To determine whether you're a slow or fast caffeine metabolizer..
Wait for a sale at Nebula.org. Get your whole genome sequenced. ~$200. Having your whole genome sequenced could have added benefits down the road.
Download the .BAM file. It will be several gigabytes.
Use WSG Extract to generate the 23andMe raw data files.
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/convert-whole-genome-file/
Connect that data file to Genetic Life Hacks. Take a look at the article on CYP1A2. This will show you whether you're a slow metabolizer or not.
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/liver-detox-genes-cyp1a2/
The linked data file at GLF never uploads to the server. All analysis is local, client side.
Thank you for this, I've wanted to do genetic testing for years but don't want it to be stored on anyone's server. Can you explain how it's not stored on any server? Like, you're downloading the .BAM file from Nebula; doesn't that mean they hold onto the data?
Nebula.org does the data sequencing.
They support anonymous sequencing.
https://nebula.org/anonymous-seq/
Genetic Life Hacks provides the analysis on a number of health and disease related topics. Their analysis is simply allele matching for any given topic (string comparisons). It's all done within the browser.
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/faqs-about-genetics/#:~:tex...
> They support anonymous sequencing.
> https://nebula.org/anonymous-seq/
The button to purchase says "coming soon" for me.
Same for me (in the US).
...and now it's gone
Anyone who does the actual sequencing has the data. I think they mean the final service that does the analysis runs locally in the browser. You still need to trust whoever does the sequencing.
I think the point is to prevent the data from being linked to your identify (name, address etc.).
Your identity can be reconstructed from relative's samples. If you submit your sequence its out of your hands forever. The only way to do this privately is to do the sequencing in your own lab.
I sequence my own genome in my own private lab. At least weekly. The rush when the sequencing begins. I almost can't help but sequence all over the place.
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23andme has a "report" about this called Caffeine Consumption. The markers they use are rs4410790 and rs2472297, whereas geneticlifehacks.com talks about rs762551. I'm not sure what to make of that, since that second 23andme one is "near" cyp1a2.
https://you.23andme.com/reports/wellness2.caffeine_consumpti...
This article seems to tie them together nicely: https://www.gbhealthwatch.com/Trait-Caffeine-Consumption.php
You can also search for the CYP1A2 gene using Nebula's gene analysis: https://portal.nebula.org/reporting/gene-analysis
Look at the variants to see if you have rs762551--that means you're a rapid metabolizer.
When I think about sequencing, I think about verifiability. With anonymity blinkers on, you could give me several gigabytes of random data and I'd have limited recourse.
Will Nebula give me an intelligible whole-genome data file if I happen to be a Golden Retriever?
Totally understand.
Luckily I had previously completed 23andMe, so I could cross reference that data with that generated by Nebula/WSG Extract.
My caffeine metabolism did match up.
You could check it against things that you know about yourself.
I know from my clinical history that I have mutations in the UGT1A1 gene that cause me to metabolize bilirubin differently. That is a relatively common mutation that occurs in roughly 2-3 percent of people. Unless I am lucky enough to have a random result that coincides with this, I could be fairly certain that this data is somewhat reliable. The problem thought, I don't know the degree of reliability.
nebula genomics uses chinese labs - would be careful about your data
Why?
Is the "Ultra Deep" analysis worth it over the standard "Deep" analysis?
When you are interested in heath issues, probably yes. For hobbyist the standard coverage will be enough.
I'm curious if there is a basic set of tests you can do with drinking locally to know one way or the other, as well?
Measure your blood pressure.
Measure before consumption. Take three different readings.
Measure at one hour intervals after caffeine consumption.
Fast metabolizers BP should return to baseline within a couple of hours.
Mine would remain elevated for 10-12 hours.
I'm assuming elevated is purely relative to your baseline?
Oddly, I don't think my blood pressure changes much at all. Will try this test again, though.
Did you measure your baseline blood pressure without caffeine as well?
How many hours/days/weeks should you be caffeine free for the baseline BP?
A couple of days.
I usually have to go through a withdrawal headache first.
Yes.
> Wait for a sale at Nebula.org. Get your whole genome sequenced. ~$200
Does anyone track these sales and send notifications? How exactly would someone wait for a sale?
nebula.org privacy policy.
Do you have other alternatives which are more privacy preserving? The last time I heard about 23andMe was here in HN [1].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
this is wonderful.
can i ask how you went about arriving at this workflow?
