I don't get much energy from it but it does help me wake up. And if I don't have it every 24 hours or so I'll get a headache and such. Been like this for a long time.
I don't get the sugar part. Maybe kids supposedly get hyper from sugar but I don't see how it can really affect most people. Even most pop doesn't have much caffeine in it at all. I have caffeine pills just cause they're so cheap ($3 for 90x200mg).
Placebo effect - it's powerful stuff.
"No sugar for you, or you'll never settle down!"
"No, I'll never settle down because you never instilled proper mental discipline in me!"
I keep caffeine pills handy too. Quite cheap, as you say, and way more portable than coffee. I dice the things up though - 50mg is my preferred dosage. Much more and I get so damned jittery I can hardly do anything useful. That probably comes from getting almost completely weaned off of it.
Back when I worked retail, a nice 24oz Code Red Mt Dew went with lunch each day. Didn't bug me then, or at least not that I noticed. But of course, it was retail, so my brain was at least 87% offline most of the time anyway.
Ahh, those were the days.
"Excuse me, do you have any zero-watt nightlight bulbs?"
- "...Um, no. We have these limelight electroluminescent nightlights, which use
very little electricity. But a zero-watt nightlight would be off or burned out, and produce no light."
"No, no, I'm sure there are zero-watt nightlight bulbs here, I'll keep looking, thank you."