UKH

I'm one of those poor buggers that suffers from Raynaud's type disorder and caffeine definitely aggravates it. I do however enjoy its effect although im not hooked on it, and I dislike the taste of decaff, plus it doesnt stimulate (even as a placebo).

Is there anything else (legal) I could replace it with?

Unfortunately the ridiculous UK psychoactive substances act 2016 means that anything aside from alcohol, nicotine and caffeine is prohibited (the fact they had to specifically exempt these, i.e. tea could be illegal if discovered now, as well as exempting "food", shows how silly it is)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/2/contents/enacted

I've tried a few legal stimulants in my time. There are various herbal ones about, generally the effective ones contain a bit of ephedrine. There is something called guarana, but that never did anything for me. One thing that does work is pseudoephedrine, although I have to say using it as stimulant is a bit rough. It's available over the counter as Sudafed, but you have to get the right version. There is another Sudafed that contains a different drug. Apparently this change is led by the ease in which you can make methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine, as per Breaking Bad.

There's nothing quite like caffeine, IME, and I have tried a fair few stimulants. I find it absolutely useless if I am actually tired or need energy, but all the same I cannot wake up in the morning without it. The fact that it comes in coffee and tea is the USP though, although it's a fairly crappy drug, the way it's administered is lovely.

If you've got a busy day ahead and haven't had enough sleep, then modafinil is absolutely brilliant. Also great for long drives. But it's not just a quick pick-me-up, it lasts for ages (12h+?) so you have to plan ahead. Works an absolute treat though, and isn't anything like speed - you feel normal, just optimally wakeful and focused, and there's no crash/side effects (some people get headaches I think). Popular with students for all-nighters.

Ephedrine is a short-acting stimulant which is pretty noticeable in effect and good for physical energy. A cracking PED for sport. It's naturally present in a chinese herb called Ma Huang or Ephedra.

I think both of these are probably class C drugs, so grey market.

Kratom (plant from Indonesia) is still available some places I think. An odd one, it's kind of an opioid and works as a painkiller apparently, but it's used traditionally as an energy booster. If you increase the dose it becomes more sedative, and increase it further and you feel horribly sick. There are different varieties that are supposed to be more stimulating/sedative due to having slightly different alkaloid content. It's great at the right dose, it doesn't exactly get you high, but there's certainly a mood-lifting effect.

I've got very minimal experience with it, but I bet Ritalin works an absolute treat as a totally functional stimulant with minimal side-effects, since they give it to kids. Hard to get your hands on though!

As far as I know there are no actually legal stimulants other than caffeine since the Psychoactive Substances Act makes them all illegal by definition.

Very odd that we should consider all of the above so threatening to society that we have to criminalise their sale! How would we cope with people feeling a bit more awake than normal for a few hours? The sky would fall in!

Coffee has Caffeine (no sh*t Sherlock!) but tea does not in any significant amount. Instead tea contains theobromine (same stuff that's in chocolate and which which can kill dogs). Some people who have issues with caffeine might still be OK drinking tea and eating chocolate.

Other legal mild physical-stimulants include taurine and beta alanine. Although they're often found in products that mix them with caffeine, I think both can be got as supplements from Holland and Barrett on their own, as bodybuilding pre-workout.

Dunno if this helps...

Tea might be a good alternative for the OP? It worked for me when I had to go cold turkey on caffeinated coffee, due to an unpleasant reaction with Terbinafine.

Just untrue.

Tea contains significant amounts of caffiene, although coffee will usually contain a lot more.

The usual rule of thumb seems to be half as much in tea as in coffee, not insignificant if you drink  five or six cups a day. ( What my GP said and  what I've seen in tables and articles since)

I've been drinking rooibos for the past two years, pleasant enough in the original but even nicer as Earl Grey.

That's what I thought, but I found that I could drink tea or decaff coffee with no issues, but proper coffee was a definite no-no.

I knew someone who swore by Maté as a stimulant and alternative to coffee. I have drunk it and like it as a tea but I didn't pay much attention to its properties, and I love coffee.

Beta alanine isn’t a stimulant - it helps buffer acid in the muscles I think. 

have you tried Barleycup?

I can't stand decaffeinated coffee but I can drink this.  I actually drink coffee half and half with barleycup as I don't find too much caffeine good for me

It's another source of caffeine that one.

Ha ha, why am I not surprised. Said person who swore by it didn't do coffee because of the caffeine. 

