I had a skiing accident at 28 that gave me a head injury and left me hospitalized for several months. That was 29 years ago.
I immediately discovered after leaving the hospital that caffeine from coffee or cola had a huge impact on my mental energy level. Caffeine seemed to bring me back to normal function in life and work. I became an avid coffee drinker for most of the next 25 years.
There were some work environments where my new personality flaws got in the way, and I didn’t do so well. I did fine in some environments though. The types of things that happened were an inability to freely switch focus from one subject to another, and to sometimes experience rage that I couldn’t shut down. These things may have been the same type of thing happening in my brain, like an over-excited feedback loop.
About four years ago I discovered a Reader’s Digest article in an older issue (which I have not been able to locate since) that explained my problems and what I needed to do. The article was written by a physician who had had a head injury due to a cycling accident. Effects of head injuries are like snowflakes and no two are identical, but the symptoms he described matched my symptoms well. He also named a culprit in eliciting his, generally negative, personality symptoms: caffeine. The doctor described how high levels of caffeine changed the way that he argued issues. It wasn’t that caffeine directly made him excited or angry while he was arguing, it was that it didn’t allow the excitement to diminish. His excitement would build and build until he was in a rage. However, he was able to completely reverse this and other behaviors by cutting caffeine from his diet.
After reading this, I suddenly felt like Dr. Jekyll looking back over his life and recognizing the presence of Mr. Hyde. There were periods of disaster in my post-accident work history, but there was also an excellent period while I worked with NASA personnel. That was the only job I had had where there was no coffee machine in the office. I fulfilled my daily caffeine requirement with caffeinated soda. All caffeinated beverages are not the same. Coffee, I have learned, has many times the amount of caffeine that is found in caffeinated sodas. A 20 oz. Starbucks coffee contains 415 mg caffeine, whereas a can of my favorite diet soda contains only about 43. Three cans of soda per day gives me about 130 mg of caffeine, which keeps my energy up, and I may be able to go much lower. When I was drinking coffee, I know that I consumed well over 1000 mg some days. I may have made poor decisions on those days.
The past four years have been consistently “Mr. Hyde-free”. I still argue with my wife, but I give up so much sooner now.
I wish I could locate that Reader’s Digest article though.