Mental Health conversation centered around 12 step recovery and related topics. We talk about spiritual living, living with addiction and growing in the 12 steps. Find us on our home at https://recoverysortof.com/. If you want to join the conversation, email us at RecoverySortOf@gmail.com, find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RecoverySortOf, Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recovery_sort_of/, or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Recovery-Sort-Of-112376247161866/?view_public_for=112376247161866.
Caffeine, by definition, is a mind and mood altering substance. However, along with it’s partner in crime nicotine, flies under the radar in 12 step fellowships that abstain from all other mind and mood altering chemicals. What makes caffeine acceptable to ingest? We talk about caffeine, reasons why it is not treated the same way as other drugs, and some of the possible benefits and drawbacks of caffeine use. Jenny and Caraline join us to help explore some of the lesser known facts about caffeine, and best practices for caffeine use in your day to day life. Listen in, then go listen to Michael Pollan’s book, Caffeine, on Audible, through this link [Recovery (Sort Of) is working in partnership with Audible. When you use links to Audible from Recoverysortof.com, we receive a small portion].
How to find us and join the conversation:
Email: RecoverySortOf@gmail.com
Episodes mentioned:
Other:
Caffeine by Michael Pollan on Audible
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Caffeine, by definition, is a mind and mood altering substance. However, along with it’s partner in crime nicotine, flies under the radar in 12 step fellowships that abstain from all other mind and mood altering chemicals. What makes caffeine acceptable to ingest? We talk about caffeine, reasons why it is not treated the same way as other drugs, and some of the possible benefits and drawbacks of caffeine use. Jenny and Caraline join us to help explore some of the lesser known facts about caffeine, and best practices for caffeine use in your day to day life. Listen in, then go listen to Michael Pollan’s book, Caffeine, on Audible, through this link [Recovery (Sort Of) is working in partnership with Audible. When you use links to Audible from Recoverysortof.com, we receive a small portion].
How to find us and join the conversation:
Email: RecoverySortOf@gmail.com
Episodes mentioned:
Other:
Caffeine by Michael Pollan on Audible
Transcript:
recovery sort of is a podcast where we discuss recovery topics from the perspective of people living in long-term recovery this podcast does not intend to represent the views of any particular group organization or Fellowship the attitudes expressed are solely the opinion of its contributors be advised there may be strong language or topics of an adult nature [Music]
welcome back it’s recovery sort of I’m Jason a guy who is not decaf I’m Billy I’m a personally long-term recovery I’m Jenny I’m also a person in long-term recovery I’m Caroline I’m also a person in long-term recovery and if you haven’t picked up on it today we’re going to talk about caffeine because caffeine is also a drug or a mining motor altering substance or I mean it’s regulated by the FDA as a drug or I didn’t even know that it’s a psychoactive substance oh it’s psychoactive that’s even more dangerous yeah I looked it up because I uh so I got the wiki definition a chemical a psychoactive substance is a chemical substance that changes functions of the nervous system and results in alterations in perception mood Consciousness cognition or behavior holy [ __ ] right sounds like drugs right but we can totally drink caffeine in abstinence-based programs Billy you have caffeine right now don’t you yes well and the way I understood the chemical effects of caffeine is it actually uplifts are like an attitude towards whatever we’re doing so if we’re doing something that we don’t like and we take caffeine it will actually help us tolerate that thing that we’re doing even more maybe that’s why people drink it at meetings
and the meaning I don’t know if there’s enough coffee in the world yeah and and that you know that’s can actually like over time that’ll actually work to make that a thing that you’re doing a more pleasurable experience just that you’ve Associated it with caffeine intake that’s super interesting no wonder people drink coffee all night and that is more at work yeah so um I read the book or listened to the Book audiobook the Michael Collins caffeine did you listen to that one Billy I did not okay this seems like up your alley anybody else no all right this book is super good there was like uh many experiments and studies done with the caffeine like coffee plants and um that buzz you’re talking about insects and animals were coming back because they liked the feeling they had you know they did experiments I guess with um bees this is a crazy experiment they put bees in straight jackets this just sounds
and there was there was no change in the flavor of the substance they were giving them but they went to the one with caffeine because they liked the effect what does the straight jacket have to do with that um I don’t know that’s how they described it in the book was like little B Straight Jackets I can’t even this was an experiment to decide if coffee was good for recovering addicts right so they needed crazy peas they had to get the bees out of the institution to make sure they measured up uh this gives a whole new meaning to like uh that [ __ ] couldn’t get a fly high I’m just saying I’ve never heard it I’ve never heard anything oh God no it must be from the city I was like that a Baltimore thing I thought it was Cheech and Chong but I heard a similar thing about caffeine like that’s why it exists in nature and gets perpetuated in plants and stuff because there’s a stimulant to plant to the the animals the pollinators are stimulated to come back to those plants and those things that have the caffeine in it and that caffeine in and of itself is actually not very good tasting like if you could isolate it it’s kind of bitter and it doesn’t taste very good like coffee that’s why yeah like well the really the higher the caffeine and coffee the more kind of bitter it tastes and we do all these cold brew and all that stuff to try to reduce that bitter acidic taste well there you go ladies we’ve just solved the problem if there’s a guy you like just get some caffeine in your vagina it’ll bring them right back he’ll be stimulated every time hard you went there I’m thinking like caffeine soaked tampon is that how sorry should I just bow out of this episode of five minutes in is it all over for me can I not redeem myself so soda right soda has caffeine it doesn’t have to it doesn’t the um manufacturers claim that caffeine helps the flavor that’s why they put it in there but when they do taste tests people cannot taste the caffeine and soda they put caffeine in soda so you keep coming back for it it’s because they had to take the cocaine out right right it was the best substitute that makes sense yeah they needed a stimulant to put in there somewhere or caffeine is the only psychoactive substance that we regularly give to children in the form of soda I mean there’s caffeine in chocolate but like Society just seems to accept like okay sure you can give the kid but here we’re all anxious in our population right so given us in feeding us a bunch of caffeine is only exasperating that problem in our society so totally we need to actually switch it we’ve got a lot of ADHD going on maybe we should put Adderall in our Coca-Cola instead of caffeine we could have like taste yeah [Laughter] we’ll just solve our society’s problems through Mass District