Here's the thing: never mind getting to bed, that will happen when you are tired enough.
How about sleeping through the night? A different function with different math.
My model is caffeine is well-known for having a half-life, from three to six hours depending. That means a geometric fall in effective caffeine in your system after you go to sleep (you don't continue ingesting caffeine in your sleep do you? Sleep-brewing?)
What is the function for 'tired enough'? That is, how does 'sleepiness' decline over the sleep period? Because, when the functions cross (sleepiness drops below the caffeine line) then Awake! That's often about 3AM for me.
If the sleepiness function is a different time-constant, or is more nearly linear (as I suspect, as long as you get enough cobbled-together hours of sleep you are functional which sounds like a simple unweighted sum) then inevitably sleepiness will fall faster (cross the caffeine-left-in-system curve).
At that point you can get up, knock around doing whatever, getting sleepier again. Once caffeine drops below your remaining sleepiness you can get a few more winks.
And wake up shortly after, another hour or half-hour, whatever. Repeat the rest of the night in ever-shorter cycles as your curves both approach the x-axis.
Anyway it describes my sleep behavior nearly perfectly.
And there are at least 3 different metabolic rates for caffeine, rapid, standard, and slow. As a holder of the slow gene, none of these calculators work for me since for me caffeine has a ~9 hour half life. Caffeine after about 11 am is a bad plan.
Pretty sure there's some age related effects too. Over the last ~20 years I've gone from being happily able to drink coffee after dinner, through not being able to drink it after 5pm or so, and now to having the espresso machine automatically shut off at 2:30pm - otherwise my sleep quality plummets.
I'm 57 now, I started noticing poor sleep related to late night coffee in my mid 30s. I do got fairly hard earlier in the day though, I've usually had 4 double espressos (somewhere between 17-21g of beans) by mid morning, and usually another one or two before my current self imposed 2:30pm cut off.
It's so funny but encouraging to read this. I started drinking coffee in college and could easily finish a whole pot, or have 3 Starbucks venti drip coffees in a day, but I was not sensitive to caffeine at all and could sleep right after. It also didn't seem to have that wake-up alertness effect either
Then something changed, and now I am sensitive to it like a normal person. It does wake me up after a sip or two I can feel it, and I can easily have 'too much' if I have 2-3 cups in too short of a timespan, so I've had to learn to slow down.
Having said all of this, my personal 'last call' is 6pm, with the idea that I will be able to sleep at 12-1am. But if I drink coffee after 6pm I might be delaying that bedtime a little.
It will be interesting to learn more about the effects of how much, and how long. Should I be tapering off hours before 'last call'? What is the best 'last call' time in the day and should it be earlier? I'll have to track some of this and figure this out!
My problem isn't falling asleep, it's staying asleep. Restlessness at night has become more noticeable as I've gotten older. Cutting down on caffeine, especially later in the day, seems to have helped some. I now have one cup of coffee in the morning, and a cup or two of tea in the early afternoon. This is instead of the two cups in the morning and espresso in the afternoon that I used to have before.
Everyone is different, but if you aren't already, and have the time for it, try incorporating more physical exercise into your day. That helped me deal with restlessness at night
For me personally, exercising makes me wake up multiple times at night and makes it hard to go back to sleep. I already never exercise after 6:00pm, it still happens. Any thoughts why?
Update: did a quick search, Reddit says it could be overtraining or dehydration.
You might try slow release melatonin. I've found melatonin increases the vividness of dreaming, though.
Or reduce the dosage. I've had much better sleep on 1mg than the 3+ mg you find most places.
1mg should really be the max dosage that is available. Most people should take 0.3mg.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E4cKD9iTWHaE7f3AJ/melatonin-...
Yeah it's well known that liver enzyme efficiency declines slightly with age. Also you may unknowingly run into medications that inhibit it, which gets more likely as you age and accumulate chronic issues requiring medication.
I'm envious of your 100 grams of beans a day consumption - if I have more than about 10g / one single espresso I'm a wreck for the entire day! The area-under-curve for slow metabolizers is 9 times larger - 3x the duration, 3x the concentration.
Given caffeine has a half life in the body, couldn’t you have less coffee but drink it for longer in the day and have the same result?
