seriously! like how do you become addicted to coffee, I drink it regularly but I can’t say I am caffeine addict or something. how one become a caffeine addict?
If you drink it regularly it’s already got you
I smoke cigarettes every day, but that doesn’t mean I’m addicted! i say this while fully addicted to caffeine
“I can quit any time I want. I just don’t want to.”
You say you drink it regularly, have you ever tried to stop? If you suddenly experience headaches and shakes after, I’ve bad news for you.
The thing is, caffeine addiction is so heavily normalized and encouraged by our capitalist society that most people do not realize they’re addicted. They consume caffeinated products with enough regularity that they never crave it, and you’re only ever encouraged to stop if you develop a health issue.
Takes a few months. Most notable symptom of withdrawal is usually headaches, lasts a day or two. It’s not a severe addiction, it’s a fairly mild one as they go.
I got jacked up within 2-weeks of hitting energy drinks and espresso. The headaches were blinding for a day or three. Guess I was really hitting it hard.
I have relatives who would get headaches if they didn’t get it. People’s bodies respond differently.
How old are you? The side-effects or withdrawal symptoms didn’t really become noticeable for me until my mid-30s…I went from feeling fine whether I had caffeine or not, to getting a headache in the afternoon if I missed my morning coffee, to waking up with a headache already that wouldn’t go away until I upped my dose.
By drinking high doses over a long period of time. When I’m in withdrawal I get depressed and foggy with terrible headaches.
The good news is that it only takes a week or so to be completely free of withdrawal symptoms.
Caffeine has a metabolic half life of 6-12 hours. This means that after a 24 hour period, there could be 1/4 of the original caffeine amount you drank in your system. If you drink the same amount of caffeine again at that point, now after a 24 hour period you ‘ll have up to 1/4 of that 1.25 amount in your system. If you consume caffeine daily, this can lead to an accumulation of caffeine that your body adjusts to always being there, becoming the new baseline normal. This would feel fine until you stop, at which point the caffeine your body expects to be there is gone, and it needs to take time readjusting to that absence. That leads to withdrawal symptoms.
No clue. While I don’t drink coffee, I did drink caffeinated sodas for a large part of my life. One day I just decided to stop drinking soda. I felt no sort of addiction or withdrawal symptom.
People conflate “Addicted” and “Dependant”. I’m not addicted to caffeine, but I will feel off by late morning if I haven’t had some.
Get out while you still can. It’s too late for me.
with a hypodermic needle into the vein of your penis
I’d like to know more
Was that not part of your education Dr.?
I specialized in an adjacent field of study, actually.
I don’t like the taste of coffee, so I drink energy drinks. Energy drinks often have much more caffeine than a cup of coffee. for example, I drink Alani brand, they have a whopping 200(!) mg of caffeine per can.
When I drank one every day of the week at work, I then wouldn’t drink any on the weekend because it didn’t matter if I had energy. By Sunday I would have a day long caffeine headache and it was awful, but I refused to drink an energy drink JUST to stave off the headache because it made me feel like a junkie lol.
Instead, I now drink one every other day of the week, and I don’t have headaches. That is how I chemically (not psychologically) became addicted to caffeine.
OP didn’t make this distinction, but you might find it interesting that the physical component is called “dependency”. The word “Addiction” refers to the psychological/behavioral side.
I did not know that! That’s clearer wording, I’ll use it in the future
200mg, but how big is the can? Coffee (brewed, but especially espresso) has a much higher amount of caffeine per ounce of liquid in almost all cases. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/caffeine/art-20049372
It’s about the size of a red bull, smaller than a Monster.
Edit: 12 fl oz, just checked a can
A black venti coffee from Starbucks has almost 450mg of caffeine. 200mg probably isn’t “whopping (!)”-worthy.
I have a co-worker that drinks a pot of coffee at work each day by himself. That’s about 1,200mg of caffeine, and he has a cup in the morning before he gets to work, so he’s probably having about 1,500mg/day. Admittedly that’s on the high side.
800mg of caffeine from black coffee per day is actually shown to be good for you. Reduced risk of alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and Parkinson’s. Reduces inflammation. Lowered rates of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Starbucks notoriously has higher than average caffeine content.
Ok
With energy drinks you get the fun double whammy addiction of both caffeine and sugar!
That’s actually why I drink Alani, it has no sugar, but tastes amazing. There’s this whole new wave of energy drinks that don’t use sugar, such as Alani, Ghost, and Bang. I’m not sure what they use for sweeteners instead, maybe something also bad, but it’s an energy drink, I’m not gonna pretend I’m a saint to my body
Caffeine is physically addictive but a coffee/tea habit isn’t unhealthy. So you get physically addicted by drinking it everyday (will get the headache if you don’t have it) but it’s unlikely to cause addiction in the sense of harming your ability to live your life, or having negative health effects.
You don’t get ‘addicted’ to caffeine. If you consume it daily your body will adjust to the new baselines and discontinuing will have symptoms (headache for a day, tired, etc…), but it is not a clinical addiction.