so does anybody notice the the sugar-free Coke or the sugar-free products do they are they decaffeinated also not all of them still have caffeine no so you don’t drink a lot of soda so I don’t know I don’t see this in the stores much not that I go down the soda aisle because I don’t drink any but it used to be when I was growing up they had Diet Coke and then caffeine free diet coke which was a whole different color it was like gold instead of silver or whatever right I don’t know if they still do that but they do have the Coke Zero but is that caffeine free I don’t know the difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke I bet Diet Coke has some calories and Coke Zero probably has no calories okay and there’s also like Diet Coke addicts that have a group on Facebook because that is apparently it yeah and there’s a couple in my life which is how I got opened up too they must be addicted to the caffeine then if there’s no sugar and I’m sure there’s something to do with the artificial sweeteners too yeah whatever people are like [ __ ] hooked on Diet Coke as well like if you dive into it a little bit it’s a real thing wow wonder if it is the caffeine I’m gonna say yeah um for what I mean I didn’t do like extensive research but I really wanted to bring this topic to the show because um so coffee like has long been the like antidote for alcohol right you know like you know like oh Johnny’s drunk get him some black coffee he’ll be fine you know as evidence Independence Day when the guy was all drunk but he was going to fly the plane and his kids like all proud of him and gets in the mug sorry that stands out in my head a lot I mean yeah coffee was fine and a half hour through those aliens I’ve been waiting 20 years for this what I did every time before I drank and drove I just had a cup of coffee 20 minutes
yeah I’m still an independence day I watched the movie over Christmas the Miracle on 34th Street the old one the 1947 one and then there was in the opening of the movie The Santa Claus was drunk nice and they were like give them some black coffee and they’re like slapping his face and stuff and that’s it’s no spoiler alert that’s when the real Santa Claus comes along and steps in like I’ll take care of it I’ve not seen that so you did just spoil that maybe the first five minutes it’s not like I was just thinking none of our listeners can relate to that movie all right not the old verb the ones who read the big book Ken I bet [Music] um you think they’re still listening after that episode they got out they were like I’m done yeah but um so yeah coffee and caffeine in general has always been like the anti-alcohol like the antidote as if it’s going to sober you up yeah there’s no scientific evidence it does wake you up like so if you’re passed out okay you’re awake but you’re still intoxicated I could see I mean I think part of the the sell of caffeine to the population is that you’re more alert more keyed in more focused like this idea of a while it’s a small one it it is a stimulant right and like that is going to increase your sharpness and mental focus I I would say it probably does do something I don’t think it makes you undrunk by any means but it probably does something to help you yeah so a lot of the information that I got about coffee came from a podcast that I listened to quite frequently called the huberman lab he’s a Stanford neuroscientist and they dig into like the chemical reasons why different things that anyway and their episode on coffee he explained like coffee doesn’t actually wake you up in the way that you think that it does what it actually does is it goes to the receptors in your brain so your brain makes a chemical that makes you tired or sleepy and the caffeine is what Dave was also telling us this um the caffeine actually goes to the receptors in your brain that that tired chemical would go to and takes up those receptors so that tired chemical doesn’t have anywhere to go to affect you and then after the coffee wears off you’re almost flooded with the tired chemicals because they haven’t burned off anymore once again we are doing the thing where we mistake the removal of one thing as the presence of another right I feel like we do that so much in our society we’re like oh we got rid of the tired we must be awake and it’s like no you’re just not tired correct so I came up with this Theory years ago and I think I still believe it but it’ll be interesting to see if you can fit that perspective of how caffeine Works into my layperson’s theory no we’re not tolerating that [ __ ]
so I think that there are two types of tiredness they’re still tired and tired again so still tired is like I didn’t get enough sleep I’m awake but I feel like [ ] because I’m still tired because I didn’t get enough sleep tired again is like I felt good this morning but now I’m starting to crash and I feel like for me caffeine works so I’m tired again but caffeine doesn’t really work well I’m still tired right now I’m still tired and I’ve had this is cup two and a half or three and a half wow of of caffeine since I woke up this morning because I woke up at five a.m which is not something I do it was not a good thing for me um and I still feel tired so let me interject here before Billy starts with his actual information and give you my my take on this so there is no oars right in my world it’s all spectrums but you’re describing two extreme or ends of the spectrum or at least two different places on it right one is uh I woke up and I’m still tired from yesterday which is probably a pretty deep Tire to try to get through your day on whereas the other one is probably like oh I slept enough and I’m at like 50 capacity which is enough to feel good for like six hours and then I’m gonna crash again and I would say yeah obviously uh I don’t want to say Obviously but the stimulant piece of caffeine will work better on less drastic Spectrum levels of tiredness which just seems to make sense maybe maybe when you wake up with the the still tired end of the spectrum you need the Adderall right the adderate to get going that’s fair I mean what’s the real information the other day well and this will be my uh grossly simplified version of understanding of like the whole so there is also a huberman lab episode about sleep and it goes all into how much sleep you actually need the chemicals that your brain produces and all that stuff so there’s a chemical in your brain that comes out that says you need to sleep most people need at minimum eight hours of sleep a day people that say they function highly off of five or six nine times out of ten that’s not really true they’re still not functioning at their optimal they would function better with more sleep because they have this leftover tired chemical in their brain the more sleep that we need and that all there’s things with that Associated to like Alzheimer’s and stuff like if you don’t get enough sleep your brain’s not flushing out enough of those chemicals they build up over time they can lead to plaques and Alzheimer’s and all kinds of [ ] so sleep is super important so when we’re getting a lack of sleep those chemicals are still in there we shove some caffeine in there so that they aren’t flooding our brain at the moment the caffeine’s taking the place of those receptors but eventually so much of them are going to build up that you’re eventually going to have to get tired you know your body just is going to get tired I’m getting better at podcasting normally in the past I would have taken us off on another Branch but the question I have for Billy right now and instead I’m going to say Billy I hope you get a little more uh research and guide us in an episode about sleep because I think that would be really important and interesting and I got questions so some of my I’ve changed some of my caffeine habits because I realize drinking caffeine later in the day affects my sleep at night so caffeine has a 12 hour Half-Life I think they call it which is like how much is in your system you know uh so much time right when is half of it gone yeah when is half of it gone and so if I’m drinking a whole bunch of coffee at like 4 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon say two or three cups there’s still a large amount of that caffeine in my you know brain floating around when I’m trying to be in my deep REM sleep so I may still be sleeping my eight hours but I’m not really getting in my REM sleep because I’m loaded up with all this coffee so after I found out that information I’ve been trying to limit my coffee intake to like one o’clock in the day so that I can make sure I’m hitting that deep REM sleep in the middle of the night so that’s interesting to me because I say that I would drink my second cup of coffee anywhere in the afternoon right maybe that’s 12 or 1 if it fits into my schedule that day but some days it fits in better like 4 30 5 o’clock and I don’t think nothing of it I just drink it because it doesn’t stop me from falling asleep but I’ve never taken into consideration it could be ruining the quality of it so that was my problem is that I could drink coffee at eight nine o’clock at night and still go to sleep right I’m exhausted but I would wake up in the morning and be like God I didn’t sleep well and I just wasn’t making that connection you know that that was why because I’ve always well I can’t say always since I’ve been in recovery I’ve been a big coffee drinker and and used a lot of caffeine you know stimulants I’m gonna help my wife with this