Honestly, I've noticed how sensitive I am to caffeine when I have reduced my caffeine intake. I think that it is important to clean the body before starting to observe, understand, and make conclusions about how a particular thing affects the body. Let it be caffeine, alcohol, or anything else.
Caffeine metabolism becomes less effective as you age
This is interesting.
One thing I am fairly sure about, the amount of caffeine makes a difference to my sleep quality. If I have a single cup of coffee in the morning, no more, then my sleep quality seems not to be impacted. If I have several cups of coffee, only in the morning, I feel great for the morning, very stimulated, but my sleep is impacted. I wake up with a buzzing several times a night and have never been able to understand what is causing the buzzing.
>have never been able to understand what is causing the buzzing
Most likely it's the leftover caffeine still in your system that's beyond your personal threshold for quality sleep.
I have the same issue. If I drink two double espressos very early in the morning and then no more after that for the rest of the day, I have no problem falling asleep at night but I keep waking up several times during the night with a buzz, while my gf can drink 3 coffees per day and an espresso after dinner and still sleep.
The only way to get rid of this is reduce my caffeine intake to absolute zero, which is hard when you get the smell and taste of fresh single origin beans. I guess some people are just that much more sensitive to it than others, genetics be dammed. I wish there was a cheap way to measure the caffeine content in the coffees I make so I can precisely determine my personal threshold.
> have no problem falling asleep at night but I keep waking up several times during the night with a buzz.
Yes, that's me. I can fall asleep, but I wake up a lot.
Try drinking more water. When I drink a lot of water, I feel that I can drink a cup much later in the evening and sleep much better at night. I highly suspect that the water intake and release washes caffeine away with it (e.g. helps with whatever mechanism caffeine is removed be it filtration, chemical, metabolism, etc). There are lots of other benefits to remaining well-hydrated, I wish that I understood this decades ago.
Just curious, but how do you know that you are a "holder of the slow gene"?
a) personal experience, also my mom carries it. b) I had my exome sequenced in 2018, and Promethease generated a report from it that showed slow metabolizer in cyp1a2
Probably though 23andMe and the CYP450 enzyme CYP1A2.
Actually went through fullgenomes.com - they apparently don't offer exome sequencing any more but for under $1200 getting your genome sequenced is interesting.
If you ask anyone who works in genetics, though, they'll advise you never to do it. It can be bad news, but there's virtually no good news there.
It's useful to have as a resource that you can dip into; for instance to check a specific thing like "how fast do I metabolise caffeine (bad example as youc can get that from a SNV checking service like 23&Me. However, never ever EVER dump your whole genome into a program that will output every match for some potential condition. Now that's not for the reason you might immediately think ("Oh no look at all the bad stuff"), but rather because the databases that tools like this use are pretty chock full of junk where some researcher threw in a reference - along with a few thousand others - to say that their particular piece of research implicates this gene at this poistion with this variant. I've seen it with my own eyes, and a lot of it is very low quality. You therefore need highly curated databases where the genotype-phenotype associations are well-defined and thoroughly researched. You'll spend the rest of your life either trying to prove/disprove every potential false positive, or just worrying yourself needlessly. So, yeah, it's not a bad resource to have if you can be responsible with it.
Hmm, now I'm interested in seeing if an LLM could be finetuned to give an effective quality score on such a study.
I had mine run twice through 23andMe just to make sure they didn’t get something wrong. I tried to get my full genome once but the company screwed me over.
And I take exception to your “no good news”.
I discovered a gene polymorphism that led to the discovery the reason for my immune deficiency and mood disorder.
I found it gave me agency as well since I know that these genes are all risk genes and not fully determinant genes.
It's funny because your post in another thread is one of the reasons I brought it up here.
I would regard that as one of the exceptions in the "virtually no" caveat.
Nowadays whole genome sequencing can be done for $300-400 (for 30x WGS, with 100x around $1000?), it's been on my TODO list for a few years.
Mm, there is more than one function fwiw you're looking at. Biological processes are complicated.
You may enjoy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9541543/ which explains more than I can
Please take in to account slow vs fast caffeine metabolizer.
"CYP1A2 Gene: Fast or Slow Caffeine Metabolizer?"
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/liver-detox-genes-cyp1a2/
This is one of those subjects where people argue past each "I can drink a cup of coffee and sleep like a baby!" vs "One cup of coffee in the morning and my sleep quality is impacted". And neither understands how the other can have a vastly different personal experience.
