alt Hacker NewsFeeling miserable for three days seems ... unlikely after 800mg/day of caffeine. I say that to mean, it should be much longer (been there, done that, took many months) Caffeine use especially at that level massively grows the amount adenosine receptors your brain has, and they don't just disappear overnight.
A 500ml Diet Coke (assuming you don't mean the caffeine free version) also contains about 65 mg of caffeine, which is the same as an espresso. I'm not sure if you really quit. Caffeine is also in a surprisingly large amount of soft drinks you wouldn't expect.
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If I consume 1-2 canned coffees a day (which is around 300mg at most), it takes me around 7 days after I quit to stop getting headaches, body aches, or mood issues.
My goal wasn't to completely quit. The goal was to keep my caffeine intake less than or equal to 400mg (the FDA's recommended max) and to cut it off at 2pm. I didn't cold-turkey cut off caffeine.
I stopped getting acute headaches after about three days; other prolonged side effects are harder to quantify.
I should also clarify, it wasn't 800mg every day (which I realize I didn't make clear), it was just one thing where I saw that at least a few days of the last week I had consumed 800mg.
I think the actual threshold is when the withdrawal misery falls below the noise floor of the ambient misery.
Right now I think 800 mg/d of caffeine would send me to the ER lol. Discontinuing 800mg/d steady state, cold turkey... that would mean 3 weeks of migraine-like headaches
I couldn't even get away from 2 cups/day until i started hyperbolic tapering by slowly mixing decaf into my regular beans.
Everybody's physiology is different, but I drank a full pot of coffee every day, for about 15 years.
After Getting Older™, I was noticing more and more effects that I didn't like, so I made the decision to (mostly) detox off caffeine using decaf beans. Cold turkey would have destroyed me. I went with the following schedule:
* Week 1: 75% caffeinated/25% decaf beans
* Week 2: 50% caf/50% decaf
* Week 3: 25% caf/75% decaf
* Week 4: 100% decaf
At week 4, I entered a full failure mode I hadn't yet experienced, namely migraines that were untouchable by OTC medications. Only caffeine helped. I tried to get through the week to "be done" with the weening but couldn't. So...
* Week 5: back up to 25% caf/75% decaf!
* Weeks 6-12: decreasing caffeine by half each week (to the point I was measuring beans using my home scale).
After week 12, I was able to go without caffeine, and now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.
My physiological dependence on caffeine was no joke, but I feel a heck of a lot less anxious and jittery after cutting it down to where I'm now at.