information my tolerance has as I’ve gotten older tolerance for coffee my tolerance for coffee caffeine my tolerance for caffeine as I’ve gotten older seems to have decreased because when I so I got clean when I was 20. so when I so maybe it’s maybe it’s clean time maybe it’s age but I feel like when I was in my 20s I could go to a meeting seven seven o’clock or seven seven thirty maybe even eight o’clock and have a cup of coffee and sleep fine that night but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to you know first it became four was the cut off now I’m like two two thirty or I sleep fitfully I sleep but I like wake up multiple times through the night so I don’t know if age Jenny did anything in your research indicate that like sensitivity to caffeine increases with age not in any official research but just like talking with my girlfriends definitely and that’s that’s interesting I would think the opposite in general because all our sensitivity to all outside stimuli sort of goes down over the course of Aging I think of anything that to me sounds more like and I don’t know if women have this idea but guys are like Jesus I remember being like 20 and I could run into a brick wall and you just got up and walked away and now it’s like you get out of bed wrong and you’re like [ ] my neck my [ ] we’re the same with eating whatever you want you know it’s like our metabolisms were probably running so much higher at a younger age that we’re just able to process all that [ ] so much better and faster I’ll buy that well the interesting part to me about the half-life thing you said is that even if you’re drinking it at seven in the morning that means it’s 7 P.M half of that [ ] is still in your system and that might not be too much to impair us or bother our sleep but like that kind of to me makes the case for why are we ever drinking this when we know that when we go to sleep at night it’s still in there yeah like I don’t know it doesn’t sound smart in uh in some of the research in the book uh the the rise of Starbucks if you did like a line graph uh totally matches the rise of the population’s Sleep problems wow so um like 90 chicken or the egg though um yeah right because coffee is the problem and the solution you know your coffee’s keeping you awake at night but then you have coffee to wake up the next morning so you have a good sleep the coffee’s the solution for feeling better in an environment that feels intolerable so how do you know if you’re getting too much coffee in a day this is a trick question because I kind of know um do you know did you come across anything about that like how much is a good amount to take in a day um three I think I think the answer is actually zero but like well yeah well what is a I guess would be considered a safer healthy amount harm reduction here Jenny harm reduction okay so I’ll go with the when I was pregnant it was two eight ounce cups a day so the optimal caffeine intake for a person is one to three milligrams per kilogram of weight oh so you have to do a little bit of so how many milligrams are in a cup of coffee generally uh two to three hundred I think two to three hundred and like an eight ounce cup I think is pretty normal when you get into the Starbucks it gets a little higher you I think you get up until like the 400 range yeah so here we have I did do some screenshots from the internet but like a 16 ounce Starbucks is 330 milligrams okay and give us your equation again how many per pound or how many per kilogram uh if you did the maximum I’ll be three milligrams per kilogram okay so I am currently 90 kilograms just about which means I can have one cup of coffee a day if I’m doing the max of three milligrams that’s the maximum I can’t even have that Starbucks Coffee she mentioned that was like 300 something I could have like and there’s more now two seven there’s more potent coffees out there like what are some names like one was like black insomnia I’m not gonna lie I kind of want to try it like no you’ll get you’ll get shaky well yeah and they they yeah but it’s just for a day they even they even Market those coffees like that there’s like ones with like the x’s over the eyes and like the the death or whatever the overdose coffee like that they Market it as extremely powerful like people love it energy drinks because those are really popular 300ish yeah I think entered so it’s similar to Starbucks and they get marketed as like double shots or double hits of caffeine yeah and so I’m just looking at this one chart here oh a Red Bull is 114. and I think Red Bull’s on the lower end yeah they’re on the lower I have two of those oh here’s monsters 160. so I’ve actually it’s funny I’ve never had an energy drink I’m like I’ll do that I haven’t either I’m like scared of them but I’ll have a high potency coffee just because I don’t know I kind of did this summer on our road trip where we had to do all the driving and we’re exhausted I love it I’ve tried to stop drinking them as much but I yeah I don’t do carbonation so that’s the I just did the Starbucks one like the ones that said like double shot and those aren’t caffeine I mean carbonated energy something on the front I’m assuming it’s some version of an energy drink right but they’re not carbonated I try to do the sugar-free ones because the some of them are [ ] loaded with sugar they have a top sugar which is really bad but there’s a lot of I guess where I first got into it was the sugar ones because they just taste delicious it’s like a sugary caffeine loaded candies you know yeah that’s what my wife used to say all the time she’s like that is like drinking a sweet tart and I’m like yes it’s [ ] delicious they’re supposed to be really bad for your teeth too so then I got away from the sugar once and was just doing the non uh sugar yeah there’s zero calories yeah zero sugar ones and then there’s some that they mark it as like healthy which I none of them can be healthy per se but there’s some that the some have protein energy a mix that they’re using is better for you than just loading it up with caffeine you know there’s other mental stimulants that they put in there as well they need to throw some ibuprofen in that caffeine energy drink right a little little energy
hahaha but I know they can’t be healthy didn’t they and it wasn’t there they might have taken these off the market they were energy drinks with alcohol yes
and I believe they took those off the market because and again that just that added thing I can’t remember you know associating with whatever you’re doing making whatever you’re doing better be like oh yeah let’s drink more I mean drinking is not already addictive enough let’s let’s add an extra element to it see I thought it was smart because instead of drinking coffee and alcohol it’s gonna make you piss a ton they just did it all at once all through the day streamlining it right yeah it was less drinks less work for their uh their kidneys this wasn’t my combo but that sounds like alcohol and cocaine to me like that wasn’t that wasn’t my deal but [Music] so why don’t you tell us some of the things you found that are negative like about how caffeine is killing us all well so interesting over the years scientists and doctors wanted to pin like heart disease cancer liver problems and stuff on caffeine but they couldn’t definitively it goes back to what Billy talked about the biggest thing that caffeine causes is sleep problems and it’s the Sleep problems that cause heart disease obesity anxiety Alzheimer’s yeah so it’s all about the sleep so coffee originally like helped rocket human beings like you know in the Industrial Age and like made work days longer and it was a great source there you know but so was like slavery we’re not real happy about that either you know like um but it it started [ ] with the Circadian rhythm and um now so like it’s like 90 of total humans drink caffeine daily it’s so much so that it’s hard to do experiments because they can’t get a control group yes that’s just yeah I heard the same thing like they can’t find enough people that don’t regularly ingest caffeine in one form or another yeah and um has has anybody done caffeine withdrawal here I mean I drive even when I get headaches I mean I will get headaches like have you gone straight like no caffeine yes have you ever you did yes okay I just to try to not you know again just to try to be like I don’t need caffeine and I went off of it for a couple weeks wow it inadvertently detox from caffeine when I get really sick okay so like I you know if I’ve had a stomach bug or probably the last time was maybe when I had coved like if I’m if I’m not