> coffee addicts

I don't know if it's the word "addicts" that maybe doesn't have to be a negative, or if it's not the right word at all for "functional addicts", but I feel like the "addiction" people have to coffee is much more behavioral than chemical (although there is physiological withdrawal symptoms too), compared to other "harder" drugs like cocaine or heroin. The clear negative effects from long-term use is also a lot much evidence with one side of these, coffee not so much.

Not sure you have to cut back on something that you really enjoy, so much that you wanna do it every day, even if you get cranky when someone (sometimes you) ruin this ceremony for you. Why would you cut back when the biggest negative is spending 10-20EUR a month on some nice coffee you can consume every single morning?

I've known people with disabling headaches until they hit 200mg+ of caffeine in the AM. They are caffeine addicts.

>you wanna do it every day, even if you get cranky when someone (sometimes you) ruin this ceremony for you

This is addicted behavior; the bar is far lower than most people use the word for.

> Not sure you have to cut back on something that you really enjoy, so much that you wanna do it every day, even if you get cranky when someone (sometimes you) ruin this ceremony for you. Why would you cut back when the biggest negative is spending 10-20EUR a month on some nice coffee you can consume every single morning?

The only thing that I know is that I know nothing but I will like to respectfully present my points

Couldn't the same arguments that you used could be used, for say, phone addiction and so many other under-focused addictions as well.

There is more nuance to it that I'd like to explore:

Is the dependency of anything whether good or bad not something worth discussing more deeply into. Could it perhaps also say just a few things about our society that workers feel so overworked that they have to resort to using coffee in order to tolerate the amount of work?

I don't drink coffee personally, do I get cranky? Of course but I don't attribute that crankiness to my lack of coffee. Life has its ups and downs but suppose a down comes just after you wanted to quit coffee, you might attribute your responses to how you stopped drinking coffee, you would feel like coffee was helping you and now you stopped it and you are missing out on something. You must again use coffee!

My main point is: How much is coffee really helping you and how much is the fear of absence of coffee as if you are losing out on something so precious and that many can't live their life without it when in reality many people live just fine without drinking coffee as well and all the ways our minds folds our thinking into wanting it again. just one more time, trust me bro. Today I had a lot of work from my boss or I feel so stressed, nothing like a cup of coffee. Just one more time.

I feel as if the excuse can work in our minds because at that point, our minds are tired, it just wants to fix itself and we don't think too rationally about it. You might even think what's the harm? but the harms is that the cycle continues and I will try to list some of the harms in the end of the comment from another HN commenter (@bossyTeacher) who puts it better than I can :-)

- High heart rate and blood pressure

- Increased risk of arrhtymia

- Less deep sleep

- Disruption to your cortisol level dynamics

(I have shared some negative effects of it, also if coffee impacts your sleep, one has to wonder that there are people willing to pay thousands of dollars to improve their sleep, the question seems to me how much do you think your deep sleep is worth over the long term?)

As such, I believe that there's more nuance to the whole thing.

To me, my personal opinion is that I don't want my self control resource to focus on the task of coffee consumption and keeping it in check. I sometimes drink soft drinks like diet coke just because I would have some friction (which well online shopping is actually ironically* making it less when I would want the friction to be more actually but still!), I know that with coffee, I might not be able to resist the temptation of having coffee at home and then drinking it a bit too much. It happens to the best of us, It's alright but something worth thinking about.

Self control is like a resource in terms of how precious it is, you have a finite amount of self control (IMO). As such, I would like to just not think about coffee so much in life and live my life :-)

(I think I might prefer less diet coke as well and to get to lemonade and other natural drinks actually, personally I like lemonade as well but even the mere friction of 2 minutes making one has sometimes made me stop as I feel like its a task. I am thinking if I really must, someday I would try to make Lemonade in huge container and just drink from it throughout the day.)