drink 2-4 cups daily and a few months ago I decided to suddenly stop just to see what happens. The results were very unexciting: I felt nothing. No headaches, no fogginess, no significant loss of alertness (although I did need more time to "warm up" in the morning from my groggy morning states). Otherwise I felt normal and after a week of unexciting I just went back to drinking coffee because it tastes good and works when you need it. At least from my personal study then, it seems 2-4 cups daily is not enough to get any adverse effects.

abrowne 13y ago
I tried the same thing with the same results. Me: 1–3 cups coffee and/or tea.
spankalee 13y ago
Good point. I drink about 1-3 cups a day, and wonder sometimes how dependent my energy and mood is on caffeine. I _think_ I feel groggy without a morning cup, but I'm too lazy or unconcerned to track how I feel, how much I drink and factors like sleep very closely. I'd love to read more about studies on this, I'm sure they're out there.
nashequilibrium 13y ago
I 200mg caffeine table before morning workout. Then a total of 3 to 4 cups of coffee. I can drop the coffee and move to tea, go without coffee(especially on weekend get ways) and still have no withdrawals.
- bpatrianakos 13y ago
  Tea is just as caffeinated, if not more caffienated than coffee. So what you're doing is no different than quitting Red Bull and switching to Monster without withdrawal. Some teas are decaf but in general the most common teas are caffienated. Even most decaf things are low or almost free of caffeine but not totally. I suggest you try quitting coffee and tea together and seeing how you feel.
  - jalada 13y ago
    “Tea is just as caffeinated” — Citation needed
  - bpyne 13y ago
    http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/AN01211 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/AN01211 From a tea site, not sure of its validity. http://www.veetea.com/site/articles/caffeine-and-tea http://www.veetea.com/site/articles/caffeine-and-tea Go to Caffeine in Tea: How It Works. It looks like tea should not affect you as much.
  - yareally 13y ago
    Depends on the kind of tea. Higher the oxidation level, the longer you steep it, and various ingredients can alter the caffeine level. Not 100% accurate, but it goes something like: black → green → white → chamomile (which is naturally caffeine free if chamomile is the only ingredient) Green tea in many cases has nearly the same caffeine content as black tea though.
  - vl 13y ago
    While black tea has roughly same amount of caffeine as coffee, it's not completely the same for whatever reason. For me double-espresso is more "spiky", has higher kick and wears off quicker, black tea has slower ramp up, has longer steady effect, overall leads to better productivity because highs are not as high and tail is longer. Both if taken too late in the day affect sleep. So over time I developed next schedule: double espresso or two in the morning, one or two black teas after lunch/later, decaf black tea or camomile in the the evening.
  - PKop 13y ago
    Not quite. While there are variances, most places I've looked coffee usually exceeds tea in caffeine content. Starbucks Pike Place 16oz coffee has 330mg caffeine. http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/pike-place-roast http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/pike-plac... Starbucks Earl Grey 16oz tea has 65mg caffeine. http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/tea/earl-grey http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/tea/earl-grey Those are just two popular examples. edit: Black Tea near 100mg per 16oz.
cydonian_monk 13y ago
I've seen similar results in terms of no major loss of alertness and no fogginess, but I definitely get frazzled nerves, mild headaches, etc, when I stop drinking tea/coffee/etc. The problem for me is on the other end. After spending more than a year off, going /back/ to drinking caffeinated drinks caused me far worse issues - complete insomnia, with the accompanying issues related to lack of sleep. My mind simply doesn't shut down at night if I regularly have 1-2 caffeinated drinks a day for the span of a week. So while breaking myself isn't too bad, going back to drinking caffeine in any regular quantity is TOUGH, and not something I care to try again (after three trys).
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  You need to add a workout regimen in then, at leat 90mins of good working out. The problem is most tech people tire their brains out but not their body. My mind will be shot and i can get up and run for 60mins at a slow 6/6.5 miles an hr, it doesn't need to be crazy. I sleep like a baby when i workout.
  - zen_boy 13y ago
    This. Also, individuals react to and metabolize caffeine differently. YMMV. On related note, 23andme users can see which kind of caffeine metabolizers they are from the Drug Response section.
minor_nitwit 13y ago
For my anecdote, I drink 1 cup a day, and then possibly a soda or tea at a meal. It hits me hard after 24 hours without any.
- Periodic 13y ago
  I'm in a similar place. I drink 1-2 cups of coffee a day, one in the morning and one in the early afternoon. I find it very valuable for increasing my attention and focus during those periods of the day when I'm generally unfocused or tired. If I miss coffee for the day I will get very groggy and likely have a headache by the mid-afternoon the next day. So definitely one more for variance. One thing that's always frustrated me is that I have friends who will drink a coffee after dessert to stay awake for the drive home, then get to sleep two hours later. If I drink a cup of coffee I am effectively guaranteed to be up for the next six hours, even if I'm tired and unproductive for all of them.
thinkersilver 13y ago
