The Caffeine Rotation

I am a firm believer that if your brain truly uses caffeine as fuel, that you must rotate your source of caffeine in order to achieve the optimal effect.

That said, I've been introducing coffee into my diet.  I know most people around the first of the year are thinking that they might get off of coffee.  My goal is to get off of soft drinks.  And I think coffee just might get me there.

I used to drink a lot of Mountain Dew.  Two or three 20-oz bottles in a day would not be out of the question.  I once worked for a dot-com that stocked the refrigerator with free Mountain Dew.   Then Red Bull hit the mainstream and I was able to buy it by the case at my local liquor store.  It gave me much more energy than Mountain Dew for less calories.  Yippee!

So I stuck to two or three Red Bulls a day for the past few years, but since I've been working so much lately, I was supplementing my Red Bull with Mountain Dew in order to keep the creative energy flowing.  And the amazing thing was that the Mountain Dew that had kind of stopped working for me years before was really working well again.

You know you are a caffeine addict when you say, "Oh, this problem sucks.  I'm going to need some Mountain Dew for this."

It also gives new credence to the idea of gateway drugs.  Today, it's just one Mountain Dew, but tomorrow you will be fighting a $30/week addiction to Red Bull.

So now I'm drinking one coffee and one Red Bull per day until the new year.   I have really been getting quite a surge from the coffee, which I expected since it is a brand spanking-new caffeine source in my life.  I got myself one of those new pod coffee machines this weekend because I have tremendous difficulty making drinkable coffee and because I didn't really want to trade my $2/hit Red Bull habit for a $2.50/hit Starbucks habit.

If this works, I will go from a very expensive Red Bull habit to a reasonable $4/week coffee habit.  My fingers are crossed.