So long Joe! Quitting coffee and never going back…
I think I must have been 14 when I ordered my first espresso.
It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in Oxford and my loitering teenage friends and I had been forced inside one of the UKs faceless coffee chains by the bad weather.
I’d seen my dad order an espresso once on a cafe terrace in sun-dappled Provence and so I naturally I did the same.
I still remember to this day the smooth praline-like intensity of the paper-thin foam and the chewy, peppery fruit notes that followed.
My eyes widened.
My pulse increased.
Where did all this energy come from?
I could talk to girls!
This was my kind of drug….
I became fanatical. I spent every weekend in my teenage years listening to records in coffee shops, feeling sophisticated, learning about the history of the coffee trade and deconstructing the party the night before in a post-match analysis over a black americano.
16 years later and I’ve:
- café-hopped around the grand Austro-Hungarian coffee parlours of Vienna (following in the footsteps of Freud, Joyce, Klimt and Trotsky),
- made a solo pilgrimage to Seven Seeds in Melbourne, Australia — often voted as the best coffee shop in the world.
- I even led a walking tour around the City of London about how coffee kick-started the English Enlightenment with the Royal Society and created investment banking as we know it today.
I was well and truly drinking the kool-aid.
A Mad Dog in a Coffee House
On the back of increasingly intense daily jitters and a debilitating burnout in 2019, it soon became clear that I am extremely caffeine sensitive.
It is fair to say that this is not the case for everyone….
I know many who can take coffee after a late evening meal and drop into a deep sleep almost instantaneously.
They metabolise caffeine well.
That’s not me sadly.
In fact any coffee consumption after about 10 in the morning would see me pacing my room in the early hours like like a string map conspiracy theorist.
At night we call it insomnia, in the day we call this ‘energy’.
But, it’s a centuries-old urban myth that caffeine makes you more productive.
In the age of reason it prompted linear thinking. Academics, philosophers and mathematicians would stay up until the early hours working fastidiously on the conundrum they have in front of them.
In the age of distraction, however coffee only drives compulsive behaviours and an attention deficit as we are bombarded with digital stimuli by the millisecond.
The human brain was never meant to be able to split its attention in so many different places at the same time.
Throw in a addictive drug that makes you fidgety and your attention wander and you’ve got a sorry excuse of a human problem-solving machine.
Thomas Rowlandson, A Mad Dog in a Coffee House, 1809, Source: The Royal Collection Trust
The often touted benefits are pretty loaded too.
Much life the polyphenols in red wine, coffee consumption is potentially beneficial to the heart health of people in their later years, but there is almost no evidence to show that it offers health benefits to younger people.
The boards that lobby for these studies are, wouldn’t you know it, in bed with brands like Coca Cola, Nestlé’s Milo and Rockstar energy drinks.
It’s in the interest of these highly-liquid companies (pun intended) that such studies are funded to create any kind of tenuous link that shows caffeine offering some kind of benefit when you squint at the data.
What is less commonly referenced in clinical and peer reviewed studies are the numerous negatives of caffeine on humans that seem to slip under the carpet when the subject is discussed.
Anxiety, insomnia, digestive issues, allergies, high blood pressure, heart arrythmia, kidney stones, gout and more are recorded as side-effects in the toxic shopping trolley that we start our day with.
Drawing a line in the sand
Over the last couple of years I’ve tried to limit myself to an average of one cup of coffee a day.
Even then the withdrawal symptoms from 1 cups down to 0 on the days where there wasn’t the time to make a coffee were staggeringly unfair — pulsing headache, unparalleled lethargy, grouchiness.
When our baseline state is ‘caffeinated’, abstention leads to misery.
What does it say that we can’t function until we’ve had a cup of coffee?
Name any other drug and the inability to start your day until you’ve had a strong hit would elicit serious concern from friends and family members…
So I decided to break the cycle once and for all.
The view from the other side
After just a couple of weeks of eliminating coffee, whilst still having a cup of black tea every few says I was astounded by the changes I experienced:
- sleep like I’ve not experienced since I was a child — long, deep and restorative — worth it for this benefit alone. 16 years lost to a bad habit that took control.
- clearer skin
- better digestion
- not rising to small things or getting agitated
- waking up with the sun full of energy and able to jump out of bed
- no acid reflux
- feeling nicely tired at the end of each day
These benefits can be found anywhere on the internet, but we almost don’t believe them or realise just how much better they make our lives when we’re under the spell of caffeine.
When a drug like coffee is so ingrained into our society it’s all to easy to fall the wagon and back into old habits at the first social invitation.
We say ‘never again’ until we do it again…
But every man has their price and one day the scales finally tip.
Where’s your tipping point?
Freddie Kift
I write about language learning, communication, flow, collaboration and technology.
Here are my most popular articles:
There just isn’t the time to do it all…
How to get razor sharp clarity on what you want from life
In 2020 I lost my business and my identity and, in that moment, I became free
Don’t become a slash-and-burn digital nomad — Build micro-lives instead