sick I don’t really want the caffeine and so that ends up being but it’s always just like two or three days and then then it’s a reset so then I’m like oh I’m just gonna have one cup of coffee so that’s actually considered a more healthy practice is we should be giving ourselves those resets like at least once in every so many days you know once I can’t remember exactly what they the recommended was but it’s like give yourself a full 24-hour period for all the caffeine to get out of your system you know so that you can kind of reset and then use it at healthier doses earlier in the day so that it has time to process out of your system and I thought in preparation for this episode we all should have like stopped caffeine for a week or two and then either talked about that experience or talked about the experience you it was like getting back on it because what I’ve noticed uh and we’re talking about depression and antidepressants with somebody soon um but what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people I work with and myself included before we took antidepressants we had no idea what depression felt like but then after being on antidepressants and getting off them again oh now I know exactly what depression feels like I remember this feeling from before that had never gone away until I took an antidepressant and then I realized it was a thing that could go away and I think it would be the same with caffeine it would almost be like if we took it away for two or three weeks and then did it then we’d have an actual good idea of what caffeine was doing to us right where you get your Baseline we should do like your normal you know yeah we should definitely do that for the sugar one we’re gonna do a sugar sugar but yeah why not we don’t sleep sugar let’s be healthy well and similar to what Jenny said I guess what I came away with in the little bit of research that I did was that caffeine in and of itself isn’t overly dangerous I mean when you think of something like you know alcohol alcohol isn’t actually a poison you know so we’re poisoning ourselves when we intake alcohol caffeine is not it’s something that’s found in nature it’s it’s in you know plants that animals use so in and of itself it’s not a harmful chemical it’s just how do we certain amounts right yeah how are we using it if we’re abusing it or intake too much and we mess up our sleep patterns then we can cause Health side effects but if you just take it in like a healthy amount on a controlled basis like there’s no real harm to it there actually is some correlation between like regular caffeine use and like there were health benefits I can’t remember which it was but like I think it helps prevent certain conditions um caffeine or coffee because coffee has a lot of antioxidants in it so I think it was reduced okay cancer risks I think is associated to to Coffee itself but well and even if you get away from the like I don’t know how to say it like good bad Judgment of it it’s like all right it’s a chemical that exists how can we utilize it to maximize you know let’s say I gotta go whatever go on a hike with my kids and I don’t like to go hiking with my kids in the morning or whatever well I can take some caffeine it up my mood makes me feel a little better about the experience I can go out there and have a much better time be a better Dad that’s great you know I’m going to utilize that to my benefit um if I ingest four cups of it and I’m all jittery and anxious and [ ] jumping out of my skin maybe that’s not the best experience so like if somebody were to actually drink like 100 cups of coffee they would die like it is you know yeah because in even in nature it’s it’s a low-key herbicide like it keeps other plants that’s it’s kind of like propagated it keeps other plants from growing in its area and it’s um discombobulates insects too so like an insect that would prey on the plant it makes them confused it doesn’t kill them it just confuses the insects and then they’re all going to sting me because they think I’m a plant um so I mean it’s not completely harmless but it’s all it’s all about like how much how much poison do you want this discussion makes me think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs um you know when Billy’s saying like let’s not look at it as a good or a bad but it’s just a thing and how do we want to use it but I feel like we’re so far down in like the basic needs category most of our society that we we don’t have the freedom to really know how coffee’s impact in our life it’s you know if I’m not sleeping well tonight it’s like well do I have sleep apnea is my life too stressful is there something going on in my family is there something going on in my work is there something going on with all the other things in life that aren’t too much very good right now right like there’s a ton of things already not feeling good I can’t parse out how much this caffeine is affecting me to know how to use it and it’s almost like I really need to start down at a base level and start building these up to get to the place where there’s not 864 things bothering my life and I can actually pick out the difference caffeine makes and that’s [ ] hard yeah and just I mean in preparation for this episode it was I’m going to say two weeks ago maybe that I listened to the podcast that I listened to and got some other information and so I actively changed some of my caffeine uh practices to be more in line with that I eliminated energy drinks all together I would usually drink one a day usually in the afternoon when I got home from work probably about four o’clock before that I drink at least two maybe three cups of coffee in the day you know sometime during the day usually two in the morning one at night then an energy drink and then occasionally a cup of coffee at meetings um so that’s a lot of caffeine intake in a day and again not every day but you know at least once or twice a week the energy drinks were almost every day so I’d have a minimum of two cups plus an energy drink every day since then I have limited myself to two cups of coffee in the morning I had the second one the latest I’ll have it is about one o’clock and no energy drinks so I’ve drastically cut my coffee I mean my caffeine intake you know basically in half and my sleep is kind of [ ] up like I’m just now so I used to sleep all night through the night I wouldn’t wake up at all but I I would say I didn’t feel rested in the morning like I would wake up and it would take me still like a half hour to an hour to like get up and actually get going that was kind of my joke like I was like don’t talk to me in the first [ ] hour of my day even though I was sleeping seven to eight hours it would still take me to get up get a shower go to work get a cup of coffee and then I would start to feel better now I’m like waking up at night my sleep’s all off and it’s only been like the last two days that I feel like I’ve slept like last night I slept the whole night through and didn’t wake up slept eight hours and then Friday night I think I slept nine hours which is exceptionally long for me anybody that gets nine hours sleep yeah it was amazing and I was like wow this is great I am so deployed right now so I am assuming that has something to do with just the caffeine detox process just cutting like my body’s been working on that high level of caffeine for years I mean it’s been years of at least what I’ll say the equivalent of four to five cups of coffee a day that I’ve now cut down to two and I haven’t noticed any like I don’t have any withdrawal or I’m not getting headaches or anything weird that I notice um but it did take a good like the first week like my sleep was all [ ] up and I I’m just attributing it to that I don’t it could have been something else but there wasn’t no any other major changes in my life other than changing my caffeine intakeup well yeah um it could be a lot of things because like Jason listed off all the things that disrupt human sleep um I just really think we need to include caffeine in the equation you know like so many people it’s like so common you know it’s like breathing you know like everybody’s drinking caffeine in some form or another you forget that it’s such a big part of it so yeah like in the Maslow hierarchy of needs you know go back down to your base stuff and make sure caffeine is included in like you’re figuring out of what’s the problem it’s you know I would be really really curious Caroline are you and I the only ones here that have wearables or maybe I should ask Jenny and Billy that do you guys have watches that like tell you about your sleep oh I do