The last two days I have limited myself to one cup in the morning. I will normally drink about 5 cups a day and nothing after 3 pm. I have not slept a wink in two days.
My lifetime coffee habit always included coffee in the evening as well as day time and I never had trouble sleeping. When I retired a few years ago ( from swingshift) I eliminated my late afternoon coffe drinking an have had trouble sleeping more than 4 hours on a good night ever since. I had a theory that I may be getting a light touch of withdrawal in the evening and decided to test it out with a late night cup of coffee. I did this several nights in a row and my sleep immediately moved up to a solid normal 6 hours.
Instead of going back to drinking evening coffee to sleep I decided I needed to kick my caffiene dependency and maybe settle for one morning cup. The only symptom I have is insomnia, I am very tired and almost ready to fall asleep but I don't seem to cross the line and actually sleep.
Any idea how long this might last or is it possible coffee has nothing to do with it?
It would seem like you took my normal lack of sleep for the past couple of days… enjoy =P
Well… I’m not a doctor, or anything close… but I would think that any change in normal schedule or diet could effect sleep patterns. Does seem kind of funny and counter-intuitive though that less coffee = less sleep.
I usually get up early, have two or three cups of coffee, and by mid-morning take a nap. So it doesn’t keep me from sleeping, either. Why are you cutting out coffee? I ask because maybe you could substitute tea or coke for some caffeine. If you’re stopping all caffeine it probably will take a long adjustment. Headache, sleep, bowels, irritability… Not a pleasant list but over time each problem should be overcome in its own way.
Thats a good question, maybe I should just go back to drinking it the way I have all my life and never had a problem with it. My girlfriend is always bugging me because I don’t drink water. I think she has been wearing me down.
I would guess that a different activity level since you retired, or a different sleep schedule have more to do with sleep problems than your caffeine intake.
Also, caffeine is a mild anti-depressant, and depression and insomnia go together in ways that are not completely understood (that is, it used to be assumed that depression caused insomnia, but some psychiatrists think it may be the other way around-- at any rate, it is very common to find insomnia in depressed people). I’m not saying that you are depressed, just that you may have some kind of reactive depression as a form of withdrawal.
My advice would be not to make a lot of changes at once. Get used to being retired, then get used to a new sleep schedule, then try to quit (or cut down on) caffeine.
Albeit, FWIW, the idea that we must drink pure water every day is a myth. We can get enough liquid from other things we drink, and even from some foods. Here’s the snopes.com page on the “8 glasses of water a day” myth.
Coffee **is **water. It’s just been heated up and poured through some ground-up beans. I don’t think cutting back is a bad idea. But if you don’t want to, don’t. Her “But it’s not water!” line of reasoning isn’t really valid.