Instant coffee will give you roughly 12mg of caffeine, an espresso will give you ~150mg , a regular size cup of brewed coffee from somewhere like Starbucks is around ~200mg of caffeine. The strength of your coffee is in the brewing method and beans used. So, I guess, the effect of a cup would vary greatly depending on where you got it.
- tachyonbeam 13y ago
  > Instant coffee will give you roughly 12mg of caffeine I just looked it up and this seems to be inaccurate. The instant coffee I have has about 74mg per cup according to the Folgers website. This of course varies depending on how you make it. I, like many people I suspect, like to put in more powder to make it darker. Honestly, I think if people sold instant coffee with only 12mg of caffeine per cup, people would find that coffee disappointing, as they wouldn't quite get the buzz they're used to, and they'd stop buying it. I can tell you that I once drank some vegan energy drink and I could immediately tell, before reading the ingredients, that it contained no caffeine, I felt like I'd just thrown money away.
mcv 13y ago
I don't know about coffee, but I've figured out when tea becomes a problem. There have been times when I drank 4-6 liters of tea per day. If I'd quit cold turkey, the next day I'd get a growing, eventually stabbing headache, nausea, and eventually vomiting. But it's very easy to kick: one or two days of drinking 1 or 2 liters and I'm fine. Even less might probably work; I've had times when I was worried that I didn't reduce my tea consumption in time, and I just drank some cola and was usually fine. (I don't like cola. I just drink it to ease down my addiction.) I never actually noticed any significant fogginess as far as I remember.
- conradfr 13y ago
  4-6 liters per day ... don't you get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_polydipsia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_polydipsia ?
  - haldujai 13y ago
    Polydipsia would explain why he drinks that much. He would get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyuria as a result from the volume he is drinking.
  - mcv 13y ago
    No idea. Though I do get a dry mouth quite easily.
- throwaway1979 13y ago
  I've heard that our British friends across the pond drink a lot of tea. Is 2 liters normal? That comes to over 8 cups in the US. I ask because I drink a lot of tea (10+ cups a day). No ill effects on me except some jitteriness. This seems to be an atypical amount of tea consumption in the US. Is there a good reason to rein this in?
  - mcv 13y ago
    2 liters of fluid is about the minimum per day (you need more if it's very hot). It doesn't have to be tea, of course, but I have a tendency to drink nothing but tea. Tea is often assumed to be utterly harmless and just as good as water, but I have my doubts that's still true at the volumes I used to drink it. Nowadays I drink just 2 or 3 liters. I basically drink per pot, and one pot is about 1 liter (depending on size). Always one for breakfast, one or two at work, and maybe one in the evening. Okay, so I guess it's 4 liters. Still better than the 6 it was.
takeda64 13y ago
I personally don't drink coffee. From my observation I don't think I'm any less alert than other coworkers, but I just need to have standard 7-8 hours of sleep.
vidarh 13y ago
I used to use 360mg before exercise (equivalent to ca 5 cups coffee), and would often add 100-200mg later in the day. "Cold turkey" for me at that level results in a week of massive headaches (too strong for just paracetamol (acetaminophen for you crazy americans)) and night sweats and shaking that is strong enough that if I don't take paracetamol or ibuprofen early enough in the evening, I have problems opening the pack of painkillers or pouring a glass of water to swallow it down without a lot of effort, and it will also generally come with diarrhea. Not at all pleasant. Thankfully it can be counteracted very easily by stepping down gradually. Even just 100mg-150mg a day for a week or so, combined with paracetamol reduces the withdrawals enough to cut it out fully afterwards for me. I still use huge daily doses of caffeine a lot, but go off it for a couple of weeks regularly to increase my sensitivity to it again.
- justinator 13y ago
  > I used to use 360mg before exercise Being of a moderate calibre when it comes to ultra-endurance types of events, I'm curious as to why you would consume so much caffeine before exercise.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    High doses of caffeine are commonly used in pre-workout formulas for weight lifting and power lifting for increased focus and perceived energy. It does not increase your lifting capacity per se, but a lot of people feel it makes it at least subjectively easier to take out your max potential as so much of heavy lifts is down to mental focus - if you go into a heavy set not thinking you'll make it, you almost certainly won't because the slightest little hesitation at the wrong moment or lack of that extra little push will get you stuck. It's perfectly possible it's placebo - it's hard to double blind test this as the effect of high caffeine doses is extremely noticeable. But if is placebo, I'm ok with that. Incidentally the benefits of caffeine (at much more moderate levels) for endurance exercise is a lot better established than for high intensity weight lifting, as far as I know.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  360mg is a lot I think this in terms of Red Bulls, a can is around 80mg, so this is 4.5 RBs I wouldn't drink more than one RB per day (but I can get caffeine elsewhere) For me going cold turkey is bad as well, sometimes (usually in trips) I forget drinking coffee and the lack of energy and headache is visible I accidentally got cold turkey the other day, by not knowing how "decaffeinated" is written in the language of the country I'm in, not very nice!
podperson 13y ago
I drink 2-4 cups of espresso per day (that's 4-8 shots) and would periodically switch from coffee to tea with no major ill-effects, and similarly would just not drink coffee some days, again with no major ill-effects.

