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Monday 6 November 2006

Caffeine addiction? Me?

The good news is that I'm no longer addicted to caffeine. I discovered in grad school that I was wildly addicted to caffeine, such that if I got as far as about 2pm without having had some coffee, I'd end up with a mind-blowing headache. Often earlier, since I was also working part time at IBM and if I wasn't at school by 9am, I was at work, and probably working on my third mocha by 10am. It wasn't unusual for me to sleep in on Saturdays, only to wake up about 11 with a pounding in my head that would kill an elk. Which would go away within about 10 minutes of my first cup of coffee, or an aspirin laced with caffeine. So I was pretty addicted.

Since then I've been weaning myself off of "massive" doses of caffeine, but always careful to have my 2 cups of coffee in the morning, or equivalent. And lately I've been able to go a day without coffee, but (never let it be said that aversion therapy doesn't work) I always had some coffee sometime, just to avoid the headache.

But this weekend, I went the whole weekend, that is, from about 3pm Friday (when I had some diet Dr Pepper) to about 9am Monday morning (when I had some coffee with breakfast), without a drop. Okay, it helps that I slept most of the weekend, so there were only so many hours a day to imbibe anyway. But no cravings, no headache, no problem. Not much in the way of useful consciousness, but that's not the point, since caffeine-induced consciousness isn't remarkably useful in the long run anyway.

So progress, of a sort, is slowly being made. Yay me.

1 comment:

EilisFlynn said...

I remember those agonizing caffeine headaches ... and the first few years it didn't occur to me that there was a correlation between that Friday cup of coffee and that pain over the weekend!

Only drink coffee once in a while these days, and tea doesn't seem to give me that headache if I don't have any, oddly enough. And water. Drinking enough water will take care of it -- two liters a day, and you won't worry about it.