I recently stopped consuming caffeine on a daily basis. For at least a dozen years, I’d had a cup of fully caffeinated coffee first thing pretty much every morning. And over the last few years, I also found myself getting a lot of pleasure out of a 3pm espresso shot.\u00a0I quit because I hoped to improve my sleep. I understand from browsing the literature that caffeine actually has a reasonably long half- and quarter-life, and a morning cup really does negatively impact your sleep 14 hours later. I also understand that caffeine does not “give” you energy; it just temporarily causes your body to consume energy stores at a higher rate. This seems to have worked; I am certainly more refreshed in the morning than I used to be, and I am as active as ever. Only negative thinking and parties keep me up late now.<\/p>\n
Having tried to quit caffeine before, I knew that I would have to titrate down gradually to avoid painful headaches. I therefore reduced my consumption gradually, over the course of two weeks, and didn’t experience much pain. I understood, of course, that there is a low-level addictive component to caffeine, the sort of thing that gives you transitory headaches if you don’t get your fix. What I didn’t understand, however, is the degree to which my addiction to caffeine (and that’s the right word here) had seeped into my higher-level consciousness. I found my mind coming up with elaborate justifications for why I needed caffeine. During the first few weeks, my mind was telling me that perhaps I’m just not as smart, handsome, clever, or strong without it. I recognize this as classic addict talk.<\/p>\n
I have kept up my coffee ritual. As I have for many years, I start every morning by grinding 10g of fresh roasted beans, heating water to 205\u00b0, and using these to prepare about 12 oz of hot coffee. However, this coffee has no more than a tiny trace of caffeine thanks to the solvent-free “Swiss Water<\/a>” diffusion process. My roaster provides a decent sample of different coffees prepared with this process (with no real markup over the caffeinated variety), including a nice fair trade Sumatran. I am also allowing myself to have one caffeinated cup (at least until I run out of caffeinated beans) a week on Friday morning just before I go the gym to lift weights.<\/p>\n I think I have to recommend going through this detox, if you’re in a state of mind where you can exert a bit of will power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently stopped consuming caffeine on a daily basis. For at least a dozen years, I’d had a cup of fully caffeinated coffee first thing pretty much every morning. And over the last few years, I also found myself getting a lot of pleasure out of a 3pm espresso shot.\u00a0I quit because I hoped to … Continue reading “Caffeine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1668"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1670,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions\/1670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}