any positive, negative or other experiences with No-doz.
I bought some at a turnpike stop and found one pill (220 mg caffein) helped me finish the trip without falling asleep.
Now, I want to by some to help me concentrate when I am tired.
Am I becoming a drug addict? Is this harmful or helpful?
What about the appropriate dose?
How much caffeing in a cup of coffee for comparison to the 200 mg. per pill?
I started taking No-Doz when I was a cab driver. I can’t remember how many I took a day but here are a few of the symptoms I experienced.
Even now that I no longer take No-Doz, years later I can’t take any kind of painkiller with caffeine in it. If I do I’ll get insomnia.
As an undergrad, I used to slam No-doze with 20 oz bottles of Mountain Dew during exam weeks. This was before I had the profound revelation that I was better off just going to bed earlier and getting more sleep.
I’ve never taken it, but I do remember a distinct incident with my mom taking it. She had driven to Chicago/Great Lakes to pick me up one weekend from my military training. We had shopped around and saw some sights and were getting a late start back. It was a 3.5 - 4 hour trip home so she took some No-Doz in hopes of staying awake.
She ended up stopping every hour or so to puke for almost the rest of the trip 'cause it made her so sick.
Good thing my aunt was with us to help drive.
I’ve found no-doz to be far less effective than “natural” caffeine, e.g. that found in coffee or soda. It tends to make me jittery and iritable, and makes it hard to concentrate. My worst experience was when I took about 4 of them to stay awaks during a 3 hour drive. I barely mad eit home awake/alive and went to bed. An hour later I was wide awake and wired and never got back to sleep. Made work that day wonderful, I assure you. The last time I took them they made me sick too. Ymmv
I was working as a shift manager at Taco Bell the summer after I graduated from high school. The store manager had this horrible habit of calling me in to open for her when I had just closed the night before. This meant that I would leave work at around 4 A.M. and have to be back at 8 A.M.(I think you all know what’s coming, huh?) So one day I just could not wake up and decided to get a bottle of NoDoz on my way in to work. I ended up with my head over a trash can the whole morning. Yuck.
You’re better off going with Mountain Dew or coffee. I tried No-Doz several times during college, especially during long drives home, and still felt drowsy until I pulled over for coffee. I have no idea why this is, but I wouldn’t trust No-Doz.
On a long drive back from Jim Thorpe, I found GU to have some reviving properties (and it has caffeine in it).
Not No-Doz specifically, but I had an interesting experience with Vivarin (which are basically identical to No-Doz) when I was in high school. Light experimentation with coffee and other caffeine products had somehow convinced me that caffeine didn’t affect me, or at least that I had a very high tolerance to it. Turns out I was wrong. I discovered this when I took four (4) Vivarin at once. An hour or so later I was so jittery I couldn’t think straight. I was sweating, and generally had all the symptoms of excessive caffeine consumption. I felt like I had to constantly keep some part of my body moving. At one point I was bouncing myself off the walls just for fun and I managed to put a pretty sizable dent in the wall (I’m a big guy, at least 230 lbs at the time, and I cracked the plaster/drywall/whatever-it-was pretty good). I owned up to it and my teacher was not happy, but at least I didn’t get in any trouble.
Since then the most I’ve ever taken at one time was two. I also have a one-big-cup-a-day coffee habit now, so I have a tolerance to caffeine that I didn’t have back in high school. Two caffeine pills is still a bit much for me. One pill is about right if all I’m trying to do is avoid the inevitable lack-of-caffeine headache I’ll get if I miss my daily dose of coffee for some reason.
Try a brand called Mini-Thins. They’re actually an antihistamine, but they’re OTC. Mostly you’ll find them at truck stops or highway service stations, like the OP found No-Doz.
They don’t make you jittery, but I did get an interesting side effect. When I was finally ready to sleep, I often felt, lying down, like I was a gigantic head with a tiny little body. Or a huge body with a little tiny head. But that may just have been me.
Chrome Spot, what’s GU?
Caffeine pills make me feel bad. Coffee, on the other hand, makes me feel good. I don’t know, but I much prefer getting my caffeine from coffee.