This extends to any online discussion regarding weight loss/gain, politics, wars, etc.
I think people simplify this too much. Fast metabolizer doesn't mean it just doesn't effect you.
I am an ultra-fast metabolizer on CYP1A2 based on genetic tests and yet I can still easily get negative side effects from caffeine. This is not an on/off thing, most of these metabolizers are rated on scale of 4 or 5 levels IIRC. I have been told the understanding of some of these metabolizer tests is not that great. They can test for it but they don't really understand how it changes things that well. The bigger thing with these tests is they point towards people of different genetic backgrounds needing different drugs or different doses of some drugs when it comes to certain treatments and that typical drug guidelines are heavily biased towards male patients with typical Northern European genetic characteristics. If you're an ultra-fast caffeine metabolizer there are apparently some drugs that don't work correctly on you.
I typically try to limit myself to only 2 caffeine drinks a day.
It's possible the tests can be wrong I guess. It's also possible I still metabolize it faster than usual but I have some other thing going on that makes me get jittery or anxious from caffeine easily. I suspect what happens is I just get a rush of the effects and then they wear off faster than usual but with a larger effect.
Oh wow, I'm surprised that this is not common knowledge given how common coffee is. I didn't even know it was a thing.
File me under "A cup of coffee feels like a small dose of MDMA"
1) Slow metabolizers of caffeine have an increased risk of hypertension or a cardiac event with coffee consumption. Whereas fast metabolizers may have net positive health benefits from coffee consumption.
2) We genuinely lack fidelity on so much subjects that we confidently pontificate about. I've read several reports that coffee is a "net positive". Imagine niavely following that advice your entire life only to realize you're a slow metabolizer and you've been increasing your risk by consuming?
There probably so many aspects to our lives that have genetic components that no one knows about or acknowledges. Even to the point where people will shame others.
"I don't understand, I can drink a whole pot of coffee before bed and sleep like a baby. You'll be fine."
"I don't understand, why can't you just eat less and exercise more and then maybe you wouldn't be a fatty?"
They have no clue.
For anyone else who discovers they are a fast metabolizer of coffee: try eating a big breakfast before drinking coffee to slow absorption.
I wanted to be a coffee drinker for YEARS, but it made me really high, and I felt super tired later in the day. I don't know why I didn't connect the dots until I searched my genome, but once you know whether you are a fast or slow metabolizer you can play all sorts of games. I can now drink coffee before dinner, and the crash hits right at bedtime.
For me, I found the secret was eating anything other than cereal (or egg & toast) for breakfast. Those seem to make me jittery. Eating something like yesterday's dinner leftovers for breakfast turns the coffee into an on switch instead of leaving me exhausted but adding jitters and sleeplessness.
Lucky you! LOL. Hope it doesnt come with the nasty comedown :P
It's a thin silver lining.
I can't have coffee multiple days in a row, else I'll experience panic attacks (and in that moment i think I'm going to die, nearly reaching for a phone to call 911). And can't partake in coffee ~95% of the time (friends don't have decaf, a ton of nicer coffee shops don't either, and often decaf is neglected so i'm drinking black water). I still love the taste of coffee, so i've kinda been robbed of that unless i'm at home and can make it myself.
Also needs to take into account if/when you're exposed to nicotine since nicotine can affect caffeine metabolism by CYP1A2 depending on your genotype.
I think this is me, interesting.
This looks like a windows only app, here's another source, that runs on the browser. https://www.gkbrk.com/wiki/caffeine-halflife/.
Not affiliated, I just use it
Also, Smokers metabolise caffeine faster. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/657717/
They only have Windows binaries, but it's just Python 3 with Tkinter. Should work anywhere if you have a GUI-enabled Python (eg python3-tkinter).
This is such a foreign way of looking at caffeine to me. I've got no problems falling asleep. My constraint is that the more caffeine I have today, the more I will need tomorrow morning to even get started feeling like a person.
Tolerance was my only issue for the longest time too. But in the last few years I started to get mild insomnia in the beginning of the night if I had coffee late in the day. It wasn’t making me feel active or awake but just unable to fall asleep even if I was tired. So I’d spend about 2-3 hours unable to fall asleep while tired. Now my cutoff is actually 11:00 and I try not to have any after that
I have some of those friends too. They can drink coffee at 11pm and sleep at 11.30. Meanwhile I can't sleep until 8 hours after drinking coffee. I don't know whether this is differing sensitivity to coffee or something else (better production of whatever it is that makes you tired at night perhaps).