I think your definition of addiction here is very narrow and most people would think that if there are withdrawal symptoms like you describe then that would qualify as an addiction.
I guess “clinical addiction” might mean an addiction which requires clinical intervention but I could imagine a hoarder who is “addicted” to collecting junk who requires a psychiatrist to break their pattern of compulsive behaviour.
No, the word ‘addicted’ is overused and simplified. People are ‘addicted’ to chocolate, and sweets. To their loved one’s kisses. That is not what it means, particularly to those that are, in fact, addicted. In everyday quaint usage it is cute. Meant to deflect accusations (internal or otherwise) of poor impulse control.
Real addiction alters body chemistry. The body doesn’t simply ‘acclimate’. It functionally depends on the addictive substance. Claiming a headache due to withdrawal = addiction is like saying shivering taking out the garbage in shorts during winter = warmth addiction. Not even close to going into shock and your heart stopping due to alcohol withdrawal.
Actual addiction alters mental thinking and results in negative lifestyle effects. When is the last time you sold your body for a shot of espresso? Does drinking coffee everyday cause you to avoid friends/coworkers or result in depression? Would you forget to feed your kids if the kitchen was out of teabags?
;tldr Addiction is clearly defined and caffeine is not one of the substances known to cause it. Hence why tea and coffee are served at most [Addicts] Anonymous meetings. “Like it a lot” is not the same as “addicted to”.
Actual addiction alters mental thinking and results in negative lifestyle effects.
This is prefrontal cortex. It’s dysregulation of neurotransmitters, largely impacted by just how strong the dopamine hit is. Gambling, for example, uses the exact same mechanism as crack to form the neurotransmitter imbalances that lead to people willing to sell their souls for one more hit, and the physical withdrawal is pretty much irrelevant to that impact.
Caffeine is the same thing. It’s less addictive, but it very obviously is addictive by every definition.
I still disagree but can understand your perspective.
That’s simply not true.
Ignoring that the habit formation is the most effective mechanism towards long term dependence and why rehab/treatment from people who genuinely want to stop often “doesn’t take”, caffeine also causes physical dependence, with meaningful withdrawal symptoms.
No, it is not physical dependence. It is acclimation. A habit is not addiction.
Someone drinking coffee daily for years could stop cold turkey for a day, drink some water and take 2 doses of aspiring throughout that day and actually reduce their coffee consumption once resuming without realizing it due to increased efficacy returning to baseline. The person would go through that day normally despite the predicable headache from blood vessel dilation.
A cigarette smoker going cold turkey for a day does NOT have that experience. After the first hour or so every minute of the day would be thinking about needing a cig, and depending on the severity of their addiction could experience serious life-threatening withdrawal symptoms.
[Addicts] Anonymous meetings serve coffee and tea because it is not addictive. It never ceases to amaze me how insistent people are to defend this mistaken idea that caffeine is addictive and yet we’ll let teens drink it without restriction, and serve it to actual addicts.
Here’s an idea, if you genuinely believe caffeine is addictive start lobbying to set age limits to consumption, or protesting in front of Starbucks.
You very clearly have no knowledge of what the research on addiction says, because this is all complete and utter bullshit.
If physical dependence was the primary issue with addiction, weaning would work. Shockingly, it doesn’t.
Cravings aren’t physical withdrawal. They’re caused by your brain expecting a different balance of neurotransmitters than it receives. Your body also adapts in other ways to drugs to prevent them from killing you as you increase your dosage, but the entire reason you increase your dosage is because the prefrontal cortex is “designed” to decrease the stimulation of the same behavior as the habit is learned, and the goal of hard drugs (again, along with other thrill seeking behavior, and gambling) is to chase that high stimulation. That loop is why you constantly need more, and it’s the habit formation of that loop that defines addiction.
This is all very basic, well understood stuff. The actual low level details are hard to pin down, but the fact that addiction is habit formation caused by neurotransmitter fuckery isn’t something that’s debated by anyone relevant.
So well understood caffeine isn’t in the list of compounds forming addictions. You’re the ignorant one trying to equate a habit with addiction. I look forward to seeing you protesting in front of Starbucks and getting laughed at.
habit formation of that loop that defines addiction.
No, it’s the negative impact on lifestyle that defines addiction actually, but you can get addicted before even having formed a habit. Smoke a couple cigarettes the first day and you’ll have withdrawal the next. A couple hard drugs literally get you hooked first try.
Seriously, stop polluting this community with your ignorance.
Why would I advocate banning an addictive substance exactly?
I don’t support hard drugs being criminalized.
So you support freely dispensing addictive substances to kids? Because there’s nothing stopping kids from buying coffee from Starbucks.
For some people, there is no addiction. I would swap between coffee and tea for my morning drink, but it was never an energy boost, just a warm drink for the winter months. Aside from that caffeine has no effect. I stopped drinking both cold turkey in an attempt to cut back on my sugar consumption and had no withdrawals.
