20 replies to this topic

[chrono]

So, I've never been a fan of caffeine, because it gives me some pretty strange anxiety. I just started a thread aimed at exploring some methods of alleviating this.

So now I'm wondering about tolerance. It's something I want to avoid for some physiological reasons (cerebral blood flow, for instance), and because I have an aversion to "needing" to take something every day to avoid withdrawals, something I hear a lot from caffeine users.

So my question: how frequently can one take caffeine and not develop any tolerance? To what extent does this depend on the dose? I'm thinking part of my solution will be very small quantities (~10-30mg, say). How is this affected by multiple doses in one day?

Edited by chrono, 12 October 2010 - 08:13 PM.
fixed dead link

[medievil]

Currently i'm at a point were i'm completely tolerant to cafeine, where even taking more cafeine doesnt do anything except making me feel strange.
My cafeine intake is around 300mg a day, it took me months to get tolerant to that.

Im currently on a break and keep you updated. ive heared 2 days are enough to reverse cafeine tolerance.

[Animal]

Currently i'm at a point were i'm completely tolerant to cafeine, where even taking more cafeine doesnt do anything except making me feel strange.
My cafeine intake is around 300mg a day, it took me months to get tolerant to that.

Im currently on a break and keep you updated. ive heared 2 days are enough to reverse cafeine tolerance.

Won't you go through a withdrawal period though? I'm currently going through it myself, after about 3 months of 300-400mg caffeine per day. I can say the worst withdrawal symptoms is the fatigue, which considering I suffer from CFS is probably worse then most.

Let us know how you get on.

[tunt01]

why not just drink decaf so you don't build a tolerance in the first place?

you can mix decaf and regular coffee in a sliding scale fashion to slowly kick your caffeine habit. 25%/75%, 50/50, etc.

Edited by prophets, 11 April 2010 - 06:34 PM.

[medievil]

Currently i'm at a point were i'm completely tolerant to cafeine, where even taking more cafeine doesnt do anything except making me feel strange.
My cafeine intake is around 300mg a day, it took me months to get tolerant to that.

Im currently on a break and keep you updated. ive heared 2 days are enough to reverse cafeine tolerance.

Won't you go through a withdrawal period though? I'm currently going through it myself, after about 3 months of 300-400mg caffeine per day. I can say the worst withdrawal symptoms is the fatigue, which considering I suffer from CFS is probably worse then most.

Let us know how you get on.

Never really noticed much of a withdrawal (some fatique, nothing too bad), all my cafeine comes from energy drinks tough, they boost my mood better then cafeine tabs for some reason. Ive been drinking energy drinks for over 6 months.

[medievil]

why not just drink decaf so you don't build a tolerance in the first place?

you can mix decaf and regular coffee in a sliding scale fashion to slowly kick your caffeine habit. 25%/75%, 50/50, etc.

Well, i dont get my cafeine because i love coffee, but because i naturally have low energy levels and cafeine helps with that.

[khakiman]

3mg per kilogram of body weight is a good number. lots of good info here http://books.google....r...0mg&f=false

[tunt01]

Well, i dont get my cafeine because i love coffee, but because i naturally have low energy levels and cafeine helps with that.

hmm, im the other way around. i love the taste of coffee, but i hate the caffeine. if i could drink zero caffeine coffee with no impact on IL-6, TNF-a, etc., I think I would practically swim in the stuff.

get off coffee/caffeine gradually and fix your energy problem w/ exercise or some other method, i guess. get better sleep. idk

Edited by prophets, 11 April 2010 - 07:54 PM.

[chrono]

Animal, best of luck to you. Must be very rough, on top of your severe fatigue.

3mg per kilogram of body weight is a good number.

That dose would be way too much for me, but I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine. Probably makes sense for training purposes, though. Thanks for the book suggestion, I'll see if it has any information about tolerance. Though the blurb says they debunk the "myth" that caffeine causes anxiety, which doesn't give me a lot of faith...caffeine is the only substance I've ever tried that produces a direct anxiogenic response, so I'm certain it's possible.

Caffeine use is so pandemic, dosing for the sole purpose of preventing withdrawal is seen as surprisingly reasonable in a lot of what I've read.

Im currently on a break and keep you updated. ive heared 2 days are enough to reverse cafeine tolerance.

Yes, please let us know how it goes for you, and what you notice when starting back up. But from what I've heard, tolerance sticks around for a week or two if you're a chronic user. Though I'm sure taking a few days off could put a dent in it.

