Waking Up

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How can people wake up without coffee? I can’t have caffeine, I have colitis.

Going to bed earlier is the main solution, if getting up is difficult.

Cold shower.

I can’t, I have insomnia.

Try a different stimulant?

How about Yerba Mate? Have you tried it?

It's a loose leaf tea from South America. You pour boiling water over it and sweeten it with honey, then drink it through a straw with a filter on it so you don't drink the leaves. The straw is called a Bombilla. I once bought a kit that had everything in it from a brand called "Amanda." It's not much more expensive than coffee, and definitely wakes you up like caffeine - but without the same jitters as caffeine. Not sure how it may or may not affect digestion/colitis, but could be worth a try.

It's flavour is like fresh tobacco - that was my first impression, and when I googled it that's how it's described! Definitely more palatable once sweetened with honey. And after you drink the first cup, you add more hot water and let it steep and drink it again. People will keep adding hot water to it throughout the day vs. starting a fresh cup. It gets weaker and weaker with each pour of water, which is Ok if you're nice and awake and alert and really don't need more of a buzz - the extra water is good for you, anyways. It's also a common ingredient in energy drinks.

Yerba Mate is still caffeine though.

Kitty, have you tried ephedrine?

So it is.. I thought it was different. Something is different about it, as it doesn't tend to give the jitters that caffeine from coffee does.

Ephedrine isn't exactly a legal substance. Well, not here, anyways.. and like cocaine, it's not something you want to make a regular habit of consuming. Probably least damaging in it's raw form as ephedra tea, but still.. it's basically the root natural form of crystal meth.

We both live in Canada, ephedrine is both legal and easy to acquire.

It's not 'the root natural form of crystal meth' any more than it's the 'the root natural form of Ritalin'. It's chemically related to both but that doesn't make it both. It's relatively mild, more comparable to caffeine in terms of the intensity of effects.

Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine can be processed into other phenylethylamines but they're all different in terms of effects. Tiny physical differences between different phenylethylamines represent substantial differences for the person using it. The fact that it's chemically similar doesn't mean it's actually almost the same.

Substituted phenylethylamines are a huge family with lots of different purposes all built off of essentially the same core.

You sure?

Dunno if I've ever seen ephedra for sale anywhere.. and pseudoephedrine is locked up in pharmacies so tweakers can't steal it to make meth from.

A couple of health food stores around here sell it, Kaizen is the brand; 50x 8mg pills. I've been buying it for years.

Interesting. I've bought their caffeine pills. Don't think I've ever seen ephedra for sale except for stateside in Washington.

Kaizen = the Japanese characters I have tattooed on the inside of my left wrist.

Kaizen = the uncompensated suggestions for improvement Honda constantly reminds employees to submit.

lol - you work for Honda?

I worked at Honda but not for Honda until I quit 8 weeks ago.

Would a little light physical activity fit into your morning schedule? I mean like a walk (running is for young-folk joints).

It's a little paradoxical, but I've found that taking a (tiny) dose of alprazolam (aka Xanax) every day when I wake up helps me with that. It makes the first couple of hours of my day a little more tolerable, and in the end it helps me keep my sleep hours a little more under control.

One important question: Do you need to wake up at the time you usually try to wake up, or could you actually wake up later instead if you chose to?

It's very important to try to sleep the same hours every day (I think it's especially important to wake up at the same time every day), but it's a misconception that "it's always healthier to wake up early". For some people it is, for some it isn't. For me, personally, there's absolutely no doubt that I function a lot better when I'm able to stick to an extreme night-owl regime (I sleep from 4 am to 12 pm).

I also use an app called "Sleep like Android". It has tons of sleep monitoring features and stuff, I don't actually use those, but it has some pretty nifty tricks to help you wake up. I use the one with the sheep (they keep shifting randomly all over the screen, and you need to click the odd one out several times to stop the alarm tone):



It has a few other options, like there's another one where you print a QR code and keep it somewhere far from your bed, and then it won't stop playing the alarm tone until you scan that QR code with your phone. It doesn't really help you "get more alert" on its own, but it helps you wake up at the exact same time every day, which might help with it.