A clear and curious correlation is this: The same people that can drink coffee late can and do take naps during the day too. That is: if they lie down in the middle of the afternoon, they could sleep for a little while. That's completely foreign to me, I have never in my soon 50 year life been able to take a daytime nap (at least not since I was 5). It's curious that it seems like a related capability, in my small sample.
Well said. I find starting the day with hydration helps me understand where I actually am in terms of rest before caffiene.
The advice going around to try and delay coffee for the first 90 minutes after waking seems to make a difference for me too, any unprocessed adenosine can be handled by my brain, and then caffeine is ready.
One explanation: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/maximizing-your-morning-coffe...
This is called tolerance. You require more caffeine just to reach baseline and it no longer confers any stimulation.
same here.. i can consume a caffiene ladened drink and go to sleep no issues.
idk what other quirks you've got but this one turned out to be an adhd symptom for me lol
Coffee actually works on me now I'm on stimulant medication haha
I've found that high caffeine drinks make me very sleepy. I'm still trying to get hold of some kind of ADHD medication
Yup, I could easily finish a meal out or whatever with coffee or two with no worries on how it'll affect my sleep (if anything the stimulation brought my dopamine up enough to sleep)
First day I was put on (low dose) stimulant meds I slept for 16 hours haha
Question, how old are you? I lost the ability to be able to drink coffee late at night and still sleep well in my mid/late 30s.
Also, coffee power naps are totally a thing, I get a real boost if I drink a coffee and immediately lie down to sleep, then get woken up 25-30 mins later when the caffeine is doing it's thing. Definitely end up feeling better and able to concentrate deeper into the afternoon when I do that round lunchtime, compared to taking a nap without first having coffee.
50 this year. Though I can no longer drink coffee as it now gives me IBS like issues. Other forms of caffeine are fine, just not coffee or decaf or instant. :-(
It's worth noting, from a youngish age (15) I spent about 10 years working as a Baker, sleeping all sorts of strange hours... so I developed by nessacity the ability to put my head down and sleep no matter whats going on. Caffeine has never hindered that in me.
Coffee powernaps sounds wonderfull and totally logical. I might have to experiment with that concept!
Quitting caffeine was one of the best health decisions I've ever made. My sleep is much better and I have just way more energy in general than when I was a heavy coffee drinker. The craziest thing is now when I wake up in the morning... I'm just awake. There is no groggy pre-coffee malaise.
How long did it take to not wake up groggy?
It took me about 3 months to get through the worst of the withdrawals and noticing sleep improvements.
Or drink green tea that negates these effects via l-theanine automatically.
The more likely explanation is that green tea is just much lower in caffeine.
l-theanine is available in pills & powder, which can be consumed with coffee.
Cool. But to guard your sleep a bit more than just caffeine blood concentration is needed.
Caffeine will influence your sleep schedule by influencing your cicardian clock via its effect on the underlying signaling.
That effect stacks with that of bright light etc, so half-life is not enough.
Rule of thump: 2 espressos 3h before normal bedtime will delay your sleep by ca. 40 minutes even without bright light.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4657156/#:~:tex....
A note about caffeine and adenosine. What keeps you awake is that adensosine turns into inosine via Adensoine Deaminase (which needs zinc). Inosine ends up inhibiting the GABA receptor[1].
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02255859
When I drink caffeine I get mild hallucinations and my blood pressure skyrockets. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8421806/
The HiCoffee app for iOS has been a great resource for me. It allows parameterized inputs for your personalized caffeine half-life, bedtime, bedtime caffeine levels, and daily caffeine limit. As you log your intake, it shows a nice chart of caffeine in your body throughout the day. The visualization has really helped me understand how caffeine is affecting me, and it has been very helpful in curbing my caffeine intake when it has gotten away from me. As an added bonus, the app has a lot of caffeine data on common drinks on the market.
I don’t have a link handy but I was just reading that broccoli can speed up caffeine metabolism!
Someone should do a test.
More broadly we should be researching products to increase caffeine metabolism. It would have a huge market.