Edited by chrono, 11 April 2010 - 08:53 PM.

[medievil]

I cant tell much about my break as still drank cafeine sometimes, however i noticed that memantine caused a dramatic reduction in my cafeine tolerance, i was hyper as hell after drinking a small bottle with coke, for me not hyper in the bad way tough, not that unpleasant stimulated feeling,but the more confortable type of jitters.

I only noticed this after going to 20mg of memantine a day, 10mg didnt affect me cafeine tolerance.

Edited by medievil, 03 June 2010 - 01:29 PM.

[chrono]

I'm very interested in memantine's anti-tolerance effects right now. Did it reduce tolerance while you were titrating memantine and drinking caffeine normally, or did it require a break from caffeine to start preventing tolerance when you re-started it?

I started taking about 600mg green tea extract last week, which I understand may be as much as 5% caffeine (so 2x15mg /day). Am a little worried about this with regard to tolerance, but I have a generally non-addictive personality, and I think the benefits outweigh the downsides to such a small amount.

[medievil]

I'm very interested in memantine's anti-tolerance effects right now. Did it reduce tolerance while you were titrating memantine and drinking caffeine normally, or did it require a break from caffeine to start preventing tolerance when you re-started it?

I started taking about 600mg green tea extract last week, which I understand may be as much as 5% caffeine (so 2x15mg /day). Am a little worried about this with regard to tolerance, but I have a generally non-addictive personality, and I think the benefits outweigh the downsides to such a small amount.

I didnt actively take a break (except maybe one or 2 days once and awhile) so maybe you need a small break, but just one or 2 days are sufficient with memantine.

I recently ran out of EGCG, wich does indeed contain cafeine, been taking it for several weeks up untill a few days ago, i dont have any cafeine tolerance at all now.

Als regarding memantine, i know you want to take it to reduce tramadol tolerance and also have tolerance issues with amphetamine, now the combo of both an opiate and amphetamine can be a problem, a friend of me has been taking memantine for amphetamine tolerance succesfully for several months, everything worked fine untill he added in codeine, quickly tolerance went up for both meds, this is probably because the combo raises glutamate levels higher then just taking one med, wich in turn overpowers memantine (wich has a really weak affinity for the NMDA receptor, and therfor easily overpowered). This may be resolved by taking a higher memantine dose, but i dont know what dose would be sufficient, tramadol is a weak opiate tough so it may not be a problem.

Edited by medievil, 03 June 2010 - 02:02 PM.

[chrono]

Als regarding memantine, i know you want to take it to reduce tramadol tolerance and also have tolerance issues with amphetamine, now the combo of both an opiate and amphetamine can be a problem, a friend of me has been taking memantine for amphetamine tolerance succesfully for several months, everything worked fine untill he added in codeine, quickly tolerance went up for both meds, this is probably because the combo raises glutamate levels higher then just taking one med, wich in turn overpowers memantine (wich has a really weak affinity for the NMDA receptor, and therfor easily overpowered). This may be resolved by taking a higher memantine dose, but i dont know what dose would be sufficient, tramadol is a weak opiate tough so it may not be a problem.

Excellent, thanks for that info. I'm not really taking amphetamine right now (only very occasionally), because that psychiatrist costs way too much for me to see at the moment, but that's very good to know. I've been able to find very little info about reducing already-present tolerance (as opposed to prevention), so your experience with caffeine is encouraging.

[aLurker]

Although this doesn't say anything about whether or not memantine can prevent the onset of tolerance it at least shows that memantine might alleviate the withdrawal:

Caffeine withdrawal syndrome in social interaction test in mice: effects of the NMDA receptor channel blockers, memantine and neramexane.

Antagonists acting at N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors have been demonstrated repeatedly to attenuate the expression of drug and alcohol withdrawal syndromes. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of NMDA receptor blockade on the expression of behavioural signs of caffeine withdrawal syndrome, assessed using the social interaction paradigm. Adult male Swiss mice were treated with increasing doses of caffeine (40-100 mg/kg, i.p., twice daily) for 8 days. Twenty-four hours after the last injection of caffeine, there were significant increases in duration and frequency of defensive behaviours, as well as decreased locomotor activity. These changes faded within 72 hours. Pretreatment with a single dose of caffeine (1 mg/kg; 24 h after the end of repeated caffeine administration and 30 min prior to the test) completely reversed these withdrawal-related changes. Separate groups of mice were treated i.p. with different doses of memantine (1, 3 or 10 mg/kg) or neramexane (MRZ 2/579; 1, 3 or 10 mg/kg) 24 h after the last caffeine injection. Both compounds dose-dependently reduced the expression of defensive behaviours while increasing motor activity. These data suggest that NMDA receptor blockade may counteract the acute behavioural effects of caffeine withdrawal.

