Caffeine intolerance!

[u/Vivid-Adhesiveness12]

Hello, first time posting but i'm wondering if anyone has any advice or has been through a similar experience. This might be a long one!

I worked as a barista for 11 years, around Christmas of 2022 i noticed i would immediately get headaches after drinking coffee. I thought I was dehydrated or needing food, didn't make a difference but it was okay because i could still have tea. Yeah, that ability went away as well sadly and i was caffeine free for several years.

I could tell when i got caffeine in a beverage as i would get the headaches instantly again.

These are noticeable, need to take painkillers headaches to make them go away and if more than a couple of sips happened then it would effect me for the rest of the day, need to sleep it off etc.

Anyway, I moved jobs at the end of last year to work in a tea shop, a few months ago, like April, i sampled some of our Matcha just to see if the ratios were right and i didn't get a headache! I thought i was cured! Matcha was fine, black tea, pepsi and even coffee all became available to me again as no headache would appear!

This was all until last Thursday when Pumpkin spice arrived back at Starbucks and thought i would enjoy a caffeinated one for the first time in years. It set me off with the headache again quite badly and i was gutted. What is bizarre is i was drinking a Hojicha drink before that and nothing happened.

Since then i've tried a black tea and a matcha and the same results, the same stupid headache!

So if anyone has any advice to make it go away that would be amazing! I don't understand how it can suddenly flip like a switch, dammit Starbucks!

I'm in my mid 30's female, fairly healthy, none smoker. I take lots of vitamins and i'm a vegetarian but that's fairly recent. Happy to give more details. I did see a doctor early 2023 but pretty much got "sucks to be you, I got a Nespresso machine for christmas"

[u/pewpewk]

I can’t speak to all of your concerns (like why you switched back to having headaches), but for why matcha/tea doesn’t cause you problems and coffee does, I suspect there are two reasons.

Matcha and tea are generally rich in natural L-theanine, which is known to help ‘smooth’ the effects of caffeine on you. Coffee does not have any natural L-theanine. Second, matcha and tea tend to have like half the amount of caffeine content to start with. So depending on how you consume throughout the day, you may have just been staying under your tolerance threshold. Coffee can also vary quite a bit depending on how it’s roasted or type of bean used.

[u/Vivid-Adhesiveness12 → u/pewpewk]

Ah good old L-theanine! Thank you for your reply. I think i drank 2 coffees during this time period where caffeine was okay- and it didn't set me off but like you said it might have been the roasting or bean that made those coffees different.

[u/ProbioticGhost → u/Vivid-Adhesiveness12]

Its possible that the amount of caffeine in those two coffees was too much. For example, I had a period when I tapered down on caffeine. Having a caffeine surplus normally will help headaches if anything. But my tolerance was lowered, and then one day I decided to drink redbull plus a dose of tea. I ended up pretty wired that day and ending up getting a headache from the tension of too much caffeine.

So you possibly got a headache from overloading past your usual baseline/tolerance. Then, when you went back to your other normal sources, the headache could've been because your tolerance had been raised and these beverages have lower caffeine so now you were facing withdrawal headaches.

[u/NeatMarionberry602]

Is this Starbucks exclusively? Cause let me tell you, I also got headaches from just Starbucks coffee.