Bad reaction to caffeine?

I love it when my zombies get resurrected. :slight_smile: Yes, it’s 4:00 am in my time zone. Why am I on the Dope? Can’t sleep, anxious, restless, yeah.

Software Developer for 20 years. Having issues for the past year or so with health. Getting worse over the last 3 months. Concentration issues and anxiety. Just starting to think that it might be related to coffee. I was drinking two big mugs a morning for years. Never had any problems. Learning new software and stress might be a factor. Going give up coffee for awhile and see if it helps.

You still awake, Thelma? After all these years? Zoinks!

I know this is a zombie thread so I’ll throw out a zombie response:

This is a story from back in 2009 about a guy hopped up on goofballs (aka caffeine) running over pedestrians with his car. This happened at a university near me.

Whoa! The zombie lives! Actually I was awake in the middle of the night last night and got on the Dope, but didn’t look at new posts so missed this.

I don’t seem to have that problem with caffeine any more. In fact, I bought a new espresso machine last week (“free” with beaucoup amazon rewards points) and have been drinking a *lot *of coffee with no apparent ill effect.

It could be that my life just sucked back in 2011 when I started this thread, and some of those problems have corrected themselves.

I had been having on-and-off problems with a very peculiar headache. The headache showed as one big pulse of pain, then several seconds of no pain. Pain pulse, no pain. Each session went on for a few minutes, then nothing until another session an hour later, etc.

This was kind of scary, but before going to bore a doctor about it, I decided to give up caffeine for awhile and eliminate that as a possible cause.

It has been three days since I have been off caffeine (after tapering down over the course of a couple of weeks), and the weird headache thing is gone. That’s a relief. Hopefully it continues.

Different brands have different effects.

About twelve years ago my wife and I had some delicious coffee at a local restaurant, and made it a point to ask what brand it was. We started drinking that brand at home. A week or so later I started developing really awful throbbing occipital headaches, and ibuprofen wouldn’t touch them. Eventually I started to notice that they didn’t seem to happen on days I skipped coffee. So we switched brands, and the headaches went away. A couple of times since then we’ve tried various other brands/varieties of coffee. Once in a while we hit one that gives me headaches, and we end up tossing the remainder of those beans

AIUI, coffee has a bunch of psychoactive compounds in it, not just caffeine. Different varieties of coffee beans grown in different soil and different climates contain these compounds in differing amounts. If one particular brand/variety of coffee is causing you problems, try switching to another and see what happens.