It’s been about a year since I had my last cup of coffee. People are often shocked when I tell them that. They ask questions like “how are you alive?” and “how have you survived?”. People tend to tell themselves this lie that they need coffee to get by. But the truth is that it’s surprisingly easy to quit caffeine. All you have to do is decide to quit and then refuse to cave.
STEP 1 - DECIDE TO QUIT.
STEP 2 - REFUSE TO CAVE.
You literally don't have to do anything to quit caffeine. You just have to not do one thing (ingest caffeine). That means no coffee, no caffeinated tea, no yerba mate, no matcha tea, no caffeine pills, no caffeinated soda, no Monster energy drinks or caffeinated Monster competitors. No Four Loko, though if that's a problem you probably have others. No any of that.
Now I want to be fully transparent in defining what I mean by "quitting caffeine". That means telling you about the foods and drinks with tiny amounts of caffeine that I do consume on occasion but don’t count because they have such a small amount. These things include decaf coffee, decaf tea, dark chocolate (~7-15g), healthy hot chocolate, and coffee ice cream. The most caffeinated thing I consumed all year was probably a few scoops of coffee chocolate chip ice cream in a waffle cone on a vacation earlier this summer. I also had a non-decaf green tea by accident one day in May and was buzzing all afternoon. So if you want to argue definitions, you can find someone besides me to argue with. This post is for practical people.
* 7-15g of 70% dark chocolate
Strategically speaking, any of the 3 hot drinks I mentioned -- decaf coffee, decaf tea, hot chocolate -- make for great substitutes for coffee or any other caffeinated beverage. Given that coffee is the most popular and most highly caffeinated method by which people consume their caffeine, I want to especially highlight the value proposition of decaf coffee, caffeinated coffee's closest cousin. I always loved the taste, ritual, and feeling of a caffeinated coffee. The thing is, decaf offers the same exact taste and ritual, just without the caffeine (or ~97% less caffeine, technically speaking). So if you weigh those 3 factors — taste, ritual, feeling — with equal importance, decaf is about 2/3 as good a regular coffee. You don’t have to give up the taste or the ritual — just the caffeine. Don’t make quitting harder than it has to be.
Beyond finding yourself some sensible substitutions, the rest of explaining how I quit coffee leads me to explaining why I quit coffee. What I mean by that is this -- really knowing why you quit is the best advice for how to quit. If you regularly drink coffee, you are not going to quit caffeine by accident. Not only is it your default state. It is also the societal norm. Why that is, I am not sure. It would be very far from socially acceptable to join an early morning meeting and say “sorry I am a bit slow this morning -- I have not yet had my morning line of cocaine.” It would not exactly fly if you substituted “shot of whiskey” either. But for some reason “cup of coffee” work just fine. They’re all drugs. They’re all addictive. And they all materially change how you feel and act. I am not saying they are all the same, but they are not entirely different.
Now the reason it’s important to realize you won’t quit by accident is to understand that you have to quit with purpose. You have to have conviction. And for that, it helps to have some reasons. It helps to have a "why", or many of them. Your reasons may be different from mine which may be different from someone else’s, but I will spend the rest of this post providing some options for you to choose from. You can see which reasons resonate with you, build your why, and hopefully gain enough conviction to quit (and not to cave when a craving comes).
Reasons to Quit Caffeine
BETTER SLEEP - Caffeine blocks adenosine. Adenosine make you sleepy. So caffeine blocks you from becoming sleepy. Most people know not to drink caffeine too late in the day because it can interfere with sleep. But as someone who drank coffee only occasionally instead of daily, I noticed an indisputable impact on my sleep even when I drank it before 9 in the morning. It’s hard to know what impact caffeine may or may not be having on your sleep until you go a while without it for a while. It needs to be more than a few weeks to get past the transition period which is not representative of a steady state. If you have trouble consistently getting a good night's sleep, this would be high on my list of self-experiments to run.
LESS EMOTIONAL VOLATILITY - My natural disposition is pretty even-keeled, but sometimes when I drank coffee I would find myself irrationally frustrated by things. It’s a feeling I almost never have in a sober state. For people with high emotional volatility, I would strongly encourage giving quitting caffeine a try. For those on the even-keeled side of the spectrum, further reducing emotional volatility feels like doubling down on a strength, which is generally a good thing to do.
MORE CONSISTENT ENERGY LEVELS - In terms of energy, I’d rather have more consistency than higher highs with lower lows. Without caffeine, natural peaks feel more earned and crashes are fewer and farther between. My energy levels are much more consistent now. Also, without caffeine, it’s been easier to figure out what gives me energy and what takes it away.
REDUCE DEPENDENCIES & ADDICTIONS - I generally believe the fewer addictions and dependencies one has, the better off one is. Caffeine is at best a dependency and at worst a societally accepted but nonetheless problematic addiction for a lot of people. I feel better off not "needing" it at all.
SOBER LIVING - Similar to the above point, I generally believe sober living is something worth striving for. This is not something to be objectively proven, but if you agree, it’s a good reason.
SAVE MONEY - If a Starbucks coffee costs $5 and you buy 1 every day that’s $1,825 per year, or $100,000 over 55 years, which is roughly an adult lifetime of drinking coffee. 5 bucks adds up.
SAVE TIME - While coffee may help you focus, going to get it can be a welcomed distraction. Even just 20 minutes every day is ~2% of your waking hours and life. You can take that back.
SUMMON FOCUS - It feels valuable to be able to summon strong focus at a moment's notice without the need for any external stimulant. Learning to work without coffee will train your natural ability to focus. You'll be able to get just as sharp without coffee as you were with it.
REDUCE HEARTBURN - Not everyone has issues with heartburn or acid reflux, but I did. Quitting coffee helped immensely. Coffee is very acidic, often drank on an empty stomach, and caffeine itself can trigger acid reflux by relaxing the esophageal sphincter. Combined with some other changes I made in addition to quitting coffee, I no longer need to take a daily medication for heartburn like I used to. That's one less drug and one less dependency.
RESTORE NON-CAFFEINATED BASELINE— I have come to believe that the positive feeling you get when you have coffee is mostly just withdrawal reversal disguised as an additive boost. Over time, your sober baseline falls and the caffeine just brings you back to what used to be your sober baseline. At least that’s what I found & wrote about here, but do your own research.
HIGHER BAR FOR WORK - It seems to me that a lot of people use caffeine to chemically induce themselves to do work that they otherwise don’t have the desire to do. If you remove the caffeine, perhaps you will be forced to find work that you actually want to do.
In court, you are innocent until proven guilty. Conversely, I believe the lifetime daily use of any drug should be considered harmful until proven beneficial. If you agree, that means your rationale for taking caffeine daily should be very strong. Not taking it should be the default.
So with all of those reasons above now stated, I didn’t necessarily need any reason to stop consuming caffeine. Rather, I couldn't come up with any reasons that strongly enough justified continuing to do so. Just because everyone else does something doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. So why are you drinking caffeine, really? Are you absolutely certain it’s worth it?