I'd love to see a similar study on tolerance instead of withdrawal.

Edited by aLurker, 09 October 2010 - 10:46 PM.

[christopherforums]

To the OP's questions,


In my extended caffeine use I would estimate that approx caffeine E3-4D will create no tolerance. Every other day will see tolerance but if you have to wait 3-4 days you should be good.

Caffeine withdrawals are really not that bad, drink a lot of water, go for long walks and run if you can, lift weights. Just push yourself to do what you normally do. Take advantage of the sleep you can get too your body will appreciate it.

[chrono]

@aLurker: Memantine seems to modulate both withdrawal and tolerance for those substances it affects, so a betting man might find that study encouraging. I think medievil mentioned somewhere recently that his caffeine tolerance was gone, but I can't remember if it was due to a break or the memantine.

In my extended caffeine use I would estimate that approx caffeine E3-4D will create no tolerance.

Can you clarify exactly what frequency/length you mean by 'E3-4D'?

I'm not particularly worried about caffeine withdrawals per se; more that I have a strange reaction to caffeine in general. I've been getting somewhat more friendly with it this summer, and if I use it with enough frequency that I would be getting a tolerance, I also get some paradoxical sedation. Could just be coincidence, or other confounding factors (i.e. my general sleep/chronic pain problems).

Edited by chrono, 11 October 2010 - 06:18 AM.

[churchill]

So, I've never been a fan of caffeine, because it gives me some pretty strange anxiety. I just started a thread aimed at exploring some methods of alleviating this.

So now I'm wondering about tolerance. It's something I want to avoid for some physiological reasons (cerebral blood flow, for instance), and because I have an aversion to "needing" to take something every day to avoid withdrawals, something I hear a lot from caffeine users.

So my question: how frequently can one take caffeine and not develop any tolerance? To what extent does this depend on the dose? I'm thinking part of my solution will be very small quantities (~10-30mg, say). How is this affected by multiple doses in one day?

I find that I gain a tolerance to coffee almost after one day. So if I up my drinking by one cup then I get a boost for that day but the next is normal, and if I take one less in a day I feel tired for one day and then it resets. The few times that I have gone completely caffeine free I have found that I generally seem to be missing something, I can't quite put my finger on it but it helps my motivation.

Why not just give up caffiene?

[christopherforums]

E3-4D = Every three to four days.

Amphetamines are better IMO.

However, caffeine and amphetamines will be harmful in the long run. ^^ Churchill says "why not just give up caffeine?" That is the best advice IMO, be natural and you will be better.

[medievil]

@aLurker: Memantine seems to modulate both withdrawal and tolerance for those substances it affects, so a betting man might find that study encouraging. I think medievil mentioned somewhere recently that his caffeine tolerance was gone, but I can't remember if it was due to a break or the memantine.

It definatly wasnt because of a break as it occured later again (when i had to lower the memantine dose and raise it agian later due to running out to soon).

The first time i drank a bottle of coke and felt full of jitters like after drinking several energy drinks right after eachother, i was first confused what the hell was going on untill i connected it with the coke, and kept getting the same response afterwards.

[medievil]

I'm pretty certain it's the memantine potentiating the effects of PTX. It's potentiating caffeine immensely for me, so wouldn't it likely do that as well for PTX? Two mugs of coffee with memantine has sent me into hyperspace.

Another guy noticing potentiation of cafeine on mem (adreno on mind and muscle).

[chrono]

@health_nutty: thanks for letting me know about the broken link; some old thread links don't work since the board upgrade, while some do. I moved your post over there.

As for "giving up" caffeine, I see no reason to do so. I have a generally nonaddictive personality, and caffeine doesn't do enough for me that it's even a possibility of a problem. Nor am I really scared of tolerance/withdrawal per se, but I think knowing how fast it develops is a good piece of information to have, to enable intelligently-designed usage.

And as for living "naturally," I'll take it under advisement, but as I'm the nootropics moderator, one might imagine that my bias is somewhere on the other end of that spectrum