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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

Its weird how it's socially acceptable to admit you're reliant upon this specific drug to get work done. But any others and it's bad.

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I was strongly anti-caffeine for most of my life. Then, in my 30s, I started getting so sleep at work that I'd fall asleep at my desk.

I went to the doctor and got drugs and vitamins. One of the drugs was supposed to be for erectile dysfunction, but had the side effect of keeping people awake. I tried it anyhow. They didn't work.

I ended up drinking a little caffeine to fix it. It worked really well.

Now I drink a lot of caffeine to fix it, and if I stop, I go back to falling asleep in the middle of the day.

If I could, I'd gladly just take a nap in the middle of the day to "fix" this problem. I get plenty of sleep at night, and I have a regular schedule. I don't work overtime and my job isn't abusive on my work-life balance.

But now I just need caffeine to keep going all day. And so I deal with that instead, and I no longer tell people that I don't like caffeine.

When someone says that they need caffeine to wake up, I certainly don't tell them that they should get off caffeine... And I don't even think it anymore. They might actually need it.

I've had a similar experience. Caffeine is probably the greatest tool in my belt.

Something you may want to look into is how many carbs you are eating for lunch, and whether your blood sugar is being affected. An amazing number of people have minor hypoglycemia and a carb-heavy lunch can leave them falling asleep at their desk. When I switched to a low/no-carb breakfast/lunch it did help (tho did not cure).

In the last few years, I've started getting migraines from sugar. That caused me to look at carbs and start reducing them as well. I still consume more carbs than I'd like, but I think I'm definitely below average on that scale.

That said, you've made me think and it's worth seeing if I can't further move my intake towards proteins safely and cost-effectively. And then maybe next time I try to reduce caffeine, it'll actually work.

Thanks!

I had the same idea and tried lchf and it works great. Caffeine never did anything for me.

Do you think you're a representative example? As opposed to what I consider is more likely: People neglect sleep and water consumption combined with natural night owls being forced into a particular schedule.

I think most people already drink caffeine and it would mask this issue. So I have no idea how many other people are in this situation.

Have you had a sleep study done? I had similar problems until I got a sleep study and placed on CPAP

As I sometimes stop breathing in my sleep, my wife made me take a study. They determined that there was nothing that needed correcting. But thanks for the thought!

Falling asleep after lunch in your late 20s is super common as you go through "second puberty". You should consider cutting carbs out of your lunch meal. This happened to me as well, I tried fixing it with caffeine. My solution was to change my lunchtime diet and eat a 200 calorie meal around 11 and another 100 calorie meal around 1-2pm depending on when I got hungry. What was happening was I would eat a carb-heavy lunch (hamburger buns, french fries and a coke) and my blood sugar would spike to the moon. Two hours later my blood sugar would crash and the only way to stay awake would be to take a walk. Around 4:30-5pm I would finally feel ok again.

Assuming you have, but if you haven't, might want to get a sleep study done. It could very well be the quality of your sleep. Also, it could be the pets/plants you have as well that affect you more at night.

After reading "Why We Sleep" I've been led to believe it really ought to be just socially acceptable to consume this drug. Unless we challenge the culture of working early then it seems to be the case that many of us are physiologically dependent on caffeine because our work culture demands it.

Or we could fix the culture problem.

The day schedules stop being set by morning people is the day I’ll give up caffeine

I don't think we're that reliant here (even excluding those who don't drink coffee), it's rather closer to an annoyance (a big one, like dealing with slow computer/bad network), but we could still get work done. It's just that since the coffee is free (and good), we're drinking a lot of it.

Probably because the benefits heavily outweigh the negatives. Combine that with the cultural/historical significance of coffee and tea and I think we have a solid explanation.

> Its weird how it's socially acceptable to admit you're reliant upon this specific drug to get work done. But any others and it's bad.

The most interesting aspect is that this acceptance is near universe across cultures.

Coffee machines make decaf and it's quite popular where I work.

I treat it as such... I avoid it for the most part, but will use it a couple times a week. I don't tend to have it too often. The diuretic effect doesn't hurt either.

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