When I was in my late teens, I noticed something which seemed to be unusual about myself. Ingesting caffeine (at the time, from drinking soda) would give me the benefits of alertness and a temporary reprieve from grogginess, but I didn't seem to suffer the bad side effects from it. No jitters. No insomnia. No irritability. I could ingest a lot of caffeine, then lie down and go to sleep without any trouble.

Other people I knew weren't like this. Some couldn't fall asleep at 10pm if they had caffeine after 3pm. Others experienced the jitters/irritability from it.

Many years later, I asked my parents if they were like this. They both told me that they also had no undesirable side effects from caffeine, and could drink coffee shortly before bed without issue. I then asked my brother and sister, who reported the same thing.

I didn't think much about this, until I experienced my LPR problems in August 2018. One of the pieces of advice for LPR? Quit caffeine, as it makes things worse.

Desperate to solve it, I quit a 30-year caffeine habit cold turkey. Five days later, a crippling anxiety and depression issue showed up. A few weeks after that, I wondered if the caffeine withdrawal caused it, but there was little medical evidence to support such a theory.

However, upon returning to taking the caffeine (now in pill form, to avoid the regular drinking of soda), I noticed that sometimes it gave me a temporary improvement from the anxiety and depression symptoms.

I then researched using caffeine to fight anxiety and depression, but found the disheartening news that it tends to make those conditions WORSE, so I eased away from it again.

Then I decided I should judge for myself and try again. For sure, caffeine wasn't making things worse, and indeed it was sometimes (but not always) leading to an improvement in my mood and level of anxiety. Since then, I've taken one 100mg caffeine pill (which is a fairly low dose) per day.

In various anxiety forums, most people have reported that caffeine makes their situation worse, and some have said it makes things much worse. A few reported exactly what I did -- that it seemed to help.

Yesterday I came up with a theory: Perhaps my good tolerance of caffeine was linked to the fact that it seems to help me with anxiety.

Turned out the theory was correct.

Read on in the next post where I explain.