i think i have a serious caffeine addiction. i never get headaches, unless it's a hangover, and those are generally mild.
but lately, i've been getting headaches a lot more. in fact, i have one at the moment. abby suggested a week or so ago that the problem might be a lack of caffeine, so i drank some coffee (or maybe a coke), and everything was right as rain.
this suprised me, because i thought my caffeine intake was already pretty low - no more all night coffee-fueled programming stints - and i didn't think that you could be addicted to caffeine just from 1-2 sodas a day. but i guess you can!
i've been trying to stop drinking soda, especially at work, because my new dentist explained to me that my habit of sipping mountain dew while coding away all day was going to eventually result in a marshmellow mouth. teeth don't like soda.
at the same time, i hate these fucking headaches.
wikipedia says that the effects should go away after 1-5 days... but i wonder how little intake you have to have to truly beat it? and how quickly the addiction returns...
i think i will just have some crappy vending machine coffee and embrace the addiction!
ed [email] said at 7:14 PM 07-28-2006: Dude, I kicked caffiene and it SUCKED bad. At the time. Now, I'm glad.
I used to drink a 2-liter of Mountain Dew (or more) daily. After my gastric bypass, when I couldn't handle the sugar any longer, I went to Diet Mt. Dew (all the caffiene, none of the calories).
A bit later, I attended a conference on health, which included a section on how bad caffiene is for you. I swore it off completely.
It took 7-10 days for the awful headaches to stop. I thought it was migraines, but I knew it was withdrawal. I stuck it out, and after a couple of weeks, I was "cured".
Those two weeks were Hell, to be sure. But honestly, I feel much better (and much more alert and awake, without stimulants!) since kicking the habit.
Now I avoid - at all costs - caffiene. And since sugar's a no-no for me too, I will pick water over (even decaf) iced tea (unless it's unsweetened, which is hard to find) or Sprite or any other sugar/caffiene choice when dining out. It's so totally worth it, once the DTs stop. I promise.
(Disclaimer: I do drink Sierra Mist Free (which contains aspertame) with some regularity, but the ratio is most often a gallon of water to one 12-ounce can of SMF. I figure that's okay, in the grand scheme. And presented with a choice of no sugar or no caffiene, I will pick Diet Coke over Sprite anyday - because caffiene won't send me into sugar shock. But it's rare when water isn't an option... the best one.)
brandonA [email] said at 7:33 PM 07-28-2006: I'm a huge iced tea fanatic, but it always pissed me off when I would go to a place in LA and all they served was sweet tea, since I don't like sugary stuff much. Therefore I'm pretty happy with tea in the NW.
Why can't you sweet tea people just add the sugar?
myriam [email] said at 9:44 PM 07-28-2006: Seriously. This is one of the things I love about Starbucks, btw: they serve excellent unsweetened black iced tea. Mmm!
josh [email] said at 2:44 PM 07-29-2006: what the fuck, you are from the south - unsweetened tea with sugar added is not fucking sweet tea, UNLESS they also give you a raging fire at your table to boil the sugar into the tea!
brandon [email] said at 7:22 PM 07-29-2006: Yeah, show some fucking respect for Southern Sweet Tea. Most of our dead grandmothers made it and that's all of them we have left.
brandon [email] said at 7:26 PM 07-28-2006: bummer, dude. wikipedia is full of shit. i've tried going off caffeine cold turkey and stepwise and it's worse than quiting smoking. at least we won't have kidney stones or alzheimer's.
peter [email] said at 9:44 PM 07-28-2006: I can't imagine sustaining my caffeine addiction on soda. You should drink iced americanos to rinse down the post nasal drip from bumping no-doz like I do.
denman [email] said at 1:42 AM 07-29-2006: Yeah, I recently cut my caffiene habit by 85% (jeezzzzz and my only vice..), and I went through two weeks of torture (so bad people noticed). However, after that I feel better than I have in a long time.
gen [email] said at 1:37 PM 07-29-2006: Actually, I guess it's a little known fact that caffeine can help relieve headaches - caffeine is an adenosine antagonist (causing vasoconstriction) sometimes used as a headache and migraine medicine. I first heard about this effect of caffeine in medical school - the research is still new and controversial. So the fact that your headache went away with caffeine intake does not necessarily imply that you have a caffeine addiction.
Obviously, migraine and cluster headache can be associated with heavy caffeine intake, and caffeine withdrawal can cause a headache resembling migraine.
So you may or may not have been experiencing caffeine withdrawal. Personnally, I think that your daily intake of caffeine does not qualify as heavy, and in most studies, caffeine-related adverse effects are seen at 4+ cups of coffee per day (it's even possible that health benefits occur at lower doses).
myriam [email] said at 1:45 PM 07-29-2006: Excedrin is only differentiated as "headache medicine" because it has caffeine in it.
Also, Josh, it could be that the sugar in your sodas is what's giving you problems. Soda has major sugar content and sugar wreaks havoc with your body--we're not biologically made to eat so much sugar and it'll fuck your shit up in weird ways. So that could be it.
josh [email] said at 2:46 PM 07-29-2006: i find this unlikely since my pounding headache went away after two cups (small ass vending machine cups) of black coffee.
gen [email] said at 1:32 AM 07-30-2006: I think the coffee helped relieve the headache, but given your low to moderate daily caffeine intake, I doubt that caffeine withdrawal caused the headache in the first place. Many things can cause headaches, from vision/eye problems, to dehydration, to viral infections like the flu, etc.
If you think that it's the caffeine - and you seem to be leaning towards that hypothesis - why don't you try a little experiment: deprive yourself of caffeine for a few days and see what happens, then drink your usual caffeine dose and see what happens. If you get headaches regardless of caffeine intake - it's probably something else causing the headaches.
josh [email] said at 12:43 PM 07-30-2006: i counted and yesterday i had 5-6 sodas (2 with lunch, 1 at home, 1 at dinner, 1 large one at the movies) and a coffee... i think i just drink more caffeine than i think i do.
julie [email] said at 6:49 PM 07-29-2006: I have this, too, even though I've cut back to 1 (large) cup of tea in the morning and 1 can of soda in the afternoon. On weekends when I'm not in my normal (office) routine, and I forget to have caffeine, it's like someone is stabbig knitting needles into my forehead. Jesus.
