"It's unpleasantly like being drunk"

[leora]

I seem to have accidentally overdosed on caffeine. It is quite annoying as I don't believe there is anything I can do but wait for my body to process it. I was brewing a loose-leaf lady grey tea. I must have brewed it too strong or it must have a greater caffeine content then I was expecting (I really wish things would tell you their caffeine

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Do you get a sensory enhancement effect, so every little noise is magnified, and there seem to be things at the edge of vision, and your startle threshold is much lower, and your skin is very much too sensitive and you have sharp-pain sensations? I very occasionally get too much, although my tolerance is much higher.

[leora]

Except for the skin being too sensitive, yes. But I get that intermittently with or without caffeine. My best guess as to the cause is that my brain no longer functions as well as it used to, so sometimes processing sensory input becomes too much of a chore for it and every sensory input becomes unpleasant.

Oh, and the things at the edge of vision... well, my vision does all sorts of weird things. The worst was shortly after the right-eye problems started. I was seeing smoke in my right peripheral vision intermittently but quite often. Given my setup at the time, what was to the right of my computer was the kitchen. This was very, very annoying and kept leading to me thinking I saw smoke in the kitchen.

It's so hard to detangle symptoms for me, because I have so many so often and so many known weird factors.

[azurelunatic]

The smoke problem sounds particularly lousy.

[leora]

I adjusted, but mainly by learning to ignore a lot of peripheral vision things. Which left me the small concern of missing something important because I ignored it

[redbird]

That's like saying wine doesn't have alcohol, in comparison to Scotch.

I'm treating caffeine as a maintenance drug, and I get it from black tea, in carefully considered quantities on a fairly regular schedule. Cola if I can't get the tea at the time for some reason.

If precise dosing is important, cola might be the best bet: standardize the quantity, and stick to one brand. With that, you're getting an amount added chemically, not the amount that is in a particular handful of tea leaves or coffee beans.

[kirinn]

The effect I get from any significant amount of caffeine these days, having lost the near-perfect tolerance I had in college, is to get both jittery *and* tired simultaneously. It's not awful, but seems like a particularly useless state to be in. And of course it's terrible if I need to sleep, though a sleeping pill seems to be able to overcome it if necessary.

[leora]

I think the problem was I was working with a loose leaf I hadn't had before. I've been trying to learn to work with loose leaf tea. I got tired of making my tea to weak, as I'd done that with a few recently, so I made it strong. I added probably more than I should have and let it steep too long, so I got a higher dose than with normal tea.

I've never had a caffeine problem from a non-chai tea before, so I wasn't sufficiently careful. Usually tea, especially the way I drink it which usually isn't very strong, doesn't have enough caffeine to be an issue for me. But one can make it a higher dosage, and apparently I did.