wear watch I don’t check the sleep app it has that feature though yeah okay I was it would be super fascinating to do like a month of night’s sleep on caffeine and then all of us do like a month’s night’s sleep off caffeine and see if it actually changes our numbers I don’t want to quit caffeine I don’t want to either but well I here I can give you this testimonial like I would before we do that experiment so earlier last year um I went to half calf because I started getting heart palpitations actually I was having heart palpitations on and off for like a year and I was really ignoring it and then I was at like the gyno for a checkout and she’s like going down the list of like symptoms for whatever and um you know I said something about heart palpitations and I was like I think it’s just from coffee and she like she like just lifted her eyes from the clipboard like don’t you think you ought to cut down like Jenny and like I just didn’t want to give it up I didn’t want to give up coffee so I went to half calf that was at the that was beginning of the summer and noticeably less anxious and better sleep in the months that followed and so did similar to what Billy did like cut it off at like one or two and I so I just made a half calf blend at home and um cut it off and then yeah I started sleeping better and then um less anxious in the form of like if my kids did something I was like hey man I want to clean that up instead of like what the [ __ ] you know like actually I don’t cuss around my kids but you know like I just like I wasn’t that jumpy anxiously person and then every once in a while when I did slip in at caffeine maybe at 4 30 or something I would be a little snappier and and that’s that’s me I’m like kind of an anxious uh Snappy you know I can be I was a really yellow or Yeller in early recovery actually in early recovery when I realized that I was a yeller there was a correlation with caffeine I would it would be after I had my morning cup and we’re trying to get out the door to school and stuff that’s when I would get like really yelly and like that over-the-top yelling like Jenny we’re not being chased by lions chill out so I made that correlation early in recovery but then last year that’s when I figured out the heart palpitations part so anyway anxiety and sleep for me noticeably different when I went half calf yeah and that’s actually now that you said that I I believe that’s why I went off caffeine at one point was because I realized my anxiety like I was all anxious and high anxiety all the time now I figured out my anxiety was related to some other things and done some other things to address it but yeah it was anxiety it was like I I just blamed caffeine for making me anxious all the time yeah it’s part of a package of things like I do better when I exercise and meditate and regularly talk with my friends in recovery but you know caffeine’s in the equation yeah well it’s amazing when we realize we are a holistic beings like all these things matter you know what I mean like the amount of sleep that we have what we’re putting in our diet you know what our spiritual conditioning is like all those things they aren’t like independent things that one individually is going to fix all the problems it’s like we have to or at least for me I try to choose to address all of them like all right what are some of my physical needs and how can I make some improvements in that area and then what are my mental health needs and what are some things I can do to improve that area and then you know what are my spiritual needs so I think if we just look at like caffeine is causing your sleep problems that’s probably oversimplifying to the issue but it’s a it’s probably a leading Factor [Music] thank you
[Music] now there is something else that I came across that I found interesting and I’ve been really trying to do this too and that is that you shouldn’t intake ingest caffeine until after you’ve been awake for your first full hour to 90 minutes that those sleep chemicals that are in your body when you wake up they’re still there and so your body gives you like a shot of uh I want to say like adrenaline or whatever in the morning to like get you up and going so if you allow that hour that process will clear out some of those sleep chemicals naturally the way that your body’s supposed to clear them out and then you actually get better benefits from the caffeine by waiting that hour to 90 minutes that’s so nice and ideal that’s the one I want it but that’s what I so I’ve been trying to do that and it’s been working it’s a little weird it gets me off my schedule a little bit but that’s what I do now I feel like then I gotta wake up super early to get that hour in before I get my super early hour of quiet so I waited I get my coffee when I go to work now I don’t drink any coffee until like I get up get my shower do all my morning stuff and then go to work and get it when I get to work man when I worked I never understood people like you like people who like could get ready for work and not have coffee and then have their first coffee at work I was like woo H who are you I’ve never been that person until a couple weeks ago it’s it’s brand new and what I’m realizing though is like I always consider myself like I would say like I am not a morning person and I’m realizing like I am a better morning person more recently just focusing on the amount of sleep that I’m getting and limiting the caffeine so my I feel like and this could all just be what do they call that when you just assimilate something that’s not it could be coincidental correlation that I’m gonna say since I limit my caffeine later in the day I’m sleeping better at night and so in the mornings I’m you know getting in a healthier pattern all around um it could just be that I’ve doing some physical things different or whatever but I don’t know I think science would back you up on that but well it’s all based in science of why I’m doing it it’s all based and that’s the whole motivation for me to try to do it I just don’t know if the benefits are a hundred percent real or if I’m just noticing them and making with a placebo effect like now since I’m doing this because I think this is what’s supposed to happen that’s exactly what’s going to happen like all of a sudden oh I’m a morning person now because I did these changes I consider myself a morning person but I also like to have coffee in the morning I just want to take a second and pause and point out that uh I did not come up with the topic for this episode to my wife Kim uh and I am not picking on you about changing your caffeine habits it has nothing to do with that thank you uh well while we’re picking on our loved ones my brother who’s also in recovery he drinks like six to eight Red Bulls a day like every morning him and his wife go to the Mini Mart in their neighborhood and buy like plastic bags full of cans of Red Bull and um and then they and a pack of cigarettes each and then I’m like oh my God Glenn this is not why we got sober like they could at least save money by getting it at the grocery store Walmart sells it by the case I know I like are you listening to this Glenn like you do they sell gallons of Red Bull would it be cheaper if it wasn’t like individually packaged how much would it cost yeah well but you ran the numbers that’s really only three or four cups of coffee a day I think that’s really is it you did math fast well you said Red Bull was like 160 in the Starbucks Coffee it was like 3 30 or something well I mean versus Homebrew not everybody okay it’s still close to the highest though and Starbucks was 16 ounces too that’s fair yeah right I think a home brew was around 200 milligrams of caffeine if I actually this one this statistics at 95 for a home brewed cup of coffee yeah well I think if we’re all going by eight ounce cups like yeah nobody drinks eight ounces I know yeah I know when I was wearing the biggest button on that Keurig machine that’s the button I’m pushing it’s different on each machine I know if it’s 10 12 16 whatever like this one’s only ten I like the ones even occasionally like hit the button and then put the cup back under put in a new thing and hit the small button just to add more top it off copy off sugar yeah I know when I was pregnant they were like two cups of coffee a day and I’m like but I didn’t say what size like you’re one of those people in the memes with the gigantic coffee mug or something yeah it’s usually alcohol you can have one drink a day look at this giant beer I got so I talked to a few people that went to caffeine free rehabs um you asked me this I’m like I have no [ ] clue