abrowne 13y ago

I tried the same thing with the same results. Me: 1–3 cups coffee and/or tea.

spankalee 13y ago

Good point. I drink about 1-3 cups a day, and wonder sometimes how dependent my energy and mood is on caffeine. I _think_ I feel groggy without a morning cup, but I'm too lazy or unconcerned to track how I feel, how much I drink and factors like sleep very closely. I'd love to read more about studies on this, I'm sure they're out there.

nashequilibrium 13y ago

I 200mg caffeine table before morning workout. Then a total of 3 to 4 cups of coffee. I can drop the coffee and move to tea, go without coffee(especially on weekend get ways) and still have no withdrawals.

bpatrianakos 13y ago
Tea is just as caffeinated, if not more caffienated than coffee. So what you're doing is no different than quitting Red Bull and switching to Monster without withdrawal. Some teas are decaf but in general the most common teas are caffienated. Even most decaf things are low or almost free of caffeine but not totally. I suggest you try quitting coffee and tea together and seeing how you feel.
- jalada 13y ago
  “Tea is just as caffeinated” — Citation needed
- bpyne 13y ago
  http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/AN01211 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/AN01211 From a tea site, not sure of its validity. http://www.veetea.com/site/articles/caffeine-and-tea http://www.veetea.com/site/articles/caffeine-and-tea Go to Caffeine in Tea: How It Works. It looks like tea should not affect you as much.
- yareally 13y ago
  Depends on the kind of tea. Higher the oxidation level, the longer you steep it, and various ingredients can alter the caffeine level. Not 100% accurate, but it goes something like: black → green → white → chamomile (which is naturally caffeine free if chamomile is the only ingredient) Green tea in many cases has nearly the same caffeine content as black tea though.
- vl 13y ago
  While black tea has roughly same amount of caffeine as coffee, it's not completely the same for whatever reason. For me double-espresso is more "spiky", has higher kick and wears off quicker, black tea has slower ramp up, has longer steady effect, overall leads to better productivity because highs are not as high and tail is longer. Both if taken too late in the day affect sleep. So over time I developed next schedule: double espresso or two in the morning, one or two black teas after lunch/later, decaf black tea or camomile in the the evening.
- PKop 13y ago
  Not quite. While there are variances, most places I've looked coffee usually exceeds tea in caffeine content. Starbucks Pike Place 16oz coffee has 330mg caffeine. http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/pike-place-roast http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/pike-plac... Starbucks Earl Grey 16oz tea has 65mg caffeine. http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/tea/earl-grey http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/tea/earl-grey Those are just two popular examples. edit: Black Tea near 100mg per 16oz.