I AM an addict, but I never have more than two cups a day, and normally only one in the morning. One big one, but it’s not that much, really.
I’m pretty sure there’s a labor law against doing that. Don’t quote me on it, though.
Let me preface this by saying I never drink coffee and rarely drink caffeinated soda or tea, so I am probably more sensitive to No-Doz than the average person. That said:
Finals week during the 1st semester of my senior year in college. I had 2 papers left to write (one 10-page, one 15-page), due the next day at 5 pm. I had the (I thought not unreasonable) idea of staying up all night to write them and I knew that I would need some chemical aid to support my sleep deprivation. The directions on the No-Doz box, IIRC, said to take 1-2 tablets every 4 hours. I took one tablet around 6 pm, and I drank it down with some Diet Coke. Wrote some paper. Felt sleepy around 10 pm, so I took another tablet and some more Diet Coke. (I’m saying this so you know that I had followed the directions.) By 11:30 I was as sick as a dog.
I have never felt so horrible in my whole life, including the time I had dysentery. For about 36 hours after that second No-Doz tablet, I was extremely nauseated and dizzy, to the degree that my stomach would heave with any movement I made.
I dragged myself down the stairs and forced myself to refrain from throwing up till I was in the bathroom. Vomiting didn’t alleviate my nausea/dizziness by much at all, but I believed that I just hadn’t thrown up enough, so I made myself throw up at least 20 more times that night, because, dammit, throwing up is supposed to make you feel better and I was going to feel better!
In short: my stomach was rotten, I could barely breathe, my heart was racing for hours, my face and throat felt tight and pressurized (like they were about to burst), I had trouble thinking clearly, and I just wanted to die.
I could finally walk by the next evening. Sudden movements made my head swim for a few days afterwards. Now, a couple years later, my heart beats irregularly a couple times a day and I can’t take an Excedrin without my heart racing and my limbs trembling.
Evil stuff, No-Doz.
I’ve had bad reaction to both No-Doz and Vivarian, although not as extreme as those described above.
I’ve had much better luck with a product called Up-time, which is basically caffeine with some herbs added. You can find it on convenience store counters next to the other OTC and little stuff.
Many moons ago in high school and again in college I also experimented with NoDoz thinking I could stay awake and concentrate for exams. Unfortunately, all I got was extremely jittery and unable to think clearly about anything. I also came to the radical conclusion that hard work during the semester and enough sleep worked much better than chemicals. No one could have told me, though. I had to learn it the hard way!
I’m not sure, either. I was only 18 and figured that by coming in whenever she needed me it’d make me look good and she’d give me a good reference letter when I was ready to move on. sigh
Concerning Vivarin…has anyone else ever had one partially dissolve before they could swallow it? I think that’s the most disgusting ass-awful thing I have ever tasted!
Well, to answer the OP’s questions rather than supply another anecdote:
No you’re not becoming a drug addict. Caffeine is not physically addicitive, beyond some minor withdrawal symptoms (headaches) for very heavy users.
In my experience, the appropriate dose is, coincidentally, about the equivalent of one cup of coffee. That would be about 100 mg. Same as a No-Doz.
I find caffeine to be very effective in waking me up after a good night’s sleep, or as a little pick me up to prevent after-meal drowsiness. But it is a very poor substitute for a proper amount of sleep.
When I was in college and kept a coffeemaker on my desk and a case of beer on the floor next to it, I learned to stick to the following rule: No caffeine after midnight; no alcohol before noon.
My roommate and I took lots of No-Doz during finals week, what with part-time jobs, Band Review and the party we were throwing, we needed to work it more than sleep. After 3 hours sleep in 3 days, we were talking about some party detail and she just burst into tears. That afternoon, I felt very very paranoid and so fearful I had to go home. Lay in bed trembling for hours, feeling nauseous and finally falling asleep. No more No-Doz, ever. I do drink copious amounts of Diet Pepsi, though, to this day, and feel great and sleep wonderfully well. But if I try to cut back, I get headaches, so I take this as a sign I was meant to be addicted to Diet Pepsi.