After a lifetime of battling caffeine adiction i got pretty much to the same conclusion. Now i drink coffee every 3 days and the effects are predictable and personally beneficial.
My trick was almost the opposite but it worked about the same. I had the same problem of drinking multiple cups of coffee a day and still being tired all the time. I stopped coffee all together and started buying caffeine pills (100 mg). I started taking one pill in the morning when I usually drank coffee and I would bring an extra to work with me. The ritual of drinking coffee is half of the addiction so once it was just a pill I stopped caring about it as much and soon enough I would regularly forget to take the second pill (which would have replaced after lunch coffee). Soon enough I started opening the capsules and dumping about half of the powder out because 100 mg seemed a bit much and taking half as much made it easier to eat breakfast. Now I take a pill occasionally and I hardly notice the difference if I do or don't. Another benefit is a bottle of pills cost like $25 and I'm still on the same one almost a year later.
Good solution to the caffeine problem, most people just say "cut back" or "be disciplined" but this offers a real chemical approach, which doesn't interfere with my bad habits. I feel like this is similar to when smokers use vapes to quit and they say just the act of smoking something curbs the craving. Also I like the animation because its a more tangible approach to explaining chemistry. Is there anyway you could do a series or vid on common chemical mechanisms (functional groups and how they react) in a similar manner to this? Kahn academy does this in their orgo vids but its done in flat 2d space and often times doesn't intuitively show issues such as steric hinderance or bulk. I feel like you would be good at explaining mechanisms in a way that helps someone to develop a chemical and functional group intuition
@@ThreeTwentysix Love this chemists perspective the more i watch your clips:) I also have a bit of coffee problem. As you are young, you can have a coffee and go to bed and sleep. Yes, this sleep is horrible, but still you get some. After 40, i had to cut back on late coffees (after 4pm) and i did this in a very similar way to you. Just instead of using decaf, i used roasted grain coffee. And just as you said, it tastes almost just as a normal coffee. Now i usually have 2 or 3 cups untill 4 - 5pm and going to sleep is way asier :) I'll have to try for a few weeks to go full on roasted grain coffee, just for fun and experiment 😊
1:46 After finishing a three months writing project, I’m having a break from coffee for fourth day now, and this video came to my feed. 9:49 I been trying the combination of normal cafe in the morning and decaf if I feel like wanting more during the day. I think there are some other stimulating or refreshing compounds in coffee, which can have then better affect once cafeine is not overruling them. It atleast works as an appetite regulator. I noticed it when I tried to drop weight by kicking out the hunger with cafeine but lost the night sleep. From somewhere I heard that there is about 200 chemical compounds in decaf, some of them gives psychoactive stimulation without increasing the pulse.
I quit caffeine few months ago. First it sucked, but after a while my energy levels felt much more stable. I used to have habbit on taking naps, it was all cause caffeine "crash". Now im caffeine free and nap free feeling better than I used to. Ps. It would be nice to get this indepth video on effects of alcohol or nicotine. I have also quit drinking, and the effects id had on my mood are incredible! Never knew that saturday drinking would be the reason why I feel down up to next wednesday.
You could drink tea leaf or "herbal" tea instead of decaffeinated coffee. I think tea leaf has a bit of caffeine but not as much as coffee and obviously easy to find herbal tea without caffeine. It usually tastes better to me than coffee, while typically costing less and giving you that habit of drinking warm flavorful fluid.
