Coffee and caffeine causes them to feel relaxed.
Stimulant diet drugs cause them to sleep well, they have said the best sleep they have ever had was on them.
Is this a real thing?
Well, not what you asked, but I know that some drugs can do exactly the opposite.
Valium, a “minor” tranquilizer, affects some people by making them very agitated instead. This is a known occasional reaction (called a “paradoxical” reaction) that I’ve read about. And I know this from personal experience too. Valium causes me to get violently agitated.
Anecdotes are not data.
But I’ve personally seen my friend’s dad drink coffee immediately before bed. He claimed it helped him sleep.
His daughter smokes weed, and it has a stimulatory effect as opposed to a sedating effect on her.
I suspect that if this is a real thing, it’s in part genetic.
Ritalin is an amphetamine. It’s speed, meth more-or-less. Yet it’s used to treat ADHD.
There are people who get wired-up-mile-a-minute-talking-pacing-around-the-room on heroin. No shit.
Among tweaks, there used to be a phenomenon known as “over-amping,” which was basically doing too much and falling out – falling asleep. You don’t hear about it anymore – I suspect it’s because there is no such thing as real “meth” anymore. What people are getting when they buy “speed” is something which is probably made out of things bearing no resemblance to the constituents of “meth;” most of them, believe it or not, nastier and more toxic than speed itself. No cite – you’ll just have to take my word for it. (or not.)
Speaking personally, I often like a cup of nice, strong black tea before bedtime. It makes me feel mellow and sanguine.
[hijack] You see the semicolon I put inside the endquote in the paragraph above? Is that correct? I know you do that with commas, but the semicolon just doesn’t look right. [/hijack]
I have a friend who claims that nicotine makes him feel sleepy (and confused.)
He uses SNUS (or maybe Skoal pouches, I don’t remember, I just recall him sticking these little pouches in his mouth) as an appetite suppressor and says that after a while he gets sleepy and/or confused.
I always thought that nicotine was a stimulant. Confused I get - too much stimulant probably *does *make one confused, but I don’t understand sleepy. (But I believe him.)
As Shakester’s link explains, it’s because stimulants can stimulate the parts of the brain that suppress activity.
And of course, an addict (yes, to caffeine or nicotine, as well has harder drugs) will always relax when they finally get a chance to satisfy their moderate withdrawal symptoms. So in that case, a sudden mild stimulant may seem to be sedating.
As a kid I was diagnosed as having ADHD and I was treated with Ritalin.
As an adult I no longer need Ritalin, but a cup or two of coffee will relax me and sometimes
make me sleepy.
More than two cups, and I can get stimulated and awakened like anyone else.
I’ve got a pretty good case of adult ADD going. I’m prescribed 30 mg of Adderall morning and afternoon. I’ve been able to, without being fatigued, take a nap an hour or two after dosage. I’m still amazed what is basically speed has such a calming effect on me.
I often feel a little sleepy after drinking a cup of coffee or tea. I always assumed it was because of the effects of drinking a soothing hot beverage rather than the caffeine, because this doesn’t happen with iced tea, pop or energy drinks.
From 1975, courtesy of the NIH
IOW, for people with problems like ADHD, it is *precisely *because amphetamines are sedating that they are used.
Coffee is actually recommended if you don’t have your stimulant dose, so this is not surprising.
When I took Ritalin, and back when I still drank caffeine, I found that they neither made me sleepy nor made me feel unable to sleep. However, now, the slightest bit of caffeine makes me feel horrible, unless it comes from tea.
I can drink a six pack of Pepsi in an hour and fall asleep soon afterward. On the opposite end, I don’t take Nyquil since the few times I have I couldn’t fall asleep at all.
That is not at all unusual. We are accustomed to thinking of weed as a sofa drug, but if you smoke a bit prior to doing a task, you will often get it done quickly. This is because you become focused on what you are doing and tend to block out distractions. I personally have experienced this and can attest. It seemed to me that I got my work done faster, without rushing, and the clock on the wall seemed to support that as well.
There are a variety of things that could be going on that could cause something like this. I know that I personally don’t get much of a boost from caffeine, but I get the slump afterwards, so in effect, chugging a Mt Dew will tend to put me to sleep.
In addition to the points that have been made already, it’s worth remembering that the chemicals we take into our bodies are processed by enzyme pathways that didn’t evolve to handle those chemicals. There can be - and is - genetic variation in all the enzymes involved that can lead to surprising differences in the end effect different drugs can have. This is the field of pharmacogenetics. I used to be involved in doing genetic testing for certain common variants of key enzymes that affect how your body metabolizes certain drugs. We had a case once where some young boys were given some totally innocuous painkillers and died. Genetic testing revealed a mutation that shunted the partially metabolized drug into a different pathway, ultimately resulting in a lethal end product. Sad.