cydonian_monk 13y ago

I've seen similar results in terms of no major loss of alertness and no fogginess, but I definitely get frazzled nerves, mild headaches, etc, when I stop drinking tea/coffee/etc. The problem for me is on the other end. After spending more than a year off, going /back/ to drinking caffeinated drinks caused me far worse issues - complete insomnia, with the accompanying issues related to lack of sleep. My mind simply doesn't shut down at night if I regularly have 1-2 caffeinated drinks a day for the span of a week. So while breaking myself isn't too bad, going back to drinking caffeine in any regular quantity is TOUGH, and not something I care to try again (after three trys).

nashequilibrium 13y ago
You need to add a workout regimen in then, at leat 90mins of good working out. The problem is most tech people tire their brains out but not their body. My mind will be shot and i can get up and run for 60mins at a slow 6/6.5 miles an hr, it doesn't need to be crazy. I sleep like a baby when i workout.
- zen_boy 13y ago
  This. Also, individuals react to and metabolize caffeine differently. YMMV. On related note, 23andme users can see which kind of caffeine metabolizers they are from the Drug Response section.

minor_nitwit 13y ago

For my anecdote, I drink 1 cup a day, and then possibly a soda or tea at a meal. It hits me hard after 24 hours without any.

Periodic 13y ago
I'm in a similar place. I drink 1-2 cups of coffee a day, one in the morning and one in the early afternoon. I find it very valuable for increasing my attention and focus during those periods of the day when I'm generally unfocused or tired. If I miss coffee for the day I will get very groggy and likely have a headache by the mid-afternoon the next day. So definitely one more for variance. One thing that's always frustrated me is that I have friends who will drink a coffee after dessert to stay awake for the drive home, then get to sleep two hours later. If I drink a cup of coffee I am effectively guaranteed to be up for the next six hours, even if I'm tired and unproductive for all of them.

thinkersilver 13y ago

Instant coffee will give you roughly 12mg of caffeine, an espresso will give you ~150mg , a regular size cup of brewed coffee from somewhere like Starbucks is around ~200mg of caffeine. The strength of your coffee is in the brewing method and beans used. So, I guess, the effect of a cup would vary greatly depending on where you got it.

tachyonbeam 13y ago
> Instant coffee will give you roughly 12mg of caffeine I just looked it up and this seems to be inaccurate. The instant coffee I have has about 74mg per cup according to the Folgers website. This of course varies depending on how you make it. I, like many people I suspect, like to put in more powder to make it darker. Honestly, I think if people sold instant coffee with only 12mg of caffeine per cup, people would find that coffee disappointing, as they wouldn't quite get the buzz they're used to, and they'd stop buying it. I can tell you that I once drank some vegan energy drink and I could immediately tell, before reading the ingredients, that it contained no caffeine, I felt like I'd just thrown money away.

mcv 13y ago

I don't know about coffee, but I've figured out when tea becomes a problem. There have been times when I drank 4-6 liters of tea per day. If I'd quit cold turkey, the next day I'd get a growing, eventually stabbing headache, nausea, and eventually vomiting. But it's very easy to kick: one or two days of drinking 1 or 2 liters and I'm fine. Even less might probably work; I've had times when I was worried that I didn't reduce my tea consumption in time, and I just drank some cola and was usually fine. (I don't like cola. I just drink it to ease down my addiction.) I never actually noticed any significant fogginess as far as I remember.

