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Old 03-25-2017, 02:31 PM
  # 17 (permalink)  
FreeOwl
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it's also a sympathomimetic agent; it stimulates your entire fight or flight response.

For those of us who were / are prone to chronic use of large amounts of this stuff - energy drinks, caffeineated sodas, strong coffee... etc... it can get to the point where we have basically spent our entire lives in "GO" mode.

It has a half-life of 12 hours, so if you're drinking several coffees or energy drinks per day - you're waking with the stuff still in your system. Over the years and even (for some of us) the decades - it builds and builds and stands to reason that your system is over-flooded with cortisol and other stress-response hormones and chemicals. You begin to actually ALTER your whole system. You put yourself in high-alert mode and essentially wire yourself into semi-permanent anxiety.

If you were like me - and also used vast amounts of alcohol, frequented stimulant drugs and maybe used a host of dopamine and seratonin influencing drugs.... then you put your mind and body through a years-or-decades-long cocktail of rewiring for stress, combat, anxiety, hyper-vigilance.

After all of that..... we get sober and find ourselves changed..... maybe a few coffees now get you sweating in odd ways. Maybe you shake. Maybe your social anxiety is all keyed up all the time. Maybe you're having a hard time working out. We take away the depressant side of the equation that we gave our bodies for years (or decades) but now we still keep and maybe in some ways even up the ante on stimulants......

Yet we have a hard time stopping. We're emotionally, psychologically and physically dependent on this stuff.

Friends and family and even fellows in recovery play the enabling role "ahh, its ONLY caffeine". "energy drinks are no big deal"!! "Coffee is GOOD for you"..... but they aren't looking at the big picture. They aren't us. They maybe didn't take caffeine to the extreme that we have. Some of us (me, guilty) have been at this since discovering Mountain Dew and JOLT cola back in the eighties. The original gateway drug was actually caffeine, and sugar. 30+ years of this stuff. Often in binge amounts. And did we ever really go so much as a few days or a week without it?

Our bodies are a system. An adaptive system. A system that naturally seeks a certain optimal balance - but we modern humans have learned to throw copious amounts of strange and unexpected things into our bodies. The system adapts. It responds. In many cases, the adaptation seems to be 'harmless' or it simply works. But some of us have begun to look at and question whether 'harmless' is really true. Some of us look at it and say to ourselves 'sure, it "works" - but is this how I want my body to work?'.

Caffeine (and all the other crazy crap they dump into the various 'proprietary blends' of energy drinks) are not a part of the balance our bodies seek. They weren't there for the tens of thousands of years human beings evolved. Sure, maybe we'd occasionally happen on a stimulant food. Use it in ceremony or for a utilitarian outcome - but somewhere along the curve we began overwhelming our bodies with vast quantities of substances that our bodies were never really meant to have as a regular diet - and we've labeled it 'normal' and called it 'good'.

If caffeine or any substance has impact on your body, your mind, your emotions, your spirit or your experience of life that isn't in alignment with the full enjoyment of your life - then it doesn't really matter how 'socially acceptable' or 'good for you' it may be; for YOU, it is an impairment of your life.

At least - that's how I've come to see it. I'd like to drink coffee in moderation. But at the same time, I know how moderation has worked for me with literally EVERY other addictive substance. And also - I've found that after managing to eliminate EVERY other addictive substance, I've looked back on and realized with deep gratitude that I'm fortunate to have left it behind.

I'm pretty well convinced it'll be the same with the DRUG caffeine.

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