A week without caffeine ...
I'm not even sure what compelled me to do this other than I felt like I was consuming WAY too much caffeine, but a week and a lot of massive headaches later, I think I'm off the stuff other than a single cup of green tea in the morning. For those of you looking to kick the caffeine habit, here's a random list of what I experienced:
* Headaches. Bad ones. Not as bad as the migraines I get from time to time, but it wasn't at all pleasant. Take some ibuprofen (not Excedrin or "migraine" pills--those have caffeine) and grin and bear it.
* Expect to be absolutely dead tired for a few days. The first couple of days was the worst for me.
* Even when I wasn't sleepy tired, I felt like I was getting over the flu--muscle aches, physical sluggishness, etc.
* I was pretty irritable but not as much as I thought I would have been. I'm sure this varies from person to person. And now that I'm virtually 100% off the stuff how do I feel? Great!
* My energy level is more constant throughout the day
* Biggest thing: I wake up in the morning not tired! I'm ready to get up because I actually got quality sleep and I'm not already suffering from withdrawal.
* I'm a lot less anxious about things, and I feel like I can do more quality work because I'm not thinking about 100 things at once and feeling like I'm behind on all of them. Or if I do think that, I don't get as stressed out about it. So for me it took a good solid week. Yesterday was the first day I felt like my old self again; well, a calmer, gentler version of my old self actually. Was a tiny slice of hell for a week but I'm really glad I did it. Interesting info here:
http://www.caffeinedependence.org/caffeine_dependence.html Anyone else go through this recently? How did it go for you?
* Headaches. Bad ones. Not as bad as the migraines I get from time to time, but it wasn't at all pleasant. Take some ibuprofen (not Excedrin or "migraine" pills--those have caffeine) and grin and bear it.
* Expect to be absolutely dead tired for a few days. The first couple of days was the worst for me.
* Even when I wasn't sleepy tired, I felt like I was getting over the flu--muscle aches, physical sluggishness, etc.
* I was pretty irritable but not as much as I thought I would have been. I'm sure this varies from person to person. And now that I'm virtually 100% off the stuff how do I feel? Great!
* My energy level is more constant throughout the day
* Biggest thing: I wake up in the morning not tired! I'm ready to get up because I actually got quality sleep and I'm not already suffering from withdrawal.
* I'm a lot less anxious about things, and I feel like I can do more quality work because I'm not thinking about 100 things at once and feeling like I'm behind on all of them. Or if I do think that, I don't get as stressed out about it. So for me it took a good solid week. Yesterday was the first day I felt like my old self again; well, a calmer, gentler version of my old self actually. Was a tiny slice of hell for a week but I'm really glad I did it. Interesting info here:
http://www.caffeinedependence.org/caffeine_dependence.html Anyone else go through this recently? How did it go for you?
