Eat your caffeine

…instead of drinking it. I recommend these.

• They have the same dosage as a cup of coffee (~100mg).
• You can still drink coffee/Diet Coke/tea, just get it without caffeine. Coke caffeine-free, decaf coffee, herbal tea.
• They cost ~60¢ per pill [EDIT: oops, it's 6¢ per pill — thanks @ryan_greenblatt] vs ~$5 for a cup of coffee — that’s about an order of magnitude cheaper.
• You can put them in your backpack or back pocket or car. They don’t go bad, they’re portable, they won’t spill on your clothes, they won’t get cold.
• Straight caffeine makes me anxious. L-Theanine makes me less anxious. The caffeine capsules I linked above have equal parts caffeine and L-Theanine.

Also:

• Caffeine is a highly addictive drug; you should treat it like one. Sipping a nice hot beverage doesn’t make me feel like I’m taking a stimulant in the way that swallowing a pill does.
• I don’t know how many milligrams of caffeine were in the last coffee I drank. But I do know exactly the amount of caffeine in every caffeine pill I’ve ever taken. Taking caffeine pills prevents accidentally consuming way too much (or too little) caffeine.
• I don’t want to associate “caffeine” with “tasty sugary sweet drink,” for two reasons:
  1. A lot of caffeinated beverages contain other bad stuff. You might not by-default drink a sugary soft drink if it weren’t for the caffeine, so disambiguating the associations in your head might cause you to eat your caffeine and not drink the soda.
  2. Operant conditioning works by giving positive reinforcement to certain behaviors, causing them to happen more frequently. Like, for instance, giving someone a sugary soft drink every time they take caffeine. But when I take caffeine, I want to to be taking it because of a reasoned decision-making process minimally swayed by factors not under my control. So I avoid giving my brain a strong positive association with something that happens every time it experiences caffeine (e.g. a sugary soft drink). Caffeine is addictive enough! Why should I make the Skinner box stronger?

If you can’t take pills, consider getting caffeine patches — though I’ve never tried them, so can’t give it my personal recommendation.

Disclaimers:

• Generic caveats.
• Caffeine is a drug. I’m not a doctor, take caffeine at your own risk, this is not medical advice.
• This post does not take a stance on whether or not you should take caffeine; the stance that it takes is, conditional on your already having decided to take caffeine, you should take it in pill form (instead of in drink form).