In my many years of consuming many drugs, no rule is more obvious than the fact that each person responds to different drugs differently, develops tolerances differently and develops addictions differently. The only way to understand drugs is to start from the position that my experience and your experience are almost certain to be different.
I had a similar idea to track my caffeine intake(assuming that the half-life is 6 hours). The only question I haven't had time to look into yet is what is the biological effect of previously taken vs newly taken caffeine? Say I had a cup of coffee at 9 am and then have another one at 9+6 hours=3 pm. Assume that 1 cup of coffee has 90 mg of caffeine. Does it mean that at that moment, I will have to track 2 different half-lifes? That is, I have 90/2=45 mg of caffeine from cup #1 and 90 mg of caffeine from cup #2 at 3 pm. Should I just add those up and track the combined amount now or should it be kept separate? I am leaning towards the latter because I think that the effect(i.e. alertness) will be higher with the newly digested caffeine and not the one taken 6 hours ago? No idea how true this is though as I am not a biologist :)
If I were to estimate my blood caffeine, I'd calculate the caffeine right before I took more, add that to the new caffeine, and use that in the exponential decay function.
Makes sense, thanks for the confirmation! :)
I had a >300mg caffeine/day energy drink habit for a few of years. It took around six months to get past the additional fatigue after quiting. There seems to be some long term effect on me way beyond the half life. Does everyone else get past the effects of going cold turkey in a matter of hours?
I went cold turkey after developing a facial tic and realizing I was consuming 1000 - 1200 mg of caffeine a day (mostly coffee, French press and canned, with some energy drinks too). I was 100% not aware that caffeine is physically addictive and causes receptor changes in your brain. Aside from withdrawal symptoms (joint aches and pains for me), the fatigue didn't fully go away after several months.
What did "fix" it was bringing it up to my doctor at my yearly checkup -- I explained that my mystery joint pains from a few years ago were almost certainly physical symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. This led to "why in the world were you consuming that much?!" questions and an eventual diagnosis of adult ADHD (likely lifelong and never diagnosed). 10 mg of generic ritalin twice a day and not only is the no-caffeine fatigue gone, but I basically don't tolerate caffeine anymore and have zero desire to consume it. Fortunately the local coffee roaster has a decaf :P I love coffee with or without the caffeine.
Not to intrude but I highly recommend you “play around” with longer acting ADHD meds. Generic short acting Ritalin is the worst. It doesn’t last long and you can “feel it go away”. There are much better meds that have the same underlying drug but in much better delivery mechanisms.
I’m sure you’ve done the homework but if anybody is reading who hasn’t… if generic short acting ritalin works, great! You know you respond to stimulant adhd meds. Now go find a better long acting one… focalin xr, adderal XR, vyvanse, etc…
I've actually done very little research on it, other than the mandatory "make sure your doctor isn't a pill pusher" kind of research. Mostly I figure they don't try and tell me how to fix hardware or software so I don't tell them how to fix meat :P
My last non-decaf drink was early July. Went from ~1000 mg a day to ~60. Change in sleep was pretty dramatic. I am sleepy every evening. Sleepy during the day just means I’m bored. I wake up feeling more rested.
The third day quitting was rough. Other than that it was pretty easy. Now my biggest complaint is finding decaf when I’m out.
> my biggest complaint is finding decaf when I’m out
I've been drinking decaf for a long time (now exclusively so), and this is a real issue sadly. Even when you go to a regular coffeeshop that has it, it's often been roasted and ground aaaaages ago (because of low demand) and then very loosely preserved, which results in drinks that taste bad and are potentially unsafe.
It’s minimal, but just FYI; caffeine free coffee still has small amounts of caffeine.
Not a chance. The body has to adapt and start producing chemicals naturally again which it hasn't. You'll also have to go through the addiction side effects of the habit which can be hard for your mental health. In my experience it's taken about 2 weeks for my body to adjust and get rid of the side effects... but then again sips coffee I've not stopped for to long.
It's caffeine withdrawal, you can also get other symptomps like stomach ache and headache.
Hum I sometimes just don't drink coffee for a week or whatever, and never noticed any symptoms
Would gradually decreasing the amount of caffeine consumed have made quitting the habit easier?
