I Did The Unthinkable: I Got Off Caffeine

It's been about two weeks so far since I last consumed any caffeine. It wasn't easy to do to say the least. So far, I feel pretty darn good, at least since the withdrawals ceased.

I'll tell you why I embarked on this personal experiment, but first, I'll talk about my history with the addictive stimulant.

I don't know at what age my parents first allowed me to have soda pop, or pop for us midwesterners, but it was probably when I was a little kid. I'm going to arbitrarily guess 7 or 8 years old. So that means I've been on the addictive drug for about 40 years in various forms.

I drank pop from then on until about 2013 when I was diagnosed with type II diabetes. That meant I had to stop drinking pop and find a new source of caffeine to feed my bodies addiction. Coffee was the answer.

I never liked coffee because my dad drank it, but it was the dreadful instant, freeze-dried stuff. It was bitter and just downright awful. That's why throughout my life I never touched the stuff. But by 2013 I had a few online friends who were quite the coffee aficionados and they helped me discover what coffee should taste like. They taught me about fresh roasted beans, grinding them, and making various forms of coffee. My favorite is espresso. Just straight espresso, 2 ounces of extracted coffee with no milk, sugar or syrups. My next favorite style is pour over either from a Chemex or a V60.

That's when I discovered how wonderful coffee can be. I ended up with two basic rules about coffee.

1. If it's bitter, you're doing it wrong. Coffee shouldn't be bitter to taste.
2. If you like it, that's all that matters. I won't get down on you if you take your coffee differently than I do - even if you like it bitter!

So I drank coffee for the past 12 years or so and enjoyed it a lot. I became somewhat famous among my friends and colleagues for making a really good cup of coffee!

Why did I quit drinking coffee, or rather, consuming caffeine? It was more of a personal experiment with myself. You see, I value my sleep very, very much. So much so that I do as much as I can to ensure I get a good night's rest. I have lights on timers that get warmer and dimmer in the evening, I try to put screens down (phone, tablet, computer) 30 minutes or more before bed and I keep a consistent bedtime schedule regardless if I have to work the next day or not. There are some other minor things I do as well, but I'll leave those out for the sake of sticking to the topic.

I think I've done as much as I can do to ensure I get a good nights sleep. But often I wake up groggy and tired and stay that way throughout the day. The morning coffee pick-me-up always helps, but it eventually wears off. I know that caffeine has a half-life of about 12 hours in the body. So I limited my intake to one, maybe two espressos after waking up, and one pour over cup when I arrived at the office. My rule was to stop consuming caffeine no later than 11am or noon so that I could go to sleep at my normal time. 11am or noon was the absolute latest, but my regular practice was having that pour over finished by 9am or 9:30am.

If I didn't get a decent nights sleep, the next day I would be irritable and mostly unproductive and I hated that. It's one of the worst feelings I experience. That's why I prioritize my sleep the way I do.

The last thing I could think of to try to get that feeling I experience once or twice a year where when I wake up, I feel rested and can immediately put my feet on the floor and get going for the day, and that was to cut out caffeine. So I did.

I know that stopping caffeine cold turkey is rough. The withdrawals are usually headaches, lethargy, irritability and other things. What I decided to do was to stop coffee, and switch to black tea and then to green tea. Each one has less caffeine than the previous one by volume. I already had both black and green tea in the house and decided to consume them until they ran out and I wouldn't buy more.

I felt like I could ween myself off caffeine and not suffer the withdrawal symptoms so intensely this way. I think it mostly worked, too. I did get headaches, and some tiredness though the process, though. The headaches came after stopping coffee and switching to black tea. They lasted a couple of days and weren't too intense.

But the extreme tiredness came the day after I used the last bag of green tea. It was a Saturday thankfully. The green tea being the form that has the least amount of caffeine by volume, had about 30 milligrams. That Saturday a couple of weeks ago was rough. I couldn't keep my eyes open to save my life all day! I sat in my chair in front of the TV the whole day dozing off and waking up and dozing off. By Sunday I was doing much better but still a little tired. Each day after that has been better and better.

So now I am about two weeks removed from caffeine and I feel really good. I have been getting about 8 to 9 hours of sleep each night whereas before I was getting 6 to 8 hours each night. When I wake up each day I am feeling like those rare days I mentioned where I feel good, not groggy, and I can hit the ground running. My energy levels throughout the day have been relatively stable and even, too.

I wanted to see what life was like caffeine-free and to get back to a baseline feeling. So far, so good.

Now I'm not here to say that caffeine is bad for you. That debate has been going on for decades, if not centuries and I doubt society will ever come to a consensus on it. People love their coffee/caffeine and the world mostly runs on it and that's just fine. I'm simply one person who makes his own choices in life.

I still like to enjoy a hot drink in the morning and so I've purchased some caffeine-free herbal teas to drink. What about decaf coffee, you may ask? Well, I don't know. I've never tried it before. Maybe I'll give it a taste one of these days, but not today.