Good info here, UKC does well as a repository for drug information. I feel for you, nature is cruel in exacerbating your condition like this.

As a day to day I sadly don't think there's anything you could replace it with. Pseudoephedrine concoctions, Modafinil etc work for special gigs but not the kind of thing you'd stumble into the kitchen every morning at 0400 for.

Nicest lift I've had that hit the spot for long drives and hard work was a spare from a colleagues Ritalin prescription, but that's just for research purposes, not a recommendation.

As I understand tea it has similar amounts of caffeine per gram, just you use much less of it per cup, ie not 15g like an espresso.

Kola is another 'substitute' that seems to do nothing.

Is the Raynaud's affected by amount, is there a threshold of some sort that could be danced around (speaking like a true junky here...)? 

How about weaning yourself off stimulants? They don't make sense really.

And if you want good coffee with low caffeine choose 100% Arabica. It's the robusta beans that have the high caffeine.

Extracting the pseudo from Sudafen, is a very satisfying process. 

It involves separating surestart with distilled water.

Mix the Sudafen powder with this, then microwave. 

The appearing white powder is pure pseudo 😁😁😁

I gather there's some background health issues linked to Mate (a brother looked into it during his Mate phase), but I forget them exactly.

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-828/yerba-mate

Here they are. 

[ When taken by mouth:Yerba mate is POSSIBLY SAFE for most people when taken for short periods of time. Yerba mate contains caffeine, which in some people can cause side effects such as inability to sleep (insomnia), nervousness and restlessness, upset stomach, nausea and vomiting, increased heart rate and breathing, and other side effects.

Yerba mate is POSSIBLY UNSAFE when taken in large amounts or for long periods of time. Consuming large amounts of yerba mate (more than 12 cups daily) might cause headache, anxiety, agitation, ringing in the ears, and irregular heartbeats. Drinking large amounts of yerba mate (1-2 liters daily) also increases the risk of esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, bladder cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and possibly laryngeal or mouth cancer. This risk is especially high for people who smoke or drink alcohol. ]

Edit: From healthline.com ''Yerba mate tea contains PAH, a known carcinogen also found in grilled meat and tobacco smoke.'' 

I'm currently going through chewing antacids due to acid reflux, and seem to have cut down from several normal mugs of tea a day to one smaller one, which doesn't seem to make it worse (at the level I have it), and a 'smaller than that' cup of coffee - which does do going on today (looks like that's off the list).

Drink less tea and wave your arms about?

What's surestart? Purely academic interest I might add, the thought of doing powered pseudo makes me wince. 

Is that significantly worse than coffee?  I'm pretty sure a dozen or more espressos in a day would give me all those symptoms!

On tired days I seem to drink tea until I begin to feel slightly odd, and then I stop.

It's an Ether  based solution for starting damp engine.

Ether doesn't destroy pseudo eff,  but it does the Sudafen additives. 

Then add to red phosphorus and iodine for a long jail sentence 😁😁😁

I do have the RV already, so if I get cancer I'll dig out your recipe and get it kitted out.

Been there and done the time. 

Had bad toothache 😁

Adrafinil. 

Don't think anyone's mentioned it yet, but a consistent routine with a 9-hour sleep window and getting lots of bright light within an hour of waking will have positive effects on alertness and energy levels and so in a cheesy way you make your own stimulants.... What you eat and when will also impact. https://hubermanlab.libsyn.com/master-your-sleep-be-more-alert-when-awake-e... is a good listen

I think the available caffeine content of tea very much depends on what sort of tea you mean and  how much tannin it contains (which tends to bind caffeine).  

I think rooibos is basically boiled sticks but is caffeine free if you can stomach it.  I tried and failed to develop a taste for it when my wife was drinking it while she was pregnant - and this was the premium locally-grown stuff in Cape Town.

Cancer schmancer.  It talks about a small increase in risk, which it doesn't attempt to quantify in any way, associated with drinking gallons of the stuff.  I think there's some evidence that just drinking hot fluids confers some small cancer risk, and if PAH's are the problem I'd have thought eating the burnt crispy bits (eg: of a roast spud or a cheesy topping) or even just living in a city and breathing the air are no better.

I've never even tried the stuff and don't have a dog in this fight, but I'll leave it to the Daily Mail readers to worry about small unquantified cancer risks that aren't well understood and just get on with avoiding the orders of magnitude more serious well known biggies: Smoking, obesity, smoking, dodgy diet/excessive booze and smoking.

In reply to: thread

Hm.  It's interesting. 

