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by bheadmaster 1134 days ago
Caffeine, when taken regularly in high doses, can cause a burnout similar to amphetamines. I've done both in college.

However, caffeine in small doses (up to ~5 cups / day) is much easier to get used to without burning out, and after a period of regular use becomes more of a tool giving you control over the time you want to be awake and alert, instead of giving you superhuman focus.
1 comments
krageon 1134 days ago
> small doses (up to ~5 cups / day)

one cup has ~120mg of caffeine. This is 600 mg of caffeine. That's not a small dose. I would say it's above even a "moderate" dose. To be safe I looked it up, and I find up to 400 mg is considered safe. Above that is considered a high caffeine intake [1].

[1] "only limited evidence is currently available to ascertain the safety of high caffeine intake (greater than 400 mg/d for adults [...] Limited data suggest adverse health outcomes" from https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/Scientific-Re...

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bheadmaster 1134 days ago
> one cup has ~120mg of caffeine. This is 600 mg of caffeine. That's not a small dose

That's a fairly generous estimate, but that depends on which coffee you're drinking and how it's made. I usually make a cup of coffee by using at most a teaspoon of instant coffee powder, which contains ~50mg of caffeine. So 6 cups for me would be ~300mg of caffeine. That's a small dose when compared to my >1000mg caffeine pill habit in college, which caused the amphetamine-like burnout.

Though, it's good that you've brought this up - "a cup" is not a well-defined measurement of caffeine, and this elaboration resolves the ambiguity of my original post.

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Kirby64 1134 days ago
Instant coffee powder has extremely low caffeine vs. other brewing methods.

I'd suggest that most people, if they're drinking '5 cups a day' level, are brewing a pot of filter coffee via a drip machine. At that rate, each 'cup' (defined as 8 fl oz of coffee) should have something like ~100mg of caffeine.

If a 'cup' of coffee is something like a Starbucks Venti (20 fl oz), Starbucks claims it has somewhere between 410-475mg of caffeine. Two of those and you're approaching 1000mg of caffeine alone.

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