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?

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 days 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.

  • djsoren19@yiffit.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    45
    ·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 days 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.

  • zxqwas@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    6 days ago

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

    If you get a headache you were addicted.

          • irotsoma@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            5 days ago

            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.

  • jaycifer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    30
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Carrolade@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    7 days ago

    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@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 days 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.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 days ago

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

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    6 days 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.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    7 days 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.

  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    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!

  • all-knight-party@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      7 days ago

      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.

      • all-knight-party@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 days ago

        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