I quit caffeine in January and it took me about the same - 6 months for the fatigue to go away - though I would say it gets much easier after 3 months. I think gradual decrease would make it easier but it would take longer. You might need to step down to one cup of coffee/tea a day for 6 months before quitting. I ended up mixing small amounts of instant coffee with decaf instant coffee so that at the end of the day it was like I had only consumed one cup of coffee. I only did that for a few weeks and then just quit altogether and still got huge fatigue. I have recently started going for runs almost every day and that has helped me a lot so you may be in a better position if you exercise. I tried lifting weights for ages but couldn't get into it then I switched to running and found that to be way better at reducing fatigue for me.
Caffeine sensitivity and metabolism is highly, highly individualized, and it's affected by medications, etc. Its a much better idea to learn your own body tolerance/limits than rely on a generic app. It will vary.
You might also have many other reasons to limit caffeine besides being able to sleep at night - heart issues or migraines for example. An app can't take these sorts of things into account.
Caffeine pretty much doesn't effect me, so I will have a cup of coffee and go right to bed if I want to. I also can be a regular consumer for weeks-to-months and stop suddenly and have none of the terrible withdrawal symptoms people always talk about.
But why a desktop app? A simple website would do the job
Does this work to assess each individual'd actual caffeine half life? Every individual is metabolizing caffeine at a different rate...
Indeed, and the variance on this number is surprisingly large. From [1]:
> The mean half-life of caffeine in plasma of healthy individuals is about 5 hours. However, caffeine's elimination half-life may range between 1.5 and 9.5 hours, while the total plasma clearance rate for caffeine is estimated to be 0.078 L/h/kg (Brachtel and Richter, 1992; Busto et al., 1989). This wide range in the plasma mean half-life of caffeine is due to both innate individual variation, and a variety of physiological and environmental characteristics that influence caffeine metabolism (e.g., pregnancy, obesity, use of oral contraceptives, smoking, altitude).
On the one end of the scale, it'd be nigh-undetectable within a few hours, and on the other end, significantly present for 24 hours+. I suspect estimating this number is also fairly difficult. I mean, I have some idea of the _outcome_ of what happens if I drink coffee at say 6PM, but I have little way of reversing this into a half-life number.
Line 6 of readme.md:
Assumptions
The script works on some generalized assumptions that would be difficult to take into account.why read anything when you can just ask the comments and make someone else do the work? /s
As long as you're consistent enough, if you use this tool for a while could you learn how to tune the value it gives you? E.g. if you know you need extra time, or less time you can take that into account when reading this.
I think it's just a cool toy for people who think coffee is cool, I don't feel like it's supposed to be accurate.
Coffee must have a very different half life in me. Even 400mg in the morning won’t completely leave my system over 24 hours. So it seems to gradually build up and by the fourth day of 400 mg I can’t sleep at all.
Everyone is different. I can’t tolerate the amount in decaf coffee.
Either I developed tolerance or I am an extremely faster caffeine metabolizer. I can have an expresso half an hour before going to bed and I will be asleep in a few minutes.
As a heavy caffeine consumer since at least middle school (I'm 37 currently): consider why you're wanting so much and maybe talk to your doctor about it. Turns out I was dealing with ADHD probably my whole life and caffeine abuse was a cope.
Though ADHD meds tend to have even more extreme physiological effects on the body than a bunch of caffeine. But at least, in return, they work.
I've been replacing most of my morning coffee with yerba mate. Yerba Mate isn't a roller coaster ride of highs and lows but a smooth, elevated sense of caffeine alertness.
I would have like that, but trialing it for several weeks it seems too much effort and caution is required (I.e. easier to ruin a brew). I take <5 minutes to make a coffee from roasted beans, whilst yerba required expertly making a stable mound, priming an isolated kettle, then pumping water in slowly throughout the day as to not over-extract.
Does it get much better with experience?
Don’t overthink it: add some yerba mate into a container, put the straw (bombilla), use a thermos to pour some hot water[1], sip it, pour again.
[1]: Or cold if you fancy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terer%C3%A9
11 seconds mate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laZ72qWdBSQ
There’s also Guayusa which is pretty much same routine as tea
Mate cocido as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_cocido
Does anyone have personal experience or an understanding of why sometimes coffee in the afternoon actually results in a feeling of perceived tiredness?
This is known as a "paradoxical" reaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction
From what I understand (I'm not a scientist), caffeine doesn't "give" you energy, but rather makes your body ignore the tiredness, by turning off some of the machinery that would make you feel tired.
