They have the same dosage as a cup of coffee (~100mg).
You can still drink coffee/Diet Coke/tea, just get it without caffeine. Coke caffeine-free, decaf coffee, herbal tea.
They cost ~60¢ per pill [EDIT: oops, it’s 6¢ per pill — thanks @ryan_greenblatt] vs ~$5 for a cup of coffee — that’s about an order of magnitude cheaper.
You can put them in your backpack or back pocket or car. They don’t go bad, they’re portable, they won’t spill on your clothes, they won’t get cold.
Straight caffeine makes me anxious. L-Theanine makes me less anxious. The caffeine capsules I linked above have equal parts caffeine and L-Theanine.
Also:
Caffeine is a highly addictive drug; you should treat it like one. Sipping a nice hot beverage doesn’t make me feel like I’m taking a stimulant in the way that swallowing a pill does.
I don’t know how many milligrams of caffeine were in the last coffee I drank. But I do know exactly the amount of caffeine in every caffeine pill I’ve ever taken. Taking caffeine pills prevents accidentally consuming way too much (or too little) caffeine.
I don’t want to associate “caffeine” with “tasty sugary sweet drink,” for two reasons:
A lot of caffeinated beverages contain other bad stuff. You might not by-default drink a sugary soft drink if it weren’t for the caffeine, so disambiguating the associations in your head might cause you to eat your caffeine and not drink the soda.
Operant conditioning works by giving positive reinforcement to certain behaviors, causing them to happen more frequently. Like, for instance, giving someone a sugary soft drink every time they take caffeine. But when I take caffeine, I want to to be taking it because of a reasoned decision-making process minimally swayed by factors not under my control. So I avoid giving my brain a strong positive association with something that happens every time it experiences caffeine (e.g. a sugary soft drink). Caffeine is addictive enough! Why should I make the Skinner box stronger?
If you can’t take pills, consider getting caffeine patches — though I’ve never tried them, so can’t give it my personal recommendation.
Caffeine is a drug. I’m not a doctor, take caffeine at your own risk, this is not medical advice.
This post does not take a stance on whether or not you should take caffeine; the stance that it takes is, conditional on your already having decided to take caffeine, you should take it in pill form (instead of in drink form).
~$5 for a cup of coffee — that’s about an order of magnitude cheaper.
Are you buying your coffee from a cafe every day or something? You can buy a pack of nice grounds for like $13, and that lasts more than a month (126 Tbsp/pack / (3 Tbsp/day) = 42 days/pack), totaling 30¢/day. Half the cost of a caffeine pill. And that’s if you don’t buy bulk.
Are you buying your coffee from a cafe every day or something?
i’m not (i don’t buy caffeinated drinks!), but the people i’m responding to in this post are. in particular, i often notice people go from “i need caffeine” → “i’ll buy a {coffee, tea, energy drink, etc}” — for example, college students, most of whom don’t have the wherewithal to go to the effort of making their own coffee.
If you take caffeine regularly, I also recommend experimenting with tolerance build-up, which the pill form makes easy. You want to figure out the minimal number of days N such that if you don’t take caffeine every N days, you don’t develop tolerance. For me, N turned out to be equal to 2: if I take 100 mg of caffeine every second day, it always seems to have its full effect (or tolerance develops very slowly; and you can “reset” any such slow creep-up by quitting caffeine for e. g. 1 week every 3 months).
You can test that by taking 200 mg at once[1] after 1-2 weeks of following a given intake schedule. If you end up having a strong reaction (jitteriness, etc., it’s pretty obvious, at least in my experience), you haven’t developed tolerance. If the reaction is only about as strong as taking 100 mg on a toleranceless stomach[2], then you have.
(Obviously the real effects are probably not so neatly linear, and it might work for you differently. But I think the overarching idea of testing caffeine tolerance build-up by monitoring whether the rather obvious “too much caffeine” point moved up or not, is an approach with a much better signal/noise ratio than doing so via e. g. confounded cognitive tests.)
