This is a lifelong mystery for me. I am not a coffee drinker but I have drunk it before even a few times this year. I have drunk caffeinated sodas all my life however. I even bought some Red Bull recently.
What I can’t figure out is what people see in caffeine as some type of stimulant? People say they use it to wake up, stay alert, sometimes they can’t fall asleep if they drink it in the afternoon etc. I have never gotten any of that. I got some coffee when I was about to fall asleep on the way to work a few months ago. I felt some mild jitter but I was as tired as even.
I have even drunk glass after glass of Coke and then gone to bed just as well as ever. I know that caffeine can do something to me. I took 8 No-Doz pills on a dare once and it was jittery hell for a few hours but that was it. However, I have never seen a sliver of upside to caffeine.
Does caffeine have the same (non)effect on anyone else?
Never done the pills, but I have polished off a pot of coffee before bed to prove a point. It kept me awake, but only because I kept having to pee. Like you, caffeine fails to stimulate me.
See, I’ve gone through caffeine withdrawl a bunch of times. Hell, I just went through it yesterday (slept 14 hours as a result). I can also drink a Coke or a Pepsi and go to bed. I know it affects me, but I’ve got a hard time finding exactly what it does to me as well.
I’ve had at least one cup of tea, usually more, on most of the days of my life. I drink Coke as well. Caffeine has never had any discernable effect on me until recently. It’s getting so that now if I’ve had a cup at work in the late afternoon, I can’t take a nap in the evening. The residual caffeine keeps me awake enough that if I’ve been in bed for about an hour, I can just start to drift off, then I have to pee, so I get up. It happened again this evening. But I don’t get jittery or feel like I’ve got more energy or alertness when I’m having a caffeinated drink.
When I had a job that started at 6, being the kind of person with a body that starts at 12, I used to buy caffeine pills to wake me up, but all they ever did was make my hair tingle.
waves hand
Here’s another person. Drink a ton of it one day, none the next, and various combinations of it, and nada. Zip. Zlitch.
Well, except for the natural side effect of drinking a lot of liquid.
The one and only time I had something happen was after drinking an insane amount of espresso (hey, I had a brand new machine to play with!) topped off with a 2 liter bottle of Coke. The room spun around once. That was it. sigh
So yes, it does mean when I’m trying to figure out how to stay awake it’s a bit of a challenge.
The way caffeine works for me is that I feel exactly the same as if I didn’t drink it. The only effects I’ve ever felt from it is not being able to fall asleep or getting nervous. If I have it after five, I will still feel sleepy and want to go to bed but when I get to bed I will just lie there feeling sleepy and wondering why I’m awake. Any time I ever felt tired or didn’t get enough sleep and had a bunch of extra coffee to try to perk up, all that happened was I felt tired and nervous.
I drink about 4 cups of coffee a day and that’s pretty much my only source of caffeine. If I don’t have it on a particular day I don’t notice any difference. It actually took me a long time to figure out that coffee could make me nervous or keep me awake because those effects are so different from what’s advertised. It has some kind of monkey’s paw effect on me like I wished on the monkey’s paw to be alert and so now I’m jumping at every sound even though I’m tired, or I wished to be awake but forgot to specifically wish to not be sleepy.
My SO seems to be fairly immune to the effects of caffeine. He can drink espresso shots, Coke, coffee, whatever. I can’t have two cups of coffee back to back most days or I get jittery.
My husband often drinks an espresso (or two) before bedtime and falls asleep easily. I don’t drink caffeine after 7 pm on week nights, because I won’t be able to go to sleep before 3 am if I do.
You guys do realize you can build up a tolerance to caffeine, right? It will not have a stimulating effect on most people if they consume it regularly.
I usually go to bed around 1 am. If I drink a cup of coffee at 9 pm I won’t be able to fall asleep until 3 am. But if you really want to party all night, try some crystal meth. I did 4 1-inch lines of that stuff over about 8 hours time, I was awake for 3 days.
I’ve never drunk much caffeine–a can of Dr. Pepper is about as much as I ever do. But I’ve never noticed any effect from it, apart from the occasional headache relief. It doesn’t seem to keep me awake or energize me or anything like that. Maybe I just don’t get enough of it.
mrAru and I can polish off a pound of coffee in a normal saturday, my favorite bedtime treat is a 24 oz cappuccino - half heavy cream and half incredibly strong expresso. Because of the cream I cant do it very often=(
About the only thing caffeine does to me is make me pee about an hour after I go to sleep=)
I used to drink a lot of coffee, right up to 01.00, 02.00 in the morning if I was up late and it never seemed to affect me too much… Over the last year or so I’ve cut right back, without actually stopping completely, and now, if I have a cup after about 20.00 in the evening I go to sleep ok but end up in a sort of semi-aware doze from about 04.00 or 05.00 until the alarm goes at 07.30
I sometimes think I should start up again so I can drink it later and still get a good night’s sleep!
I never noticed any sort of energy surge after a cup of coffee but I have a heart condition that eventually made me limit my caffeine intake or spend a few hours in the ER. Switching to decaf was easy since I wasn’t getting the same thing other people seemed to drink coffee for.
I wish it was easier to get good decaf in restaurants after 11am…
Add me to the list. I can drink regular coffee all day long and it has no real effect on me. I don’t get withdrawls when I don’t drink it. I feel very fortunate.
Same here, minus the ER trips. Caffeine doesn’t give me any sort of energy boost, but it does keep me awake…due to my heart skipping beats. It creates a reaction that’s rather similar to a panic attack and it isn’t fun at all, especially since the more nervous I get from it the worse it gets. So, I simply don’t have any caffeine at all.
But some people claim that they can’t wake up without (the same amount) of coffee every day. Others claim that they have to have the same amount of coffee every day in the afternoon to stay alert. Some days I drink caffeinated sodas and there have been a few days I drink coffee. I went for a few months recently without much caffeine at all. I didn’t drink Coke and I don’t like diet Coke much so that was the end of it. When I drank coffee or Red Bull in between times, it still didn’t do anything.
I would love to hear what any of this stuff is supposed to do from self-professed caffeine addicts because I don’t see anything.
Surely, you know what it’s supposed to do, don’t you?
And surely you believe it actually does do that for some people, right? That different people have different reactions (or nonreactions)? It’s not that we’re all as unaffected as you are, but we’re just conspiring to pretend that it does something for us.
For my part, I could say something like, “I would love to hear what booze is supposed to do from self-professed alcohol addicts.” Because, while I can certainly get a buzz from alcohol, it doesn’t make me feel nearly good enough to want to overindulge or center my life around, the way some people do.
