People really do underestimate the effects caffeine has on mental and physical health. And how addictive it is. It’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even see it as a drug. But it is a drug – a relatively mild one, but still.
Try going completely without caffeine for a month, see how you feel. You’ll need a week or two to get past the withdrawal symptoms – mostly headaches and lethargy – but after that, I bet you’ll feel overall much better.
It’s even worse here in Melbourne, since from a young age you’re told that “Melbourne is the coffee capital of Australia”, and that everyone drinks it, which normalises it so much that you can genuinely be peer pressured into drinking it, and that addiction is encouraged.
My dad for example has around 5 coffees daily, and he even told me a story of him at work, where he grabbed an entire 3 litre bottle of milk from the fridge, drank a little to put a series of coffee shots into it and shake it, and even then people only found it amusing for like 10 minutes. Not to mention how his workplace apparently felt like the gloomy aftermath of a war when both coffee machines (which could each make two coffees simultaneously) were broken.
I’ve tried that a couple times and it wasn’t hard to give up but eventually went back to it. Seems not just an addiction and withdrawal thing, but that I really function better with caffeine in my system than without. I think a majority of software developers / coders / IT geeks just need their caffeine the way spacing guild steersmen need their spice.
If I wasn’t compelled to get up three hours earlier than I want to every day to go spend 8 hours sitting at a desk squinting at a dense pile of multicolored abbreviations and punctuation marks, I’d drop the coffee, no problem. It’s not what I want to be doing with my life but it is what makes enough money to survive in my area and drinking coffee makes it tolerable.
I’m sure my ideal job- something which isn’t real in this universe- would be one where I could function better on weed.
I’ve joked about how normalized it is that we use caffeine as a drug to feed an almost civilizational addiction.
Imagine checking into a motel room and saying “Oh, man, this motel doesn’t even have a spoon and a lighter to cook my heroin in! What a cheap joint this place is!” or going to a social gathering and wondering “I wonder when someone is going to offer me some meth. It’s only polite!”
I take energy shots roughly 2 times a week as needed, and occasionally enjoy a coffee with a cigar, but I have friends who are legitimately physically addicted to it. It’s crazy how normalized it is.
Caffeine doesn’t seem to have any effect on me at all. I have weak tea for breakfast every day (routine/habit thing). And I believe dark chocolate is quite high in caffeine. But I gave up chocolate for about a year and all that happened was I put on tons of weight on my tummy. And it went back down when giving up chocolate was obviously not making me lose weight (and no, I wasn’t replacing the chocolate with other high calorie things. I actually introduced more junk back into my diet after I went back to chocolate).
The guys at work used to give me caffeine drinks, strong coffee and caffeine gels to see if they could up my perkiness even more, but I felt just the same. I kinda wish I could experience a caffeine buzz, but at the same time, I can’t really think of any times I’d have needed it.
And apparently you are not meant to drink a whole mug coffee in one go.
It’s so interesting how it can be so deeply affecting on people while having much less on others. I can go from coffee and energy drink during the day to no caffeine and have not much difference but that’s likely because of drinking caffeine for so long. I do feel sleep is better after no caffeine for 2-3 weeks even when I didn’t drink any late in the day
People really do underestimate the effects caffeine has on mental and physical health. And how addictive it is. It’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even see it as a drug. But it is a drug – a relatively mild one, but still.
Try going completely without caffeine for a month, see how you feel. You’ll need a week or two to get past the withdrawal symptoms – mostly headaches and lethargy – but after that, I bet you’ll feel overall much better.
It’s even worse here in Melbourne, since from a young age you’re told that “Melbourne is the coffee capital of Australia”, and that everyone drinks it, which normalises it so much that you can genuinely be peer pressured into drinking it, and that addiction is encouraged.
My dad for example has around 5 coffees daily, and he even told me a story of him at work, where he grabbed an entire 3 litre bottle of milk from the fridge, drank a little to put a series of coffee shots into it and shake it, and even then people only found it amusing for like 10 minutes. Not to mention how his workplace apparently felt like the gloomy aftermath of a war when both coffee machines (which could each make two coffees simultaneously) were broken.
Just ask for a tea
And yes from Melbourne also. People don’t want to have coffee with you, they want to sit with you
I’ve tried that a couple times and it wasn’t hard to give up but eventually went back to it. Seems not just an addiction and withdrawal thing, but that I really function better with caffeine in my system than without. I think a majority of software developers / coders / IT geeks just need their caffeine the way spacing guild steersmen need their spice.
If I wasn’t compelled to get up three hours earlier than I want to every day to go spend 8 hours sitting at a desk squinting at a dense pile of multicolored abbreviations and punctuation marks, I’d drop the coffee, no problem. It’s not what I want to be doing with my life but it is what makes enough money to survive in my area and drinking coffee makes it tolerable.
I’m sure my ideal job- something which isn’t real in this universe- would be one where I could function better on weed.
I’ve joked about how normalized it is that we use caffeine as a drug to feed an almost civilizational addiction.
Imagine checking into a motel room and saying “Oh, man, this motel doesn’t even have a spoon and a lighter to cook my heroin in! What a cheap joint this place is!” or going to a social gathering and wondering “I wonder when someone is going to offer me some meth. It’s only polite!”
And yet, here we are, a world of addicts.
I take energy shots roughly 2 times a week as needed, and occasionally enjoy a coffee with a cigar, but I have friends who are legitimately physically addicted to it. It’s crazy how normalized it is.
Caffeine doesn’t seem to have any effect on me at all. I have weak tea for breakfast every day (routine/habit thing). And I believe dark chocolate is quite high in caffeine. But I gave up chocolate for about a year and all that happened was I put on tons of weight on my tummy. And it went back down when giving up chocolate was obviously not making me lose weight (and no, I wasn’t replacing the chocolate with other high calorie things. I actually introduced more junk back into my diet after I went back to chocolate).
The guys at work used to give me caffeine drinks, strong coffee and caffeine gels to see if they could up my perkiness even more, but I felt just the same. I kinda wish I could experience a caffeine buzz, but at the same time, I can’t really think of any times I’d have needed it.
And apparently you are not meant to drink a whole mug coffee in one go.
It’s so interesting how it can be so deeply affecting on people while having much less on others. I can go from coffee and energy drink during the day to no caffeine and have not much difference but that’s likely because of drinking caffeine for so long. I do feel sleep is better after no caffeine for 2-3 weeks even when I didn’t drink any late in the day