Some of the more um..  pharmaceutical recommendations on here make me think "Jesus, that's grim.  Imagine needing a stimulant to wake up in the morning!"  But then of course it seems perfectly natural and ok to 'need' my morning coffee exactly like that.  I guess that's addiction for you.

I don't drink coffee to wake up, I wake up to drink coffee. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "giving up coffee's the easiest thing in the world - I've given up a hundred times"

Pop some viagra before your coffee, it should counteract the vasoconstricting effects of caffeine.

On a serious note could vasodilating foods help offset the caffeine's effect?

Exactly.

I don't think anyone's describing a daily routine of extracting pseudoephedrine from cold remedies and snorting it so they can get out of bed - just one off/occasional experiences with legal(ish) stimulants other than caffeine.

I've just thought of another one, which has of course been banned for absolutely no reason - khat, a plant which contains cathinone (the molecule is amphetamine with but with an extra oxygen sticking out). You can make a tea with the leaves, rather than chewing the leaves and bark as is traditional but disgusting, and it's way better than coffee, actually kind of euphoric. When I was at school, it was easy to get and I'd drink a big mug of khat tea before going out on the piss, and have a whale of a time. In fact we used to buy it at lunchtime and chew it through lessons on a Friday afternoon, making them significantly more fun.

Very similar to coca leaves, which unlike using powder cocaine (or crack), would make a great alternative to coffee. Shame they only grow in the Andes.

Yep, I get that.  It was just a musing really.

There's nothing one-off or occasional about my caffeine consumption though, which is not wildly excessive or even particularly unusual.  But it definitely is enough that trying to cut it out completely overnight and go 'cold turkey' would probably lead to some surprisingly severe withdrawal symptoms.

I'm totally caffeine dependent, in behavioural terms, but I think it's largely placebo in my case. I know people do get withdrawal symptoms from stopping caffeine, but I've never experienced them. If for some reason I don't get my morning coffee, nothing happens really, except that I want coffee, and feel vaguely sluggish like I'm "not awake as I should be" which is kind of hard to pin down. I haven't had headaches or other symptoms people report.

Later in the day I'm pretty certain you could switch all my coffee to decaf and I wouldn't notice (it might taste a bit crap, but I've found fresh decaf remarkably convincing when I've had it). It doesn't make me feel awake, in fact, if I'm really tired I'll still fall straight asleep after a double espresso. It's just not an effective drug for me. And yet if I ran out of coffee at home I'd drive to the nearest 24h shop to make sure there was some in the morning. So that's all the behaviour of a drug addict, but without ever really recognising the effects of the drug - weird.

Thinking about it, it must take a while for caffeine to get to your brain - it's absorbed through the gut, not the stomach. But it's definitely not the feeling I get 30 minutes after drinking coffee that makes me crave it, it's the act of drinking it which I'm addicted to. It must have something to do with the drug, but it's not properly correlated like say, tobacco addition, where you get an instant relief from craving, or other drugs where you might take them and wait anticipating the effect. 

But, since tea and coffee are really nice (unlike, I imagine, snorting pseudoephedrine extracted from cold remedies using engine fluid), it's an addiction I'm perfectly happy to live with.

The instant coffee hit is all psychological, but the real effect lasts for hours. When I had to quit I found a really good decaff from Black Sheep and drank that for my usual kick start in the morning. I didn't notice the difference in terms of getting out of the house, but I found I was falling asleep on the train about 45 minutes later.

I'm often slightly puzzled by the logic that X (which we have a choice about) is likely no worse than Y and/or Z (which are a part of modern living), so it's therefore not worth worrying about. It strikes me that, if modern living does surround one with pollutants and carcinogens, given that some of them are things we can choose to do, eliminating some potential carcinogens (depending on volume) which we have a choice about could seem to be reasonable thing to do? Whilst being chilled about it, since stress and worrying can be bad for one's health. 

It's not the best tasting of drinks, to be fair, compared to coffee, and tea, and rich dark 100% cocoa drinks.

Decaff coffee is good once you have found the right one. You have to drink a lot of crap to find it. Also, if you are talking real coffee, it's flavour seems to be much more dependant on method of making than normal coffee. So it always tastes dreadful out of one of those stove top aluminium things. Tastes at its best from one of those plastic syringes but uses a lot of coffee. Not bad in a cafetiere but make sure water not boiling. We use one of those work top filter machines. Serious business.

There is one decent instant decaf. Nescafe Azera.