Reactions to alcohol and caffeine

Post Reply New Topic

Just wondering whether this something common to people on the spectrum, or whether it's just an oddity of mine.

I seem to have a very low tolerance of alcohol - far lower than that of most people I know. One small glass of wine has me feeling wobbly, sleepy and dizzy. Two glasses of wine and I can't walk straight or think straight.

In some ways my reaction to caffeine is very similar. A couple of cups of coffee make me dizzy and wobbly and give me a headache and stop me thinking straight.

A glass of wine does also give me a sort of warm happy feeling, and a cup of coffee gives me an alert feeling, but still they both also have the effect of making me feel dizzy and unwell, and making it hard to think straight. Both seem like a sort of sensory overload, which is why I wondered if it's something common to people on the autistic spectrum. Does anyone else experience these reactions?

I actually do not drink more than 1 glass of alcohol, I just turn sleepy from it. Coffee is a whole other thing. I can't drink it after 12 am because the effects last for hours and I get all hyped up. If I drink it after 12, I can't sleep in the evening, so I don't drink it that much.

My reaction to alcohol is trong too, 2 glasses of wine and I'm literally drunk. My response to caffeine used to be quite the same, I'd feel hyperactive after one or two cups of coffee. That changed when I started to drink more coffee. Now I can drink a lot without having much of an effect. But yeah, alcohol does a lot to me.

Caffeine doesn't do anything for me. As a young teen I would come home late holding a large cup of sweet tea and my mom would freak out, then I'd go to bed and fall asleep. I drink monster and nos energy drinks late in the day or at night and again fall asleep right on time.

I'm sensitive to caffeine but I've always had a REALLY high tolerance for alcohol, more than most people I know and I;m a petite woman, makes no sense.

i don't drink much but caffeine makes me deathly ill

Caffeine makes me drowsy and puts me to sleep if I drink too much. I used to drink it to calm me but I developed fibrocystic breast disease and had to cut out all caffeine because now it causes painful breast tumors in me.

Back "in the day" I could put away copious amounts of alcohol and not even get buzzed. That's just a thing on college campuses in the southeast United States. When I went to upstate New York for grad school, some of the students were shocked by my peculiar drinking habits: I went to one party with a half pint of Jack Daniels which I consumed with the beer everyone else was drinking--apparently in some social circles Jack Daniels induces raging sickness, something we southerners seem to be immune to! So after an hour or two, two or three of my friends and I got bored and decided to walk back to campus. So sometime after midnight we decide to call a lady friend of ours and DEMAND she bake us some cookies (no, not "special" cookies, she was just good at baking). So one of my friends goes with me because I don't know how to find the house. After I miss my turn, I see flashing lights--it seems I'm being pulled over for drunk driving. The cop ends up field-testing me and pulls out the breathalyzer, which I have to take not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES!! ! I passed it all three times, with hardly a drop at all showing up on the meter. For this, I became a sort of oddity on campus, a living legend!

And then there was that time my friends co-opted me for taking them on a road trip--14 hours non-stop from New York to Indiana, but that's another story...

Yeah, I could put back some liquor back then. Now I'm too destitute to afford the stuff, and I rarely drink hard liquor anymore. We're so cheap I get the CHEAP canned beer which I cut with seltzer water to make it last longer, and for a special treat on the weekends about once or twice a month I'll get a $5 bottle of Cold Duck. Our favorite Tex-Mex place serves abnormally strong frozen margaritas, so I'm thoroughly wasted by the time I reach the end of my 2-for-1 drink special...

Coffee, on the other hand... We go through a lot of coffee at my house. If I have coffee that's been in the pot for more than a day, I'll just pour it into a cup, add cold milk and a spoonful of Splenda and it's like one of those expensive bottled Starbucks Frappucinos you get at the gas station.

The thing I like about caffeine is that it gently spurs my creative flow for the day. I've taken Ritalin before, though being a stimulant, effectively killed any original thought in my head. Before developing a tolerance to it, Ritalin cleared the fog in my head but made it too difficult to concentrate on the things I ENJOY doing. Caffeine doesn't clean out the cobwebs, but once I'm sufficiently wired after a cup or two I can get a lot done.

By about cup #4 or #6, I start experiencing some nasty anxiety and maybe a touch of paranoia. I struggle with depression every day, so a cup or two first thing in the morning works wonders for my moods. But stretching it out over an entire day can get ugly. I do find that hanging on to my cup while I'm working (while I teach my piano students) actually helps me do a better job--like it's a sort of stim that helps keep me from getting too worked up in my moods, which can get ugly depending on how well the student is doing or not doing while playing the piano. It takes a LOT of patience to do what I do! The coffee-drinking can be a big help in regulating that.