if they had caffeine in my rehab I just drank whatever they had well what I realized after you asked that Jenny was that I didn’t actually start drinking caffeine until I got clean and came together I never drink coffee when I was using I never drank it yeah heroin addicts don’t drink coffee that’s only because it’s the antidote for alcohol that y’all some kind of luxury yeah yeah people get coffee [ ] coffee we got cocaine bro what the [ ] you want caffeine for right shoot speed balls yelling what’s that coffee going to do for me yeah yeah so I I same Caroline said that to me and I was like well that’s probably why I don’t know if they had caffeine or not because I didn’t [ ] drink anymore well I do remember it was a big deal in a I went to an adolescent rehab at 17 and they didn’t have caffeine in there and it was a big deal when we went to the outside meetings you know all the people from the rehabi running up getting you know two and three cups of coffee because we’re all trying to get a buzz off the caffeine I mean in prison they have chicory that was nasty sugary’s like a brown drink I don’t know what the [ ] it is it’s some kind of coffee substitute or something it’s probably like uh uh the root beer of coffees like the Sarsaparilla of caffeine okay yeah now there is also in hot teas there is also caffeine in some hot teas it’s usually a lot lower black and green depending on which tea you’re drinking there’s caffeine in that as well yeah I think green tea is the lowest looking at my little chart from the internet yet uh yeah green tea is like 25 milligrams versus that that k-cup’s like 120. I only know that because I’ve looked it up for some [ ] argument where somebody kept trying to tell me that there’s more caffeine in tea than there isn’t coffee yeah technicality there is but not when you drink it like so this was an interesting history about tea so tea was used medicinally uh in China like 800 BC and they didn’t start using it recreationally until like 800 A.D so at first T was used but like for medicine and it was until like a thousand plus years later they’re like oh we could drink this for fun they spent 1 600 years being stupid yeah they could have been they could have been buzzing all around China well and one of the reasons I bring that up and we had Jenny and I talked about this before is I like that habit of drinking like a warm drink especially like in the evenings or I’ve Associated it like say for years going to meetings and so more recently I’ve gotten in the habit of drinking hot tea taking tea with me to the meeting because most of them well most of them now aren’t even making [ __ ] coffee anymore since covid which is kind of annoying but is that why you don’t come to the recovery Dharma meetings
celebrate any you guys don’t greet nobody with nice little stuff what the hell sorry um because we’re all friends but I have to be because certainties do still have caffeine in them so if I’m drinking like a green tea which is what I kind of like so I’ve been trying to be more mindful of picking up decaffeinated teas like you know chai tea or something that’s decaf because I’m still I don’t want that caffeine late at night even if it is a lot less I’m trying to get it kind of down to none in the afternoon or evening yeah I have brought like uh like Celestial Seasonings to like the evening meeting and we all we all like that so I you know you can bring your own tea to the Dharma meeting but yeah there’s a like a whole world of decaf teas it’s pretty nice like yeah it’s like a comfort and um because I used to be the one going to the eight o’clock meeting drinking coffee I didn’t realize how it was affecting my sleep I mean I think I was just it was just good to be off alcohol you know like so that was my life was getting better I did have a friend too when I first started recovery and I told her I was going to start going to AAA she was like oh no Jenny they’re all caffeine addicts I’m like well doesn’t that better than me myself to death yeah it seemed like a really silly argument I mean it was coming from a place of love but I was like Ah that’s not really the point I feel like that’s an argument I would have made while I was still using heroin like oh the [ ] I need people you just go there and get hooked on [ ] coffee that ain’t no better yeah but it is true I mean early in recovery it was going out to I mean you say the coffee shop I never went to actual coffee shops but we would go to like Denny’s or the late night restaurants or the diners and eat food and drink coffee and you know like all at eight nine ten o’clock at night you know and just not think anything of it yeah you’re also in your 20s then too that’s a little different I was I was in my late 30s when I started um I want to tell you about these rehab experiences though real quick yeah yeah so um so I was talking to like so the one guy Chris he works here and he said I could use his name um he was older and he went to a VA rehab and is in a hospital and it’s no caffeine no cigarettes so he was withdrawing from alcohol and he said he could tell the difference between what was detoxing from alcohol and what was detoxing from the caffeine he said his head hurt terribly and he said he could tell the difference because he ended up going to rehab in VA two more times in his life and he would sneak caffeine in and uh to to not have I guess that headache part but he said he could tell the difference between detoxing from alcohol and the caffeine withdrawal so the VA says no caffeine for health reasons now I talked to Jen Jen R who also works here so she went from prison where she was already detoxed from drugs but she said she was Hardcore into caffeine in jail and she did talk about like a brown drink in jail that wasn’t coffee so she went from no drugs in jail but lots of caffeine to a Therapeutic Community have you heard of this this is where they like put you that everybody sits in a circle around you and like tells you you’re a piece of [ ] right yeah so yeah I know that’s why you know we could probably have therapy yeah it was in the 90s I don’t even know if these exist anymore so it was in the 90s oh this is down in Baltimore she was in Jersey oh okay they had one in Baltimore where you had to like stand on the corner and wear signs that said you were a piece of [ ] while cars drove by oh my God so she told me we actually I I wanted to talk to her about the caffeine but we got on a wild tangent her telling me about therapeutic communities maybe that’s a topic yeah I think it would make a good show I mean are they still around because there’s probably not how did it sound like it is not Compassionate Care yeah I mean I think you could be camps for I’ve been there someone somewhere is still doing it oh yeah down south yeah maybe like super rural but I don’t think around here Georgia but so she went from from say called TC like so from jail to TC and uh it was no caffeine and it wasn’t for health reasons it was for punishment because you could still smoke there was restrictions on how you could smoke cigarettes but it was no caffeine um and so family members would sneak instant coffee in and toiletries and it was pretty common so her and the other women there would have like secret coffee parties which sounds adorable um and uh but if you got caught then you’d have to wear a sign that says I drink coffee and I’m not allowed to like big humiliating things they’d have punishments like um all right we’ll get that printed up like a recovery sort of t-shirt um and um she’d have to like she’d have a punishment like cleaning the whole stairwell with a toothbrush like so that and she said oh yeah she had hardcore withdrawal headaches body aches from going from caffeine heavy duty in jail to no caffeine in a punishing environment is the Therapeutic Community moniker like a sarcastic thing or like think that’s what they were called TC’s Therapeutic Community and uh that that sounds like yeah like a euphemism like you know it’s exactly the opposite of what it is right like when the new development gets put on like you know Winding Creek it’s like what it destroys you know it’s like they have to like it’s that mentality of like break you down to build you up that’s exactly what she said yeah that’s exactly well that’s the mentality I just it reminds me of handmaid’s tale um which I haven’t seen but I thought about that other war movie the soldiers beat each other up sorry I can’t remember name it platoon is that where they’re like really bully each other yeah full metal jacket I don’t know they’re all a nightmare nightmare to me is that a jelly donut private