Haven't found any reason not to jump start my mornings with a double espresso (no coffee the rest of the day). I used to drive cross-country in long stretches; coffee made the trip a lot safer and easier,
is that adenosine floating around just what's left over of adenosine triphosphate? would sort of make sense.. free adenosine being and indicator of metabolized ADP being an indicator of ATP having been spent being an indicator of the body performing work. as for addiction: i do notice that some days i need my cuppa (tea, i rarely drink coffee) in the morning or i'll just be grumpy. not sure how much caffeine is in breakfast tea exactly, but then again also coffee can vary in caffeine content (plus the way you make it also makes a difference yada yada) i should definitely experiment a little more with rooibos; decaf tea is a bit of a sad drink to my taste buds (i am an enthusiast too, so that makes it harder)
That's a video I might make one day. I've only looked at it briefly, but as far as I'm aware it's an extraction process, typically using supercritical carbon dioxide. As such, it isn't adding any extra chemicals to your coffee. In fact the opposite situation is the problem, with many flavour chemicals being removed at the same time. Quality decaffeinated coffees seem to have solved this problem somehow, but I don't know the details.
@@ThreeTwentysix I am curious about 2 things 1) They sell decaf not only powder but also whole beans. How can they remove all caffeine from inside of such a thick substance as the whole bean? 2) How the way of brewing coffee affects its caffeine content? What I enjoy in coffee is its taste, I don't care about being awake. After long experimentation, I found that my favorite taste is achieved when I brew it in a cezve (ibriki) in a Middle Eastern style, with a little bit of cardamom and cinnamon (warning: calling it 'Turkish coffee' outside Turkey, in any country approx 1000 km around Turkey may not be well received :) ) I noticed that coffee made that way kicks my brain less than coffee made in espresso or mocha style when it is extracted by a steam. Does it mean it contains less caffeine? Can caffeine content be changed by changing the brewing method?
@@vladgladkikh I assume they found some kind of a process involving factors like temperature or presence of catalysts. I imagine it to be something similar to decarboxylation process of THCA to THC by just applying a proper temperature through a specific amount of time. There are many external factors that are not chemical, but can destroy a caffeine molecule. I'm not a chemist, so i don't know what works for a caffeine, but besides temperature you can expose to different kinds of radiation perheaps? UV light, gamma rays and such.
Thank you so much for the video. My friend is addicted to heroin, so after watching this I told her to triple the dose! For some reason she isn't returning my calls to tell how it went, but she looked so happy yesterday! I think she might lose her addiction soon :)
Maybe next time you should use an analogy that doesn't cause pain and hearing damage to people who watch the video with earphones. Anyway, good video (only now my ears hurt).
@@ThreeTwentysix Hehehe. A lot of people are using such tricks, but you just need to put a warning text a few seconds before, for people using earphones and Bob's your uncle 😁
Yep - found out at the end that I'd watched this at 1.75 speed. Ha. [Edit: it's after 9 in the morning and I need a cup of tea. My own home blend. Pretty much equal parts Darjeeling, Ceylon, Kenya, Assam.]
Ironic that he was exercising while advising on switching to decaf to become more alert & never mentioned exercise as the best or one of the best ways to get alert & stay alert! An unfortunate missed opportunity!
@@matthewbartsh9167 well thankyou for reminding me of the adenosine bit. I didn't take it in. remain at this moment as ignorant as I've ever been. I better brace myself and go through it again and extract that bit. I think I'll scan the transcript this time though. More and more I find videos to be an inappropriate way to present information. :) Ah, right. I just did it. That was the core of the whole thing: caffeine jams the adenosine receptor meaning cell calming adenosine cannot function. Just like ivermectin jamming spike protein receptors. How - you think perhaps - could this abrogard bloke have any idea what he's talking about when he didn't even remember the core message? I ask myself the same question. I think I shuffle it to the margins of my mind because it is such a simple and usual mechanism and the details (i.e. the names of the proteins involved) aren't even important. And I hurried past that bit looking for the promise: the triple impact. And the triple impact turns out to be somewhat ill defined It seems to be here: "I promised you that switching to decaf would triple the effects of caffeine so what do I mean by that well I haven't quit caffeinated coffee completely but what I do now is I will have a third of a cup of caffeinated