By having coffee in the morning and then in the afternoon, you build a "high" of caffeine that forces most of your "alert systems" to shut down. Once the peak wears off though, your body starts remembering to alert you to tiredness, which by then is often multiplied by the fact that by ignoring tiredness you've pushed your system hard when it was already tired. Hence you might feel like crashing.
On top of that, caffeine de-hydrates, so if you've not had enough water, your body will start to crawl.
On top of that, a lot (most?) people will have sugar with their coffee, and often quite a lot of it. Sugar can cause similar "crashes", particularly in the obese (like me), and obviously this combines with the abovementioned items.
> From what I understand (I'm not a scientist), caffeine doesn't "give" you energy, but rather makes your body ignore the tiredness, by turning off some of the machinery that would make you feel tired.
I have heard this too, but it doesn't feel like this to me, it feels like a stimulant getting me to a state above and beyond the one I would be in without the caffeine. There are also a lot of references to caffeine as a stimulant. So what is really going on?
Yeah, I have had this feeling as well. I don't think it is a direct cause of the coffee consumption and is more of an association that the tiredness is still building rapidly at the time you decide you need an afternoon pick-me-up. There is a hysteresis in the caffeine actually kicking in leading to the perception that drinking that cup of coffee in the afternoon is making you more tired.
My understanding (I don't have any experience in any bioscience, just an avid coffee consumer) is caffeine works because it blocks receptors of adenosine which has a depressive effect and is a signaler that makes you tired. While the caffeine is blocking these receptors, the adenosine is still building up. So once the caffeine starts to wear off all of the adenosine comes rushing in to those receptors and you start to crash. Drinking more caffeine after you have started to feel tired now takes longer for the caffeine molecules to start to muscle in and start filling those receptors again. If you can start to clear out the tiredness receptors ahead of the caffeine hitting them it will make the caffeine more effective. This has led some people to start taking a "coffee nap" where you drink you afternoon coffee, immediately take a short nap to help the caffeine be even more effective when you wake up.
Are you having coffee with milk? Casein/whey allergies affect a single-digit number of the population and can lead to feelings of sluggishness. Try black/almond/oat/etc.
Have you tried a "coffee nap"? I find that if I just drink caffeine to counteract building tiredness, it's not going to help. Like sponging up water from a broken faucet. But if I lay down and rest (this doesn't have to include sleep, I set an alarm and let my body do what it needs, but the primary factor is giving your brain the peace it needs to process and flush stress accumulated through the day, in pseudoscientific terms), and then drink coffee, I'm reset and it can take effect.
The "Coffee Nap" is where your drink a cup of coffee (quickly, I guess), then lay down for 10-20 minutes to rest, and by the time you get up the caffeine will begin to kick in. I find that process to be a bit more stress-inducing.
Im the same, caffeine after ~1pm results in afternoon sleepies. I have ADHD and caffeine affects me differently.
3pm as a limit seems to work pretty well for me.
This is innovation
Why not a web app?
great! now, has anybody found apps to approximate caffeine contents from bean, roast and prep?
this could be a basis for computation:
How Much Caffeine in Coffee Cup? Effects of Processing Operations, Extraction Methods and Variables
Carla Severini, Antonio Derossi, Ilde Ricci, Anna Giuseppina Fiore and Rossella Caporizzi
Reviewed: 05 April 2017 Published: 21 June 2017
DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.69002
open access:
Reminder: too much coffee will give you diarrhea.
Feature requests:
- Let me save coffees I normally drink on file so I can just choose my regulars: "Temple pour over", "Starbucks Americano", etc. and it knows the ounces and mg of caffeine in that drink.
- Let me define my wake/sleep times, or like the coffees keep a few saved times to easily choose from later.
- After I drank the first coffee, it should ask me if I want another one at the optimal peak (unless it's too near to my sleep hour). Partner with DoorDash to fulfill the order.
- The important part: Because DoorDash drivers will occasionally no-show, or drink the coffee themselves, you'll need some extra cash to cover costs, comp angry customers, etc. so you'll need a Series A. So we need to convert your UI into a ChatGPT wrapper that converses with the user in a friendly way, rather than in the VB6-esque UI I see here (as slick as it is).
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This does not exactly solve the concern of executing random code from online, but FWIW the decoded base64 blob is easy to vet as a trivial HTML page.