Also positive in the long-term for me. Fewer digestive issues, less spiky dopamine sensitive or impulsiveness and performance during the day, better memory. I wish it weren't so.

But damn was the 3-6 months of anhedonia awful. I still feel pangs of it.

You might want to look at this pathway, and the enzymes, and the cofactors for these enzymes:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pingyuan-Gong/publicati...

Tyrosine 3-monooxygenase (TH) needs Iron

Aromatic-L-amino-acid decarboxylase (DDC) needs B6

That's surprising to me. In my case one of the reasons I discontinued it (emotional effects aside) was mild but consistent weight loss. The stimulant part of the effect seems to suppress my appetite quite effectively although at least part of that is likely indirect due to sustained task focus leading me to skip meals.

Turns out I needed stimulants from time to time, just not that one.

I think caffeine is legitimately more disruptive and addictive than is commonly acknowledged. It creates quite a life-style loop where you need it for [drive, energy, mood, alertness] as a fix to many of the issues it causes, lol. Caffeine is such a widely used drug yet doesn't seem to have been studied that much. It's fascinating to me how the drugs that are socially acceptable seem completely arbitrary. Like alcohol (which in terms of addictiveness isn't far behind the most addictive drugs.)

In tables that compare the most addictive drugs, you know what drug is always missing yet seems to be consumed more widely than any other recreational drug on the planet: caffeine. This is funny though. It may be difficult to actually do high quality, comparative research on caffeine because to do so you would need to find people who don't already consume caffeine and I suspect that is a harder problem than it sounds.

By the way: the set of people who have never been effected by caffeine shrinks even further if you consider whether the mother consumed it during pregnancy.

I have better mood, presence of mind and working memory in the morning, especially compared to caffeinated peers. I'm also a lot more aware of when I've woken up from a bad night's sleep (see paragraph 5).

I have much less mid-day dysregulation/impulses compared to caffeinated peers. No predictable afternoon slump either – but a rich lunch will always leave me foggy, lol. If it's the weekend, I'll often join my young kid for the afternoon nap and fall asleep in minutes – the 30-45 min nap usually feels amazing.

Coffee really feels to me now like the psychoactive substance it is. I've had anxiety issues for other reasons in recent years, and today a cup of caffeinated coffee will often trigger a good level of anxiety if I'm not physically active during the peak. The physical symptoms of both are very similar. If I'm moving about, it usually feels good, like something hyped me up, but the sensation comes on its own instead.

Anxiety greatly changes my sleep needs, and caffeine and alcohol both hid these sensations in the past, enough that I suspect I didn't have the interoception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception) to consciously notice and adjust in the past, which would leave me stuck or spiraling in terms of maintenance/recovery, probably for weeks at a time.

In recent days (pretty low anxiety! knock on wood) I have sleep that's almost 2hrs shorter per night, waking up naturally. That came very progressively (sleep quality), then very suddenly (lower needs). Also a great gain, though I also aged a decade and that must contribute as well.

Note that I faded out caffeine by progressively substituting for decaf. No headaches this way (from a peak of ~4 cups a day, I would say?). It sounds like you're doing the same, which I really recommend! There's no need to self-flagellate on top of what's usually a major habit adjustment.

Much less anxious now too, but that's more likely due to ADHD meds.

I also had a very big life altering mental health incident very recently, drank A LOT of coffee during and I feel it helped, now I am much more calm, "more correct" despite drinking coffee like before.

Based on this I posit that coffee is used by humans to offset unwanted mentality changes, not a cause of unwanted mentality changes.

It likely was a contributor, insofar as the incident had poor sleep as a contributing factor, and I do know with some certainty the caffeine habit had been causing some (likely not all) of my sleep problems. I can also tell you the very worst day of that incident was when I mistakenly consumed caffeine again prior to being recovered enough for that to be safe; that was a horrible glimpse at what that drug can do to you when you're in an already very unstable state. Caffeine definitely can aggravate all kinds of symptoms, even when you're in a relatively stable state. It's a stimulant, after all.

But I think caffeine consumption is… only one factor of many in causes of that incident, and doesn't deserve any special blame. The relevance of the mental health incident here is really that it gave me a chance and a good reason to abruptly stop, and therefore also the opportunity to see what getting the brain back into the caffeination ritual again feels like. (I've tried taking it for a few consecutive days more than once since then, and not particularly enjoyed it. I've also tried it on single isolated days.)