

Caffeine is a dangerous drug - chasingsparks
http://pathdependent.com/2010/03/31/caffeine-is-a-drug/

======
btilly
Years 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.)

~~~
presidentender
For 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
Having 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
I 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.

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paulbaumgart
What'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
The 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
That 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
I 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.
:-)

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whyenot
You 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._

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lutorm
An interesting and very different take on caffeine consumption strategy was
posted here a while ago:

<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.

------
xiaoma
Caffeine 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://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/472473.stm>

~~~
jongraehl
The 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>. Live rat studies
find that caffeine _reduces_ hippocampal neurogenesis - e.g.
<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> 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.

------
petercooper
But 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>

~~~
AngryParsley
Caffeine 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
_An 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.

------
cheald
I 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.

------
unignorant
I 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
I 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.

------
furtivefelon
Drinking 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.

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stcredzero
Isn'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.

~~~
gte910h
A 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.

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proee
How many cups of coffee do you (HN Reader) drink per Day?

<http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/876846-244527>

~~~
proee
link to results:

<http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpresult/876846-244527>

~~~
astine
It lists me as being in DC because I'm using an LoC computer. I'm in Culpeper
VA.

