[swaginator]

The parent comment's experience does not reflect my relationship with coffee at all.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, never medicated for it. Just regulated with diet and exercise, also probably self-medicated with caffeine and nicotine in college. Quit nicotine because of the very obvious health problems that come with it, I found it very easy to quit interestingly enough (thank God I quit before the Zyndemic).

But I have never felt that coffee comes with any negative side effects for me other than anxiety. It doesn't affect my sleep unless I drink it past 5 PM, and I've never felt like it "wakes me up", it just lets me enter a hyperfocus state a lot more easily. Other people describe their relationship with coffee that they wake up and feel groggy, so they take coffee to have a baseline. For me it has never been about waking up, it's just something that helps with focus.

I do get the jitters when drinking coffee especially since I eat my first meal very late in the day (12pm), so I switched to mate cocido, which is just mate in tea bags. The effect of even very strongly-brewed mate is far less pronounced than the effect of coffee, and I would even go so far as to say that whatever benefits I think I am getting from mate is probably just placebo.

For reference during college I probably consumed 3-4 cups of coffee a day, then as I started working I would consume 5-6 cups a day, black. Now I stop drinking coffee after I eat at noon, so I am down to 2-3 cups a day.

Also I think that brewing methods matter. Hot-brewed coffee causes less jitters and more focus. Cold-brewed coffee tastes better but it is easy to overshoot what feels like a "therapeutic dose" and actually end up making it harder to focus, as well as more jitters. It might be that I usually have hot coffee black, and I have cold brew with a bit of milk and simple syrup. The sugar or coldness might also make me colder or do something with my blood sugar, not sure.