this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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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?

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[–] randomdeadguy 89 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you drink it regularly it's already got you

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I smoke cigarettes every day, but that doesn't mean I'm addicted! i say this while fully addicted to caffeine

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago

"I can quit any time I want. I just don't want to."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I smoked for a year, then one day I smoked and it made me feel like shit. No nice dizzy buzz, just felt like garbage. Didn’t smoke the rest of the day. Tried again the next day, felt like shit. I just stopped after that. I feel so lucky, I didn’t get any other cravings or withdrawals. My brain just suddenly associated smoking with that terrible feeling.

I tried more times over the years (this was over a decade ago) and the same feeling each time. The only time it feels good anymore is if I’m absolutely SMASHED.

Coffee did the same thing to me. My body feels AWFUL if I drink much caffeine anymore. This one I am NOT thankful for. I love black coldbrew and I miss it so very much. I’ve tried some decaf but it just felt like drinking NA beer. I hope one day I can drink coffee again.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I went from drinking 6-8 cups every day to zero when COVID popped off and suffered zero headaches. My body chemistry is weird.

[–] Carrolade 35 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] shalafi 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] jaycifer 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Astronauticaldb 2 points 1 month ago

This is the best explanation for caffeine withdrawals that I've read. Thanks for the enlightenment!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago
[–] zxqwas 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Drink a few cups a day for a year and then cut back to no caffeine.

If you get a headache you were addicted.

[–] potpotato 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] Nikelui 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Isn't that the same thing?

[–] potpotato 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] irotsoma 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Depends on context. If you're discussing it in a medical context, the terms are separate. Dependence refers specifically to the severity of the effects of stopping the drug, both physical and psychological. Addiction is more about the behavior of a person when exposed to the substances and is not as strictly defined of a term in a medical sense. But generally, dependence is a component addiction. So not all dependence results from addiction, but most definitions of addiction include some kind of dependence.

So, not the same thing, but also, outside of medical context, most people don't differentiate the terms and use the word addiction to refer to the dependence component of addiction.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

When the best part of waking up is folger’s in your cup that’s addiction

🎵

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Joke's on you, I have headaches either way!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] RBWells 17 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

I have relatives who would get headaches if they didn't get it. People's bodies respond differently.

[–] Volkditty 16 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] Duamerthrax 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Zarxrax 9 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

with a hypodermic needle into the vein of your penis

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Was that not part of your education Dr.?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I specialized in an adjacent field of study, actually.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Tell me taint so

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

might be worth it to consider that addiction is only a colloquial word for substance use disorders, which have strict diagnostic criteria

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Friend of mine used to drink quadruple espressos at Starbucks every day, then go back to work. I was talking to him last week and told him about remembering the time he called me from the Starbucks and his name was called with the quadruple order. He laughed and said he actually bumped it up to quintuple at one point.

Then he sold his house and moved to another state, living out in the woods. Asked him how he managed without a Starbucks nearby. He said he now does Keurig espresso shots every morning. But it was getting expensive, since he had to press 10 pods in one sitting!

Moral of the story: he's perfectly functional and productive. Go nuts!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

Jesus what an inefficient way of doing it. Just buy a grinder and beans

[–] roofuskit 4 points 1 month ago

There's plenty of health costs to being addicted to caffeine. This devil may care attitude is dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Get out while you still can. It's too late for me.

[–] Etterra 4 points 1 month ago

Drink 5 cups of coffee every day for 6 months. Then quit all at once. That misery you're experiencing? That's called withdrawal. If you simply decrease your intake to 2 cups a day, you'll feel less awake and alert. That's how you know dependency has set in. If you can't take those symptoms and go back to 5 cups a day, congrats you're addicted just like normal people.

Also your English sucks, but that's unrelated.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I did not know that! That's clearer wording, I'll use it in the future

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

With energy drinks you get the fun double whammy addiction of both caffeine and sugar!

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