Can you handle coffee?

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Interesting. I had no idea coffee had those kind of therapeutic effects for some conditions.
Do you aim to drink a certain number of cups a day?

Hi again; sorry, was offline today til now.

I don't have a target in mind. It's what's known as "titrating" - I drink coffee when I feel as though I need it; I stop when I feel "OK". I was doing that for 20 years almost before I knew what I was really doing; so far, it's still working for me .

The only time I had an issue with coffee was when I was going through PTSD-related psychosis, and in the weeks after I recovered from the psychosis.

My thoughts were already going a million miles per hour, and they weren't very good thoughts. Caffeine just made it worse - pretty much kicked the bad feelings and thoughts into hyperdrive, and made it nearly impossible to distract myself from them. Unimaginable suffering, where every 5 minutes feels like an hour on top of it all.

Thankfully once my bupropion started working, I never had issues with caffeine again. Now I'm back to full-on caffeine addict

Caffeine is serious business - in the 1950s, people would get something that was called "coffee nerves" then. Near-overdose on caffeine from too much coffee. Jittery, irritable, insomnia type stuff.

Then people started using it directly as a substitute for benzedrine - which had actually been legal (!) - (long haul truckers, etc.) When I traveled for business in the '80s and '90s, I preferred to drive, and the rest stops and diners (oh, diners!) all sold various caffeine pills for the same purpose. I lived in Rochester NY for awhile, home of Jolt cola "all the sugar, twice the caffeine" and it was quite effective when I worked overtime. Also tasted pretty good, at least to me, at least back then .

Now it's probably energy drinks, which are like turbocharged Jolt. I've never tasted one - Jolt was quite enough for me

People can actually overdose on these and die - sadly it's often younger people with cardiac conduction defects or other undetected issues that make them vulnerable. With coffee, even with espressos, you usually get really uncomfortable before you're in serious danger, and that will slow or stop your consumption.

I guess if there's a moral to this bit of rambling it's that caffeine is a respectworthy stimulant, and we forget that because it's part of our routine diet... but it can have strong positive or negative effects.

I've heard some worrying things about energy drinks.
My daughter likes them, she's only 14, and I tried gently warning her off them. Unfortunately, at that age, if I get too heavy-handed she'll rebel and only drink more
Maybe they ought to be classed as a kind of drug/medication instead of a beverage.

I used to be way into energy drinks. Never anything too far overboard, but generally 1-3 per day. I definitely think they aren't good for health, and the crashes from them are pretty lame. One thing you could do is try to control the type of energy drink - some have 80mg caffeine, comparable to an espresso or something like that. Others have 240mg, even 515mg of caffeine - a ridiculous amount. With drinks like that, caffeine overdose is possible if they chain them back to back.

I tried my first one when I was 16 or so. The first times felt like a high, practically. After that it was just a caffeine buzz.

Now I strictly stick to coffee and tea. Cheaper, healthier, and no crash.

An update:
I've been trying really hard to stay off coffee since I posted this thread, and doing OK so far (averting my eyes from the cafe as I hurry past).

Bought a take-out lunch from McDonalds (yes, I know I shouldn't, but it appeals to the child in me). Anyway, after drinking about half the coke, I found myself getting all agitated again, pacing around and stressing out. So now I'm thinking I ought to give up the fizzy drinks as well.

Huh. Looks like I'm back on the green tea Unless anyone can recommend an alternative...?

I've been trying roasted dandelion tea. Not quite the same as coffee, but close enough to (sometimes) take away the craving for it.

Yes, I might try dandelion. Apparently it's caffeine free.
I saw it in the shop and wondered about it, but I'd never tried it and it wasn't cheap, so I hesitated.
They had rooibos tea as well (not sure if I spelt that right), has anyone tried that?

A cup or two, but I also make my coffee rather strong...so if I drink much more than that it makes me a bit jittery. If its not strong than it just tastes like dirt water so typically I turn down most coffee I am offered as people don't typically make it as strong as I like. Sometimes I try to use a little less coffee to conserve the bag a bit longer, but then it tastes like crap so I can't enjoy it.

I never really notice the effects of coffee. I can drink it whenever I want without a problem.

I just noticed something interesting. On the poll, if you add the third and fourth rows together it looks like a bell curve, with mean around the level of drinking a cup a day.
Not sure if that means anything

A-ha
I've been doing some reading on-line. So apparently:

For people with ADD / ADHD, stimulants can have a calming and focusing effect, so coffee can be beneficial in a similar way.

But coffee also stimulates the release of adrenaline and cortisol, which are stress hormones. It speeds up the heart and raises blood pressure. This may be why it makes some of us agitated.

Autistic people in general seem to have odd reactions to drugs, sometimes over-reactive, sometimes under.

Taking all these into consideration might explain why there's such a large spread of response to the coffee question: how much one can drink may depend whether one has more trouble with ADHD or with anxiety, and whether one is hyo- or hyper-reactive to drugs like caffeine. This may be further complicated by whether other medical issues are involved, such as asthma, heart valve or thyroid problems.

For myself, I feel like the coffee had a beneficial effect on focus as I drank it, but that was followed by an issue with agitation. So maybe there's a difference in timing between those two effects. And since that was only on one cup a day, I guess I'm hyper-reactive to caffeine.

Does this fit with others'e experiences? I'm kind of having trouble understanding how some people can drink several cups of coffee per day without adverse effects, because that's so different to my own experience. If you're one of those people, how is your reaction to other drugs and medications?

I love coffee, but I cut it down to maybe one cup in the morning with a bit of milk. It hurts my stomach sometimes.

I can handle coffee from the standpoint of caffeine consumption, but I don't like hot drinks so I only ever drink frappacino or similar coffee based beverages. I'm sure the fact that at one point in my life I was consuming ~1g of caffeine (combined with other stimulants) impacts how sensitive to caffeine I am now.

I can't do alcohol or sedatives. They either completely knock me out from a very small amount, or they give me anxiety attacks. If I have to take something like benedryl, I take kids version and an infant dosage. I try to do most medicine as herbal tea because it's much more subtle.