I am on the light side of the caffeine curve, and I don’t drink coffee at all, so you didn’t get a vote. That said, I’m not addicted; probably two or three days a week I have some tea or a diet coke to help me get through the afternoon, but I can and do deal well if there’s none available for some reason.
Sometimes I wonder how the world would be different if caffeine just stopped ‘working’, or if it had never worked in the first place. I’d have to think our attitudes towards both sleep and reasonable working hours would be quite different, as a society, and that we’d probably all be much healthier for it. Either that, or amphetamines would be really popular. One or the other.
I get headaches without it. I can make it to about 10:00 am before they start. I only drink coffee in the morning but I get a lot down in a short time.
My earliest childhood memories include drinking coffee (with plenty of milk and sugar/sweetener). So coffee is second nature to me, but I can handle some days without it (when I have no coffee around or when I need to stop caffeine consumption for a few days). Not addicted, as I can drink it right before bed and still fall asleep.
Also, are you going to make that recipe and send it by mail to all the Dopers?
I was allowed to have coffee as a little kid, too. I’m told it’s kind of an old southern thing to let kids have coffee, my family is old (ie white trash roots) Virginia.
If I don’t drink coffee by about 11am I have a headache that pretty much shuts me down for the rest of the day, so yeah addicted.
I voted for option 2 but I don’t actually drink coffee. My caffeine delivery mechanism is diet coke but the addiction is real. I had to give it up once due to a medication interaction and the withdrawl headache was miserable for over 2 weeks. I did attempt to remain off caffeine after the medication was finished but I failed.
I know I need to cut down, my hand tremors are getting worse and caffeine is a contributor but I don’t want to badly enough to follow through.
I drink coffee – up to 4 cups on a work day – but I’m definitely not addicted.
My cites:
I drink my first cup when I get to work – well over an hour and a half after I get up in the morning.
I will often just not have any coffee on the weekend – it’s really more of a workplace habit.
If I have coffee after about 6 PM, I don’t sleep well…
In a sense, it’s a work-place-related habit that I’ve developed as a way of remembering to get up out of my chair every so often, and also as a way of getting myself to the office cafeteria, or I wouldn’t know even the 10% of the office gossip I catch up with this way. In essence, a social crutch. Half the time I get up and go to the cafeteria and end up drawing a cup of water from the cooler because I don’t really want coffee at the moment…
I wouldn’t say I’m addicted. I drink a glass a day (one 12oz mug) and rarely another. If I have more than that I start to buzz. One day at work I had my mug then people brought me two more large cups in quick succession. That day was… interesting. I didn’t even drink all the coffee and was very jittery.
As someone who has an actual addiction that I have yet to kick, no, I’m not. I don’t think about coffee on a semi hourly basis. I don’t plan outings based on whether or not coffee will be available to me. I don’t anxiously hide my coffee, or look at discarded coffee cups in the trash and feel despair.
I like coffee a lot, and I do sometimes get a little headache if I don’t have any for a couple of days, but how I feel about coffee isn’t even in the same neighborhood as addiction, at least as I know it.
I didn’t drink coffee regularly until well into adulthood.
I look forward to morning coffee now when at work, but during vacations don’t feel that I have to drink any. And I’ve cut back quite a bit even during work hours (I used to have two cups to get started in the morning and another big mug of coffee to battle afternoon blahs) without seeing noticeable physical effects.
I saw this thread and thought I would respond, but when I began my response, I realized what I really wanted was a cup of coffee. So I made some coffee, drank it, and only now do I feel up to writing a response.
I’ve never gotten any sort of withdrawal symptoms that I know of from not having a cup of coffee. I usually make maybe 3 or 4 8 oz. cups’ worth of coffee for myself in the morning. But there’s days I’m just too lazy to do so and don’t bother. I’ll go weeks without coffee if I forget to stock up. It would be easy for me to give up coffee if I had to.
I drink about 10 cups a day and miss it on those few occassions when I can’t have any but in no way feel any kind of addiction or withdrawal. I don’t think the caffiene in coffee is all that strong.
I picked the wrong damn poll option because I hadn’t had enough caffeine yet!
I don’t drink coffee right now. I drink Diet Pepsi instead, because I have to limit the amount of caffeine I have per day because of breastfeeding. At least I can have more now than I could when I was pregnant. It still sucks, but not as bad.
I couldn’t quit caffeine completely when I was pregnant. I was afraid I’d fall asleep at the wheel during my morning commute. I would have a 24 ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi every morning in the car on my way to work, and one on the way home. Now I can have three such bottles per day, and life is better.
If I don’t have any caffeine, I get terrible headaches. If I don’t get enough, I’m too tired and out-of-it to function.