Sort of. It’s more like nicotine than, for instance, cocaine. Caffeine’s effect sort of has a reservoir system, so once you liberate all the energy you can with caffeine, there’s nothing left to liberate for a long time, so tomorrow, you can only get back to “normal”, and taking more just increases the side-effect load, whereas cocaine can be re-dosed a lot more until the body runs out of steam.
Something to do with the adrenergic system getting desensitized a lot faster than the dopamine system…
About a week ago, my partner sent me a link to an article about a study that confirmed her belief that the apparent improvement in mood from caffeine was simply the relief of caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and that you’d be better off overcoming the addiction.
Since my coffee consumption had been decreasing lately anyway, and I was down to one cup of coffee a day, and not every day, I thought maybe I should go ahead and give up caffeine. It’s turning out to be more difficult than I thought at first. I’m trying to decrease my dosage by drinking one cup of black tea every day or two.
This article is an even stronger argument for my giving up caffeine. I need to go back over it and read it more closely, but this part near the beginning particularly struck me:
In a 1974 paper, “Anxiety or Caffeinism: A Diagnostic Dilemma,” he wrote, “Relevant to this endeavor is the overlooked fact that high doses of caffeine — or ‘caffeinism’ — can produce pharmacological actions that cause symptoms essentially indistinguishable from those of anxiety neuroses.”
In my first year of college, I started having severe problems with anxiety. The obvious culprit was stress, and I’d been having issues with anxiety in my last year of high school, but I’ve often wondered if my rapid escalation in the consumption of coffee and espresso drinks was a major contributor to my increasingly severe anxiety, and this suggests it may very well have been.
Growing up I had a steady intake of sweet tea and Mt. Dew, and I am one of those people who could sleep 10 hours a day. So for a lot of my life I never really experienced a caffeine buzz. From time to time in college I’d go a while without having any and have the usual side effects. Fast forward to my late 20’s and it started becoming clear that I simply couldn’t have a steady intake of caffeine. Now in my mid 30’s it’s fine if I have a can of soda, I’ll get a buzz and feel pepped for the day. But continue that for a week and I start feeling bad, not like the anxiety everyone else mentions but not well. I start feeling tired, weak, I start to loose focus, it’s almost like I’m getting sick. I stop with the caffeine for a few days and it clears up. Ironically tea doesn’t really cause this issue (coffee really does, but I have never been a coffee person) but soda does. So now I have a soda mostly when I need a boost and drink decaf if anything else.
My personal anecdotal experience confirms the study results mentioned in this article, but like some others commenting, I had a change in my response to caffeine over time. I drank large quantities of coffee in my teens and twenties without any serious consequences, but sometime in my thirties I began suffering asthma-like symptoms and freaky heart arrhythmias (if that’s the right term) that sent me to a cardiologist. He suggested trying a decrease in caffeine intake – in fact he said he’d had similar symptoms around the same age that cleared up when he cut down on coffee – so I switched from 3 or 4 cups of very strong coffee a day to 2 or 3 cups of tea and my symptoms disappeared.
My sister had a similar experience, but she had the misfortune to feel acute anxiety as well. Like me, she found that reducing caffeine intake (in her case eliminating it completely) caused her symptoms to disappear.
After not drinking coffee for months at a time, when I occasionally do have a cup with dessert or at a friend’s house I’m amazed that I used to ingest such a powerful drug in such large quantities.
Without delving too deep, I wanted to make a parallel between this article denouncing the evils of caffeine, and the modern stance to pot, which on the throes of legalization is touted as good thing. So we have two legal drugs, like alcohol, which get a free pass out of cultural blindness. Surely there are different levels and sensitivities to consider but the living without them seems not to be an option.
That’s common for people with the hyperactive variant. I have the inattentive, and impulsive type of ADD, and caffeine works as a stimulant for me just like the neurotypicals.
But it can be used as a medicine too. Just the other day I was sitting in a NICU and I overheard a couple of the nurses talking about how they might have to treat one of the babies with caffeine. Not sure what it does for them as it’s never come up with my baby.
Actually she was born 10 weeks early. She’s in the NICU because she’s massively preemie, so she’ll be there for awhile. She needs a little help breathing and is tube fed right now but she’s a strong little munchkin and will be fine.