I'm not affected at all by caffeine, I'm 15 so i haven't tested my alcohol tolerance.

I think my tolerance would be considered about average, if I had ever stuck to moderation while drinking. I'd either be sober or slobbering drunk, and FWIW when I was in that phase I could put away about a case of some cheap beer and still be looking for more.



At one time I used to drink somewhere around 20 8 oz. cups of black coffee a day, every day. It was my "self-treatment" for the then undiagnosed Hashimoto's hypothyroidism I somehow managed to pick up. I seemed to suffer the fatigue side-effect of the condition worse than most, and coffee was my coping method...otherwise I could literally sleep 16 hours a day.

I still drink quite a bit of coffee, but not anywhere near that much, maybe six or seven 8 oz. measures daily. Gives me a little boost, but I scarcely seem to notice it. Don't really need it, since I seem to be on the correct medicine at the correct dose for the condition now.

all substances have unpredictable effects on me. sometimes one drink will make me drunk. sometimes coffee gives me horrible anxiety and heart palpitations; sometimes it puts me to sleep. i feel high from novocaine. etc.

i am wary of even taking vitamin pills.

Wine, which is the only alcoholic drink I think is yummy and divine, will make me warm within half a glass, wobbly and unable to close my eyes due to the head spins up to two glasses (1 glass of anything over 13% can do that).

Beer makes me sleepy and I often can't stop yawning halfway into the bottle.

Hard liquor is an odd one. It hardly has any affect, at least not in the sense that it gets me "drunk". It's buzz is very different from the other types, if I get one. It's not nearly as noticeable or enjoyable as a wine buzz. But if I have too much hard liquor, even though I probably won't get drunk, my liver (and stomach) will react strongly. One time after some CC (whiskey) I thought my liver was gonna up and walk out on me. I didn't get sick, but there was this strange, all encompassing pain emanating from the area in my body where the liver resides. Vodka is the only spirit that comes close to some semblance of intoxicating me. But I rarely touch any of them now, especially whiskey.

If I drink coffee with moderate amounts of caffeine slowly, I'm fine. High amounts of caffeine can cause the shakes, or bring on a panic attack. It can keep me from getting to sleep if I drink it too close to bedtime. Oh, and I took a caffeine pill once and never again.

The dentist has to give me some special shot because the standard novocaine medication is mixed with something else -- I think epinephrine? -- to make it more effective or work more quickly or something like that. But it makes my heart race and I go into a huge panic and start trying to leave the dentist's office (with the paper bib still around my neck and everything) so they have to give me some other kind of shot to numb me for dental work so I don't go all insane on them.

Alcohol I'm pretty normal.

Caffeine, for me, non-addictive, keeps me alert when driving, doesn't keep me awake when I want to fall asleep. Wonderful stuff. I don't have a caffeine habit, because I don't need to. I drink it when there's a particular benefit (which isn't all that often) or when a drink I'm drinking happens to have it. I also theorize that it helps me sleep if I've been drinking, because, being a stimulant, it keeps my body from manufacturing it's own stimulants to counter the depressant affects of the alcohol, and, unlike my body's own stimulants, it doesn't keep me awake.

My observation is for most folks, caffeine is habit forming at least, so I'm unusual in it not being. And all the cautions about caffeine seem to suggest for most folks, it does keep them awake.

yes, i think that's right. it's basically synthetic adrenaline, so it actually rushes the novocaine through your system quicker (epipen = same concept; and also what they will give you in an emergency room if you go in with a dramatic allergic reaction). this is probably exactly what's causing it - i get terribly panicky but it subsides and i have been able to learn to tolerate it.

first few times i had novocaine i think it lacked the epinephrine: i didn't get the speedy panic reaction, but three or four hours afterward i got a migraine, every time. when i switched dentists, i told them about this and insisted i was allergic. they told me it was impossible to be allergic to novocaine and it must be the epinephrine but they wouldn't give me novocaine without it. (and with it, for some reason i don't get the migraines, which they also insisted were from holding my jaw open for so long.) i guess it's moot: i get one bad reaction, or i get a different bad reaction. or, i guess i could get my teeth drilled without anesthetic, which isn't really an option.

it's hard to get people to take you seriously when you're hypersensitive to anything. (lights, sounds, meds.)

I'm sensitive to both caffeine and alcohol. However, I like to do an experiment on the evenings that I don't have to work, the next day, drink coffee, and see how long I can stay up. It's fun!