I've had the same experience with caffeine- I am very addicted and without it the withdrawal includes a bad headache, serious fatigue, and not being able to think about much else except wanting caffeine. Yet lots of people have told me with a straight face that I am "wrong" and caffeine is not addictive.
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.
I don't think it's common to claim there's no such thing as caffeine withdrawal -- that's extremely well known and documented. The headaches and fatigue from going cold turkey are the worst.
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 DSM-5 does not use the terms dependence or addiction as standalone diagnostic categories. It unifies them under the concept of "substance use disorders," describing a spectrum of use and classifying severity based on the number of symptoms present.
I've always heard "caffeine withdrawal" explained as symptoms of dehydration from people who drank mostly coffee, go cold turkey, and do not replace with water.
I don't know who's been telling you that, but no, that is false.
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.
I'm surprised that people don't know that caffeine is addictive. I'd think most adults have accidentally withdrawn from it at some point.
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 did the exact same thing you did, except with cold brew concentrate, when I wanted to quit caffeine one time (in preparation for a dental surgery, where I decided I would rather not be taking caffeine while recovering). Would recommend for anyone who is trying to 'kick the habit'.
Funny story: at my first programming job, there was a coworker that had never had coffee before. Then he tried some and started drinking it everyday. Then he realized “he couldn’t stop” after it was time to start paying the coffee club dues (somehow there was an IT shop without free coffee).
It is surprising, but from my experience, there are some people that actually don’t realize it’s addictive.
i think it's very individual. I get a lot of caffeine when i need to work through a bunch of stuff (and probably developed tolerance, etc) but when there is a lull at work or a vacation, i feel 0 need for it, don't take it and feel 0 side effects from quitting for a couple of weeks.
If you want to kick caffeine, I recommend switching to caffeine pills and continue using as many of them as you need to feel normal, then start ramping down the dose. Since pills are discrete it's hard to cheat. When I do this I usually start at 400mg (sometimes 600mg) a day then over the next month ramp down to 100mg a day until finally going to zero. It takes me about a month before I can function normal with no caffeine.
...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.
Something I used to do is make a big pot of coffee and sip on it throughout the day, which was very hard to regulate (and it was also just too much caffeiene). Now I make a single cup of coffee in the aeropress and I use 16 grams of beans which i weigh manually. And I only have one cup of coffee in the morning instead of multiples throughout the day.
Point is, weighing beans and using the aeropress helps me keep my dosage consistent so I don't go overboard.
Decaf is pretty good these days; When I don't feel like ditching the actual cups of liquid I swap over. It's certainly what I reach for in the afternoon if I want another coffee for whatever reason. Might be another option if you still enjoy the ritual of coffee making and consumption.
I've tapered caffeine successfully by measuring out instant coffee. This works pretty well for managing the physical effects of caffeine withdrawal, or at least spreading them out. Basically, I 1) committed to only having the same exact amount of instant coffee, at the same exact times, every day, and then 2) every so often, reduced it a bit. Then I switched to a very moderate amount of decaf (which, yes, has a little bit of caffeine in it, but not enough to cause me problems).
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!
I never really liked coffee, but I drank it at work just as a pretext to talk to other people.
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.
It's telling that both people recommending this method have seen it fail multiple times, and are somehow rebranding those failures as successes. Every time you quit again "successfully" was because the previous attempt failed.
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.
The irony isn't lost on me, but we're recommending a method to safely wean off the substance to prevent having withdrawal symptoms, which have prevented me from coming off from caffeine in the past.
I wouldn't frame starting up again as a failure. Quitting short vs. long term are two different things.
* 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.
I have the same issue, and it originally comes from soft-drinks like Cola, and now I have to drink tons of coffee just to not have headaches and withdrawal syndrome.
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.
Maybe making a law that forbids selling drinks containing caffeine to kids could be a good start.
Moreover, legality doesn’t even necessarily imply reduced cost. I’ve heard anecdotally that in California illegally produced cannabis is cheaper: it’s not taxed and there’s no cost to meet regulatory compliance for the producers.
>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?
Much better, because alcohol can be made with any grocery store items (like fruits and bread for example) so nearly impossible to ban, whereas caffeine without coffee beans or tea leaves is going to be extremely challenging.
>Much better, because alcohol can be made with any grocery store items (like fruits and bread for example) so nearly impossible to ban, whereas caffeine without coffee beans or tea leaves is going to be extremely challenging.
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.
Caffeine is long term safe to use, tapering is done easily when its necessary (see my other comment on the thread, I tapered over 10 days with no side effects). And it's a stimulant.
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.
> I can't imagine any state or religion banning caffeine.
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.
> 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.
Extremely unlikely. Caffeine is one of the most studied substances on earth. It's not a secret that it causes a clear physiological response. There are tons of double blind placebo studies on this.
You got exposed to such substances because the law enforcement failed to apply the rules against controlled substances.
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.
You don't understand how addiction works. Most people can try almost any drug and not get addicted. Some people will seek out drugs and get addicted no matter what the laws are. Banning the drugs does nothing to help most people, because they don't need any help, they don't have the genes, the impulsivity, the lack of executive functioning for it to be a problem!. It does plenty to harm the people who are going to get addicted anyway.
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.
I live in a state where sports betting was recently legalized and suddenly a lot of people are addicted to gambling who weren't before. There're also many people who got addicted to legally prescribed pain medication, it seems unlikely all of these addicts would have sought out heroin from a sketchy drug dealer had they not been introduced to the pain medicine first.
You'd be surprised how many heroin addicts have chronic pain problems.
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.
Just because you can effect health improvements by strict government controls, I don't think that means we should.
> 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.
I'm skeptical that Singapore's policy is working as opposed to driving the drug trade underground. Draconian drug restrictions haven't worked in the US, and the death penalty wouldn't do anything here.
What about personal freedoms? Is eroding our individual rights really worth criminalizing something like coffee just because it might be physically addictive?
> If caffeine was illegal you and I wouldn't have acquired such addiction, so there is a very big + to prohibition
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.
Yet a majority of caffeine users don't get addicted, and the increased productivity and freedom seems well worth the trade off on prohibition. There are better solutions to addiction than making everyone else suffer.
I think a majority of caffeine users are addicted, given the prevalence of idioms on shirts/mugs/etc like "don't talk to me until I've had my morning coffee," etc. Most coffee drinkers I know feel at the very least tired if they don't have a morning coffee, even if they got enough sleep; that lethargy is a withdrawal symptom from a stimulant.
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.
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.