policer yeah something like that yeah I I think I did watch and had nightmares and blocked it all out my rehab experience was outpatient it wasn’t caffeine free but I wanted to talk to some people about that um there is a guy in the Sangha who recommends if you wanted to get off caffeine there’s a yerba mate anybody hear of it it’s like a plant and it’s like not caffeine but it has like stimulating qualities like caffeine in it or something yeah or uh like cow what coffee’s made of and there’s also like another mushroom drink out there like so Cafe cacao c-a-c-a-o okay oh okay I thought that was like I thought that was chocolate chocolate yeah so it makes like a um a coffee type beverage yes I’ve seen that so more as like I guess as caffeine is becoming like it’s more Warehouse it’s like [ ] people up um not as much as drugs I know but like disrupting sleep and stuff uh like this yerba mate cacao or like a mushroom drink you can find on the internet mushroom one too I see these ads on I think Facebook gives me these ads Jenny said [ ] I did yerba mate is an herbal tea uh this tea commonly known simply as mate is popular in part of South America the leaves and twigs of the Yerba mate plant are dried over fire and seeped in hot water to make the herbal tea oh dirt water yeah I mean it’s altered is there other ways to use caffeine like can you inject it can you smoke the leaves can you snort it like or is drinking it the only option I don’t know of any other way but that’s very interesting Hills he used to be able to get the caffeine pills that’s still interesting yeah yeah yeah that’s true is it like a topical caffeine ointment no I I want to try it all right I’m just curious like well there’s like The Vaping right vaping caffeine no I guess not I’m never making that up yeah I think so like science fiction caffeine oh hey real quick too before so back to Chris being in the VA rehab so that’s you know military rehab um they take caffeine away from you in rehab but the military has been issuing caffeine to its soldiers for like 400 years since the Civil War and I double checked with my husband who was in the Air Force and he’s like oh yeah there’s always coffee in the MREs and it’s just a known thing you get issued caffeine when you’re in the military so if we’re interested I just found a thing nine crazy ways to get caffeine fixed without taking coffee yeah sure give us a few I’ll just run through them quick because one of them was kind of hilarious so of course pills usually 100 to 200 milligrams uh vape pens so they do have caffeine in babies you can get two milligrams per puff never uh uh patches uh you can get caffeine patches apparently with about 60 milligrams do not get me a vape of caffeine this might be the best one for all of us caffeinated soap I thought that said soup at first yeah
wow so 4 to 42 milligrams to enter the bloodstream I guess it’ll eventually soak in through your skin it said experts think it would take about four hours for it to actually get it out though uh yeah that’d be great chocolate of course we know yeah chocolate has caffeine in it coffee gummy candies oh that does not sound are we all going to get medical coffee cards medical caffeine cards caffeinated gum about 40 milligrams of caffeine per piece I’ve seen that wow that’s and caffeine hot sauce it’s just for that just when I need my caffeine yeah so yes you can get it I mean I guess you could probably shoot it
don’t shoot hot sauce yeah that doesn’t sound fun so does anybody here think n a of course you know it gets it’s a absent in space program and then what about caffeine cigarettes why is that okay anybody want to speak to that I I want to speak to the fact that I definitely argued that yeah we had a whole episode where we debated that whole thing not the week not that we can’t yeah yeah I I agree I don’t know why we I think we arbitrarily I say arbitrary I think we make the difference because people don’t feel like it messes up their life yeah the unmanageability isn’t typically as obvious you know there’s not too many people that are like not paying the rent because they’re drinking too much caffeine or smoking cigarettes but it’s probably hindering their ability to pay the rent and to get to work every day that month when they’re exhausted from not sleeping well every night right so it’s like it’s I would agree it’s a great we’re contributing to a problem and I think that’s where it goes back to the hierarchy of needs it’s not that it’s not a problem it’s just that we’re not even to that level yet to even think about it or see it or make changes because we’re too busy trying to make changes on some fundamentally bigger thing yeah and I and don’t hold me to this because I’m definitely not the spokesperson for any 12-step Fellowship but I think the general uh understanding at least early back in the early days of 12-step fellowships was that those were like considered you know quote unquote legal drugs and that the problem had more to do with illegal drugs um of course yeah and alcohol now we have more uh I guess you would say common understandings of drugs to realize that all sorts of things can be addictive like the addiction isn’t in the substance but it used to kind of be looked at as it’s the substance so I think we’re changing that mentality now I I wish it could help us though a little bit in our shift of changing like you know Billy’s saying like it does seem like people are becoming more accepting of like mats and things like that and I wish that the coffee and and you know or caffeine and nicotine debate could help us change the way we see those because it’s like you’re coming into recovery and we’re focused on the big things first we’re like hey you know what Billy if you got to hold on to that caffeine and nicotine like whatever we’ll [ ] work with that later right like right right now focus on the things that are that are ruining your life and then hopefully over time you get to these so-called higher levels of recovery or higher levels of care about yourself where you can address these right and why can’t we have that exact same thing with mat right why can’t that be like hey you’re in the process you’re on the road right you’ll figure the rest of it out later the big [ ] we’re we’re working on the [ __ ] that’s causing the damage yeah but realistically I mean caffeine is worldwide the most abused substance that we know of like that’s the most abused substance but we don’t you wouldn’t talk about that and if you look up a list of like 10 most abused drugs it’s usually going to be like alcohol marijuana cocaine like they don’t even list caffeine in a lot of those conversations like this don’t even consider it and yet it definitely impacts so many parts of our life so there’s big tobacco big alcohol and big caffeine yeah because that’s what everybody accepts as normal this is this is acceptable yeah no I wonder is there a big caffeine conglomerate they like have to there’s no policy around caffeine to limit it so there’s nothing for them to Lobby again you know they’re they’re just accepted already it’s bigger we’re just welcome planetary well and that’s not even just a U.S thing this is around the world you know so it’s Global um
what would you have done if you’d have come in recovery and coffee was off limit I mean I don’t think it would have impacted me at all because I didn’t drink coffee at the time so I just never would have drank yeah it wouldn’t have impacted me at all either what would you have done Jenny I I did drink coffee and um what would you have done if you’d went to AAA and they’d have been like oh if you still drink coffee you’re not sober I was pretty determined to get my life back together like all right then huh yeah that’s interesting I wonder if that would actually hold anybody up well I know when Jen was telling me about the TC people that went there and found out caffeine was off limits they quit so they did quit the program like there’s other reasons why you should have quit that program but not having caffeine was there yeah that’s like the least reason to quit that yeah right people should have been quitting for every [ __ ] thing right what if n a tomorrow says we no longer consider caffeine people who use caffeine to be abstinent and if you want to wow this is a great question I love it keep claiming your clean time you better stop that caffeine use I mean right now it wouldn’t impact me at all well no I know but I’m really asking Billy though I know that’s why it should be like well give me a mushroom drink foreign
[Applause]
