Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, this'll be a thread.

In my teen years I used caffeine heavily during the day to cope with fatigue while trying to be awake on a school schedule, sometimes even spending my lunch money in the soda vending machine. This exacerbated my insomnia, which meant more caffeine.

https://twitter.com/bennessb/status/1447189737312227330

I had so much caffeine addiction in high school that if I didn't drink it at night, the withdrawal would keep me awake, but the caffeine in my system interfered with my REM cycle, leading to frequent bouts of sleep paralysis.

As I've mentioned on here before, I knew that sleep paralysis existed and thought that I knew what it was, but the brief clinical description in my health textbooks had not prepared me for the reality of it, which made me feel like either I was crazy or afflicted by actual demons

Even knowing the "fun fact" that sleep paralysis was a source of things like succubus myths "because people would wake up and feel a weight, like something was straddling them"... I didn't feel a weight, I felt trapped, and like the bed was levitating and bucking wildly.

And neither the textbooks nor the succubus trivia stuff had thought to mention that something in your brain chemistry is repeatedly jabbing the "somebody's present nearby" button in a way that can make you perceive a figure or be convinced that someone's just out of your sight.

So by my second year of college I was a paranoid wreck, sleep-deprived and became convinced, every time I did let myself sleep, that something was just outside my dorm room trying to get in.

In between episodes (which had a near 100% frequency) I could doubt it was real, which didn't make me feel super better because it just shifted the balance away from "demon" to "crazy", but when they were happening I was 100% sure it was real (because it came from my own brain.)

Which... these days, I know that I was "crazy" but also that "crazy" is just a not terribly useful way for describing your brain zigging when it would be more helpful to zag.

Anyway, about midway through the second half of my twenties I had figured out that what I was experiencing was sleep paralysis and was sort of cyclically successful in tapering my caffeine use down to levels where it didn't disrupt my sleep cycle in that particular way.

Throughout my late twenties and thirties, I occasionally tried to cut caffeine out of my life completely, because I had an actual horror movie history with it and regarded it as dangerous and destructive.

(This tweet is not a request or opening for advice. Keep it to yourself.)

And it took me a while to figure out that being a full-blown caffeine addict during the years my baby brain was falling out and my adult brain growing in had basically destroyed my ability to dopamine without it.

I discovered that without caffeine I had literally no motivation. I lacked "task saliency", the ability to *feel* the point in tasks (independent of knowing the point or wanting the thing the task will produce). Just a constant haze of low-grade but all-encompassing depression.

So now I use caffeine on a fairly strict schedule, with a hard cut-off of 5 PM and a goal of being done with it for the day by mid-afternoon.

So to circle back around to the question at the head of the thread: my relationship to caffeine is that trying to get by in a world with no room for disability made me abuse it to a level that left me more disabled and more dependent on caffeine to get by.

https://twitter.com/bennessb/status/1447189737312227330