Comment by grvdrm
6 hours ago
Fascinating.
Can you describe what else you tried? Other supplements? Any other non-food/supplement techniques like journaling, breathing, etc.? Any therapy and other similar human interventions?
After all those - is it / was it still the case that cutting caffeine drove the best outcome?
Not OP but I'll share my experience. For me, I have to quit caffeine for those to even become an option. Otherwise I get my short burst of productivity then everything shuts down after and I don't want to do a thing, everything feels "impossible" or like it doesn't matter at all.
Things like journaling / breathing / etc calm the nervous system while caffeine stimulates it. I would say caffeine is counterproductive to those practices.
Thanks for sharing.
I briefly quit caffeine once but it as well before any realization of anxiety. So, hard to extrapolate forward from that experience.
What feels different to me (compared to you) is this: sometimes I'll drink 2 cups of coffee in the morning and be awake but useless. Sometimes totally productive. Caffeine in some form is there - recently sometimes substituting coffee for a Celsius.
I am OP, and I can confirm exactly this line of thought. Once I had given up caffeine, I was able to start using methods like Pomodoro and Eisenhower grids, and they actually worked.