and then just laugh at how stupid it is you know because it’s irrelevant to the issue but I wonder how many people would still go into meetings though and like share that they still drink coffee and [ ] that stupid oh yeah 100 yeah that’s definitely so we actually had some meetings in this area years back when I first got clean there was a guy and his wife basically had two meetings that they were telling people you couldn’t drink or smoke cigarettes drink coffee or smoke cigarettes and like they would tell all the people that came in that were smoking out front they had to pick up a one-day key tag and [ ] like that so there was a guy who used to run some recovery houses down in Baltimore and he wouldn’t allow Energy Drinks like the guys in his house weren’t allowed to drink energy drinks but I mean I will say when I was in early recovery and hanging out with a lot of people in early recovery I definitely saw people using energy drinks like a drug like to get to get a feeling so I I kind of kind of understand that I feel like we’re doing that all day every day with everything we do though you know everything is in the action of changing the way we feel unless we feel good and then it’s in the action of keeping so it’s like I mean are we gonna get specific about energy drinks are they really doing something different coffee is is that really doing something different than the girl I’m texting is like it’s all feeling good yeah that’s the whole point I’m chasing something that feels better I know I remember reaching for alcohol I’m sorry reaching for a coffee like it was going to solve my stress for the afternoon when in reality it was probably just making me more anxious yeah it amps everything up so it makes you more anxious more alert more stimulated something we haven’t mentioned in that it kind of occurred to me earlier on when you two were sort of guiding the conversation about caffeine and the ways that impacted you guys and Caroline you’re kind of like the the question mark in all this because like you don’t necessarily fit easily into one of these two categories um but I feel like Jenny and Billy are more like people who struggle with anxiety I’m more somebody who struggles with depression like I have not had any of those negatives you’re talking about with coffee I’m like maybe people with depression need that [ ] energy and maybe people with anxiety get heart palpitations and feel [ ] on edge you know what I mean so maybe we should also take some consideration into like our personal body and the things we struggle with and how that impacts our relationship because for me having two coffees a day might be ideal it might be great for me to have just a little bit more energy whereas like one of you guys it might be bad to have two or three that might be like uh it’s tolerance too I mean if I haven’t been drinking coffee and I then all of a sudden have like three and a half four cups of coffee in a day I’m gonna feel anxious and jittery same same but when that’s my kind of normal or almost normal I I told Jenn Jenny and I were talking about this I don’t know when but I was like oh yeah I get heart palpitations too I just don’t really care about them well and and that’s where because I never know the side of this anxiety depression line you land on more often yeah I’m not an anxious person I am probably more depressed but I’m also an antidepressant so I’m pretty good there too right I got it I don’t I got you I don’t tend to get a lot of anxiety when I do I’m like oh my God what’s this feeling I don’t disagree with your take on it that like the level could impact it as well but I think at a baseline like their level is already up enough as anxious people yeah team anxiety it just might be something for people to also consider when they’re thinking about this idea of like is caffeine useful for me or not so much because like I don’t have a lot of and again I am interested in trying to experiment with my my sleep tracking watch and like doing that but in general like I don’t see any negative impacts in my life doesn’t mean they’re not there means I don’t see them yeah I sleep amazingly I don’t want to give caffeine up I’ve got it down my sleep score is usually in the 80s I’m just saying well I’ve considered like looking at my history with caffeine that I was probably drawn to caffeine because it was a familiar feeling like being spun up I know how to do that like I’m good at being spun up because of the anxiety yeah yeah it’s almost like the anxiety depression too it’s like everyone is slightly different in their brain chemistry and like our neuroplasticity and how our brains have changed based off what the [ ] we’ve done to them like you know and how they’re going to go back like you know it was almost like Jason mentioned earlier like most of us we don’t even know what our Baseline is because we’re never off of everything we’re never completely like without caffeine or whatever other stimulant things we got going on in our lives to know what normal even feels like anybody got any final thoughts about caffeine does talking about it here make you want to do something different in your life for me personally I do I kind of want to do this experiment where like I keep track of my sleep for a month I average that out then maybe I do a month where I’m only drinking it before noon or I’m only having one cup like minor adjustment to see if I can still keep it in my life and then a month without it and like just I would love to but I feel like I won’t do that unless we all agreed to like do like I’m not probably just going to take that on because if it’s just easier or not I’m kind of I don’t wear a watch or anything though but I would love to try that because that’s like say the whole reason I change my sleep I mean my caffeine intake in the last two weeks has been because of this I love the show but I do not want to disrupt for the rest of my life for this that’s interesting yeah I just I’m a softer gentler like I didn’t quit caffeine with the heart I went half calf like I don’t wanna I’m like a softer gentler like I do think it would be ideal if I could go down to a decaf life you know have decaf coffee and stuff but because even decaf still have small amounts of caffeine in it so it’s not a hundred percent and then maybe like whip out coffee in an emergency like oh you know Babe’s in the hospital I gotta be up all night you know save coffee for like emergencies but so but I did you so I just a completely random weird side thing is I listened to a podcast about something else that they said that all this caffeine that they’re adding into all these drinks and supplements and all this [ ] comes from the caffeine that they remove from decaf coffee so they have such a surplus caffeine from making decaf coffee that they almost had to find [ __ ] to do with it which is why they kind of started shoving it into all kinds of things put it into cars yeah you know the process of decaffeinating coffee is actually just people standing on the side of this assembly line as the beans Roll by yelling don’t wake people up
sorry I should hold that for like half an hour I don’t understand but anyway Jenny you mentioned a good book what was the book you mentioned oh yeah so Michael pollan’s caffeine it’s a audible exclusive and we could put a link in the show notes to go right to it through yeah and then you’ll you’ll click on that link and you’ll be able to access that book and you’ll also sign up for an audible trial run which is free for the first 30 days you can cancel at any time and it will not take you 30 days to read the book I love audible I use it all the time listen to it yeah and then we’ll get a percentage of that to give back to the community so feel free to check out that book it’s very sounds very interesting um and then I listened to a podcast it’s a couple hours you can probably skip through and try to get the Highlights but it’s huberman lab uh he did one on he did the three most abused drugs it was caffeine alcohol and nicotine so there was like deep dives into each of those which was the caffeine one was the one I got the most benefit out of so awesome so if you got all that time check those things out if not just tell everybody about us and how wonderful we are telling you about other people’s stuff uh and we’ll see you next week and stay off the keffi foreign
did you like this episode share it with people you think might get something out of it check out the rest of our episodes at recoverysortup.com also while you’re there you can find ways to link up with us on Facebook Twitter Instagram Reddit YouTube anything we’re always looking for new ideas got an idea you want us to look into reach out to us [Music]