For context: I drink a lot of caffeine and like a lot of people have developed a bit of a tolerance. I estimate my daily intake is anywhere from 120-300mg everyday.

There were a couple things that started to annoy me about developing a tolerance.

• Caffeine was less effective
• I needed a certain amount of caffeine to hit my “baseline”

I realized that if I need something to hit baseline then it’s not really helpful anymore. Sick of my reliance on and tolerance of caffeine I decided to take a two week cold-turkey break from all sources including things like chocolate and soft-drink.

The first few days were surprisingly difficult. I felt like a bit of a vegetable but it didn’t take long (maybe 3-4 days) for my body to adapt and after that I was functional.

Two weeks later I decided to reintroduce caffeine. I had been stuck on a conceptual problem with kenku.org for the last few weeks and didn’t know the best way to solve the problem. Armed with a cup of coffee and hopefully less adenosine receptors I decided that today was going to be the day. I opened my laptop, booted up my editor (vim btw) and started sipping the elixir of the gods. I was ready to get to work. The first sip was a crescendo of pleasure, my senses rejoiced at their favorite molecule entering the system and I quickly had another sip, and another, and another. The coffee didn’t last very long. It only took a few minutes to feel the effects and oh my, was it beautiful. I felt like a cognitive god. I’ve never taken meth but this is what I assume meth would feel like. My brain was running at 100km/h and almost instantly I saw a solution to the problem I had grown so frustrated with. I had spent so much time on this problem that it started to hurt to think about in depth but now it was so simple. I can just do x, y and z and then it’s done, that fixes everything. I instantly got to work and within two hours I was done. What shocked me was how quickly I had come up with a solution, it must have already been at the back of my mind but the caffeine had brought what was in the subconscious into the conscious, I imagine that this is how psychedelics work.

I think that the best thing I did here was that

I went into drinking the cup of coffee with the intention of solving this problem

which i think was super important and something I want to try again in the future.

now that I have less of a tolerance I also want to try to keep it this way for longer so heres

what i’m doing in the future to get the most out of caffeine

• waiting 90 minutes before consuming it in the morning
• not consuming caffeine two days in a row, i can consume whenever i want and in whatever dosage, but I can’t drink caffeine more than two days in a row. I'm hoping this stops my brain from developing too much tolerance. life hack for this. just drink decaf. Not totally caffeine free but has 1/10th of the amount of caffeine and your brain thinks it’s the same thing. Amazing.