coffee in the morning just to get me started and then maybe another third or a half of a cup in the afternoon but now I'm drinking so little caffeine that it clears from my system before my body recognizes it as a problem but that caffeine now in my system even that low level will still give my body a kick of activity and gives me a boost of alertness to get on with whatever work I want to do. " Which is more or less a fudge I think. Another curious thing is this: " If caffeine is continually blocking the signal from adenosine your neurons will just create more adenosine receptors and the problem with that is that when the caffeine runs out you've got too many receptors and the signals to your neurons telling them to slow down are too strong" I guess the bit about too many receptors and signals too strong is understandable. It means I suppose that too many receptors created and now functional allows much adenosine to send much 'slow down' signal to the body overall. But what's interesting to me is 'your neurons will just create more adenosine receptors'. What? How? Why? Caffein blocking signals surely simply means the body is running at that setting. Like a car throttle set to half maybe. Why would the body interpret that as invalid? And begin to manufacture more receptors like a car opening more fuel input jets because it doesn't think you've got enough throttle on? And it raises the question of when are these extra receptors destroyed then, if ever? And the whole thing: creation and destruction if it happens are at the behest of some control mechanism and that's where the real interest lies i think. Anyway. There you go. :) p.s. afterthought: what he's effectively told us that for anyone who habitually kick starts themselves in the morning with a coffee there's no kickstart. Their bodies having created extra adenosine receptors (he seems to indicate a 24 -48 period for these creations/destructions). So yes, millions of us do exactly that: have heart starter in the morning with our coffee. It seems it is psychosomatic, all in the mind. We feel it has happened as a matter of habit. Going through our normal ritual is soothing and satisfying and we ascribe values to it that are not there. We actually get no 'kick' because we effectively has caffeine tolerance. That's what he says. His whole spiel is simply about lowering the base line, the tolerance level, actually. the final effect he gets with his half cup of java we also could get with an 'extra' half cup of java which lifts us above our baselines. His other suggestion buried in his text is about us consuming more and more to get that kick. Well there's very few do that, I think. That's either kinda insane behaviour on the one hand or very short term 'drastic measures' behaviour when necessary on the other. Like you just must stay up two nights in a row or something. So you do it. His 'measures' here simply don't apply for there's not the time span to 'switch to decaff' etc.
@@abrogard142 " I think I'll scan the transcript this time though. More and more I find videos to be an inappropriate way to present information. :)" I didn't know there was a transcript. I found it just now. Awesome. I also think video, and maybe also audio, are a probem. I don't control the rate of input of information, and therefore of what I attend to, and for how long. My ability to think deeply and critically is impaired. You can't beat reading, I think.
@@matthewbartsh9167 Yep. I agree entirely. Not only reading but books. Written pages. Better than reading on a screen. With a book I can flip through pages and scan whole pages, bookmark, annotate etc. All these things are supposedly available digitally but they're not the same. Actually they are 'work arounds'. You 'flip through pages' on screen is half a page at most (for the sake of legibility, type size ) and usually tends to quickly get too quick. You simply can't 'scan a page' because we don't get a legible page on one screen. Bookmarking pages, paragraphs, chapters etc. gets us into word processing editing... quite a different thing to simply reading. And then a book I can get up and shove it in my pocket and go bush taking it with me. The supposed digital equivalent of that is cumbersome, awkward and unreliable, not to mention unsatisfactory. Sour old curmudgeon aren't I? :)
@@abrogard142 There are drawbacks to reading on a screen but most of what you posted has nothing to do with my point, which is about text vs video/audio. I wouldn't have called you sour or curmudgeonly, though.
Excellent video, Dr. Andy! I drank green tea, roughly a third the caffeine level of coffee if you believe Google, instead of coffee for quite a while, but went back to coffee a couple of years ago. I think I might switch back!
I take caffeine pills. An Exact 100mg dose each time. I used to drink coffee but then I got the コ ロ ナ and drinking it makes me feel sick now. So I switched to pills and I only take one a day in the morning to wake up, unless I'm taking it more medicinally for a migraine, anhedonia or pain.