conradfr 13y ago
4-6 liters per day ... don't you get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_polydipsia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_polydipsia ?
- haldujai 13y ago
  Polydipsia would explain why he drinks that much. He would get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyuria as a result from the volume he is drinking.
- mcv 13y ago
  No idea. Though I do get a dry mouth quite easily.
throwaway1979 13y ago
I've heard that our British friends across the pond drink a lot of tea. Is 2 liters normal? That comes to over 8 cups in the US. I ask because I drink a lot of tea (10+ cups a day). No ill effects on me except some jitteriness. This seems to be an atypical amount of tea consumption in the US. Is there a good reason to rein this in?
- mcv 13y ago
  2 liters of fluid is about the minimum per day (you need more if it's very hot). It doesn't have to be tea, of course, but I have a tendency to drink nothing but tea. Tea is often assumed to be utterly harmless and just as good as water, but I have my doubts that's still true at the volumes I used to drink it. Nowadays I drink just 2 or 3 liters. I basically drink per pot, and one pot is about 1 liter (depending on size). Always one for breakfast, one or two at work, and maybe one in the evening. Okay, so I guess it's 4 liters. Still better than the 6 it was.

takeda64 13y ago

I personally don't drink coffee. From my observation I don't think I'm any less alert than other coworkers, but I just need to have standard 7-8 hours of sleep.

vidarh 13y ago

I used to use 360mg before exercise (equivalent to ca 5 cups coffee), and would often add 100-200mg later in the day. "Cold turkey" for me at that level results in a week of massive headaches (too strong for just paracetamol (acetaminophen for you crazy americans)) and night sweats and shaking that is strong enough that if I don't take paracetamol or ibuprofen early enough in the evening, I have problems opening the pack of painkillers or pouring a glass of water to swallow it down without a lot of effort, and it will also generally come with diarrhea. Not at all pleasant. Thankfully it can be counteracted very easily by stepping down gradually. Even just 100mg-150mg a day for a week or so, combined with paracetamol reduces the withdrawals enough to cut it out fully afterwards for me. I still use huge daily doses of caffeine a lot, but go off it for a couple of weeks regularly to increase my sensitivity to it again.

justinator 13y ago
> I used to use 360mg before exercise Being of a moderate calibre when it comes to ultra-endurance types of events, I'm curious as to why you would consume so much caffeine before exercise.
- vidarh 13y ago
  High doses of caffeine are commonly used in pre-workout formulas for weight lifting and power lifting for increased focus and perceived energy. It does not increase your lifting capacity per se, but a lot of people feel it makes it at least subjectively easier to take out your max potential as so much of heavy lifts is down to mental focus - if you go into a heavy set not thinking you'll make it, you almost certainly won't because the slightest little hesitation at the wrong moment or lack of that extra little push will get you stuck. It's perfectly possible it's placebo - it's hard to double blind test this as the effect of high caffeine doses is extremely noticeable. But if is placebo, I'm ok with that. Incidentally the benefits of caffeine (at much more moderate levels) for endurance exercise is a lot better established than for high intensity weight lifting, as far as I know.
raverbashing 13y ago
360mg is a lot I think this in terms of Red Bulls, a can is around 80mg, so this is 4.5 RBs I wouldn't drink more than one RB per day (but I can get caffeine elsewhere) For me going cold turkey is bad as well, sometimes (usually in trips) I forget drinking coffee and the lack of energy and headache is visible I accidentally got cold turkey the other day, by not knowing how "decaffeinated" is written in the language of the country I'm in, not very nice!

podperson 13y ago

I drink 2-4 cups of espresso per day (that's 4-8 shots) and would periodically switch from coffee to tea with no major ill-effects, and similarly would just not drink coffee some days, again with no major ill-effects.