Once you’ve established that, you can try more complicated schemes. E. g., taking 100 mg on even days and 200 mg on odd days. Some caffeine effects are plausibly not destroyed by tolerance, so this schedule lets you reap those every day, and have full caffeine effects every second day. (Again, you can test for nonlinear tolerance build-up effects by following this schedule for 1-2 weeks, then taking a larger dose of 300-400 mg[3], and seeing where its effect lies on the “100 mg on a toleranceless stomach” to “way too much caffeine” spectrum.)
You can establish that baseline by stopping caffeine intake for 3 weeks, then taking a single 100 mg dose. You probably want to do that anyway for the N-day experimentation.
there are plenty of other common stimulants, but caffeine is by far the most commonly used — and also the most likely to be taken mixed into a tasty drink, rather than in a pill.
One question I’m curious about: do these pills have less or no effects on your bowels compared to what a coffee cup can? Is it something about the caffeine in itself, something else, or the mode of absorption? If they ditch those effects then I’m genuinely interested.
Counterargument: sure, good decaf coffee exists, but it’s harder to get hold of. Because it’s less popular, the decaf beans at cafés are often less fresh or from a worse supplier. Some places don’t stock decaf coffee. So if you like the taste of good coffee, taking caffeine pills may limit the amount of good coffee you can access and drink without exceeding your desired dose.
As a black tea enjoyer I would argue it’s practically non existent, no decaf black tea I’d ever tried even comes close to the best “normal” black tea sorts.
This is true of all teas. The decaf ones all are terrible. I spent a while trying them in the hopes of cutting down my caffeine consumption, but the taste compromise is severe. And I’d say that the black decaf teas were the best I tried, mostly because they tend to have much more flavor & flavorings, so there was more left over from the water or CO2 decaffeination...
Eat your caffeine
…instead of drinking it. I recommend these.
They have the same dosage as a cup of coffee (~100mg).
You can still drink coffee/Diet Coke/tea, just get it without caffeine. Coke caffeine-free, decaf coffee, herbal tea.
They cost ~60¢ per pill [EDIT: oops, it’s 6¢ per pill — thanks @ryan_greenblatt] vs ~$5 for a cup of coffee — that’s about an order of magnitude cheaper.
You can put them in your backpack or back pocket or car. They don’t go bad, they’re portable, they won’t spill on your clothes, they won’t get cold.
Straight caffeine makes me anxious. L-Theanine makes me less anxious. The caffeine capsules I linked above have equal parts caffeine and L-Theanine.
Also:
Caffeine is a highly addictive drug; you should treat it like one. Sipping a nice hot beverage doesn’t make me feel like I’m taking a stimulant in the way that swallowing a pill does.
I don’t know how many milligrams of caffeine were in the last coffee I drank. But I do know exactly the amount of caffeine in every caffeine pill I’ve ever taken. Taking caffeine pills prevents accidentally consuming way too much (or too little) caffeine.
I don’t want to associate “caffeine” with “tasty sugary sweet drink,” for two reasons:
A lot of caffeinated beverages contain other bad stuff. You might not by-default drink a sugary soft drink if it weren’t for the caffeine, so disambiguating the associations in your head might cause you to eat your caffeine and not drink the soda.
Operant conditioning works by giving positive reinforcement to certain behaviors, causing them to happen more frequently. Like, for instance, giving someone a sugary soft drink every time they take caffeine. But when I take caffeine, I want to to be taking it because of a reasoned decision-making process minimally swayed by factors not under my control. So I avoid giving my brain a strong positive association with something that happens every time it experiences caffeine (e.g. a sugary soft drink). Caffeine is addictive enough! Why should I make the Skinner box stronger?
If you can’t take pills, consider getting caffeine patches — though I’ve never tried them, so can’t give it my personal recommendation.
Disclaimers:
Generic caveats.
Caffeine is a drug. I’m not a doctor, take caffeine at your own risk, this is not medical advice.
