Caffeine Withdrawal: Symptoms and Solutions

Nearly everyone has, at one point or another, suffered from caffeine withdrawal. While it is never a fun thing to suffer through, there are some very easily recognizable symptoms, as well as some easy solutions to help make it a bit more bearable.

Symptoms

Caffeine withdrawal can start as early as 12 hours from a person's last intake of caffeine and last as long as nine days, though most people quit feeling any signs of withdrawal by the third or fourth day. A person is considered to no longer be addicted after nine days without caffeine.

Symptoms include:

- headache : this is the most common symptom and can range from being mild to severe and throbbing. This differs based on the person.

- Fatigue/sleepiness: many people can feel sleepy when they stop drinking caffeine, especially if they were in the habit of drinking a cup of coffee every morning when they wake up.

- Mood swings: these include irritability, depression, and anxiety

- Flu-like symptoms: this includes stiff muscles and even nausea

The severity of withdrawal symptoms differs from person to person and is also affected by how much caffeine was regular consumed before quitting.

Remedies

If you drink large amounts of caffeine, it might be unwise to stop cold-turkey. This could result in severe withdrawal symptoms. It is recommended that you slowly cut back your daily caffeine intake until you are able to cut out caffeine altogether. Granted, you might still experience caffeine withdrawal, but it will be less severe than if you were to stop suddenly.

Some other remedies include:

- Drink lots of other fluids, especially water. This makes sure you remain hydrated and keeps your body and metabolism running throughout the day.

- Get plenty of rest. Your system is taking a hit by going through withdrawal so you're going to need plenty of sleep to tackle it.

- Use stress-reducing techniques such as deep breathing or yoga. These calm your mind and help reduce the severity of certain symptoms such as mood swings.

- In order to deal with the headache, it might be wise to take some pain relievers, but be careful in doing so. Some pain relievers have some amount of caffeine in them, so be sure to check before taking anything.