This post does not take a stance on whether or not you should take caffeine; the stance that it takes is, conditional on your already having decided to take caffeine, you should take it in pill form (instead of in drink form).
Are you buying your coffee from a cafe every day or something? You can buy a pack of nice grounds for like $13, and that lasts more than a month (126 Tbsp/pack / (3 Tbsp/day) = 42 days/pack), totaling 30¢/day. Half the cost of a caffeine pill. And that’s if you don’t buy bulk.
It’s actually $0.06 / pill, not $0.60. Doesn’t make a big difference to your bottom line though as both costs are cheap.
thanks, edited!
i’m not (i don’t buy caffeinated drinks!), but the people i’m responding to in this post are. in particular, i often notice people go from “i need caffeine” → “i’ll buy a {coffee, tea, energy drink, etc}” — for example, college students, most of whom don’t have the wherewithal to go to the effort of making their own coffee.
I second that.
If you take caffeine regularly, I also recommend experimenting with tolerance build-up, which the pill form makes easy. You want to figure out the minimal number of days N such that if you don’t take caffeine every N days, you don’t develop tolerance. For me, N turned out to be equal to 2: if I take 100 mg of caffeine every second day, it always seems to have its full effect (or tolerance develops very slowly; and you can “reset” any such slow creep-up by quitting caffeine for e. g. 1 week every 3 months).
You can test that by taking 200 mg at once[1] after 1-2 weeks of following a given intake schedule. If you end up having a strong reaction (jitteriness, etc., it’s pretty obvious, at least in my experience), you haven’t developed tolerance. If the reaction is only about as strong as taking 100 mg on a toleranceless stomach[2], then you have.
(Obviously the real effects are probably not so neatly linear, and it might work for you differently. But I think the overarching idea of testing caffeine tolerance build-up by monitoring whether the rather obvious “too much caffeine” point moved up or not, is an approach with a much better signal/noise ratio than doing so via e. g. confounded cognitive tests.)
Once you’ve established that, you can try more complicated schemes. E. g., taking 100 mg on even days and 200 mg on odd days. Some caffeine effects are plausibly not destroyed by tolerance, so this schedule lets you reap those every day, and have full caffeine effects every second day. (Again, you can test for nonlinear tolerance build-up effects by following this schedule for 1-2 weeks, then taking a larger dose of 300-400 mg[3], and seeing where its effect lies on the “100 mg on a toleranceless stomach” to “way too much caffeine” spectrum.)
Assuming it’s safe for you, obviously.
You can establish that baseline by stopping caffeine intake for 3 weeks, then taking a single 100 mg dose. You probably want to do that anyway for the N-day experimentation.
Note that this is even more obviously dangerous if you have any health problems/caffeine contraindications, so this might not work for you.
Also consider modafinil
there are plenty of other common stimulants, but caffeine is by far the most commonly used — and also the most likely to be taken mixed into a tasty drink, rather than in a pill.
One question I’m curious about: do these pills have less or no effects on your bowels compared to what a coffee cup can? Is it something about the caffeine in itself, something else, or the mode of absorption? If they ditch those effects then I’m genuinely interested.
Counterargument: sure, good decaf coffee exists, but it’s harder to get hold of. Because it’s less popular, the decaf beans at cafés are often less fresh or from a worse supplier. Some places don’t stock decaf coffee. So if you like the taste of good coffee, taking caffeine pills may limit the amount of good coffee you can access and drink without exceeding your desired dose.
And good decaf black tea is even harder to get…
As a black tea enjoyer I would argue it’s practically non existent, no decaf black tea I’d ever tried even comes close to the best “normal” black tea sorts.
This is true of all teas. The decaf ones all are terrible. I spent a while trying them in the hopes of cutting down my caffeine consumption, but the taste compromise is severe. And I’d say that the black decaf teas were the best I tried, mostly because they tend to have much more flavor & flavorings, so there was more left over from the water or CO2 decaffeination...