Quitting Coffee — Why coffee is (potentially) a big problem and how I finally quit
Why the hell is coffee so difficult to quit?
I’d tried once before a few years ago and lasted a month, each day of self-denial face-scrapingly arduous, taunted as I was by the knowledge that the object of my desire was always pretty much immediately at hand.
Coffee is the second most consumed drink in the world (after water, which obviously doesn’t count). Its smell wafts from what seems like every street corner, calling you so seductively: ‘Drink me. I am the permissible indulgence. You can have me all you want and no one will bat an eyelid.’
On top of this, the admixture of social condonement with the increased levels of productivity and daily hits of dopamine makes a deliciously tantalising combination that it’s very easy to find reasons not to ditch.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why would you want to quit in the first place? What could be wrong with something so ever-present, which reliably supports you in the wearisome battle of the everyday, like a benevolent charioteer whipping you lovingly as you snort and whinny on? For coffee is the fuel of modern society, the grease that keeps the hamster wheel a’spinnin, and so is naturally seen as good and necessary in service of this.
But herein lies the problem. Coffee hides in broad daylight because it is what helps everyone get everything done. But no one stops to question if that is actually a good thing or not.
Coffee allows us to sacrifice sleep for busyness, to postpone our basic needs for some future day when we can finally cash in on all our hard work. It is what keeps us up to speed, as the speed gets ever faster and faster. But as Gandhi said, ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed.’
We all whir blindly around at this frenetic pace— dictated by what? social norms? the objective number of unavoidable responsibilities we have? our own unreflective imagining of what pace life is appropriate to be lived at? — because we are too jacked up on business juice to stop to catch a breath.
We do not pause long enough to listen to the signals our body is sending us, that we should sleep and rest more, eat differently, spend more time in nature, or look to whatever other natural energy boosters there are. (Instead we turn once again to consumption to meet our body’s needs, to an immediate neurochemical intervention, because we don’t have the damn time or energy for anything slower-acting which might require effort on our part).
The irony is that it is only in periods of rest and pause where we can reflect on whether our behaviours are serving us, or whether we might not do things differently, regardless of the importunities of society.
Essentially — and you’ll thank me for paraphrasing on everyone’s behalf here — our increasing consumption of coffee is the equivalent to us all signing up to a contract which says: ‘Life is fucking knackering. But if we all just get jacked up on this mildly psycho-active, energetically potent drug we can all drag ourselves exhaustedly through it until the sweet release of death.’ (Hey, you said it!)
Because many of us simply cannot function without it. (Or at least, we think we can’t.) And that’s a problem. Because being dependent on anything isn’t good. And if we looked past the status quo bias of society, where we think of 100mg of caffeine as a nice little bump that it’s normal to mainline into ourselves every two hours or so, we would see that the typical cup of coffee actually provides a pretty fucking powerful jolt, not so dissimilar to cocaine or amphetamine. [See symptoms below if you think I exaggerate].
That’s not to say we should never do it. It’s to say that our quotidian reliance on it is out of balance. Caffeine is recommended before large bouts of physical exercise. But should you need it to be able to sit at your desk? Is there not a suggestion here of needing to run just so we can sit still? Should we have to depend upon something that helps you run a marathon just to overcome the pre-9am feeling of having a small furry creature living behind your eyeballs?
As someone who has drunk coffee for their whole working life, I’ve long harboured puritanical suspicions along the lines laid out above. Something is up with our reliance on this black magic.
But I don’t even need to generalise. I’ve recognised for a long time that something was up with my relationship with coffee. And so finally, I decided enough was enough.
My hope is that in reading this piece you will find something to relate to your own experience, and take pause to consider whether coffee — or anything else you habitually indulge in — is really contributing to the quality of your life or not.
Taking the plunge
So many of us dream of giving up the various habits we know ultimately block us from our happiest selves. But there always seems some excuse, some reason to delay till tomorrow.
But we will leave behind any harmful behaviour whenever our motivation becomes strong enough. And our motivation becomes strong enough when we get in touch with all of the ways the behaviour is holding us back, and with what we might stand to gain if we stop doing it. With the why.
Still, why was I able to quit right now rather than any time before? So many of us are aware that we should give up on behaviours we don’t like. We seek motivation, but somehow slide back into old behaviours.
This is a complex question, encompassing habit change and even the problem of free will to some extent. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll just speak to what I think helped me in this instance:
They say that transitions are the ideal time to make changes in your life, as though we can just follow the momentum they set, and this has been a time of transition. As the seasons shift and the school year starts, everything, from weather to cities to workplaces, is in flux. On a personal level, I was just starting a new job in a new place. Although this didn’t mean the change just happened by itself, it at least provided a new context for my mind to begin to form new patterns and associations.
But to be honest, I don’t really know. Sometimes, there is just a sense of being ready to make the change.
Get clear on why you want to quit
At its outset, I dubbed this year: ‘My Year Of Rest and Relaxation’. The aim was not to sit on my arse and take valium all year like the protagonist in the (fantastic and hilarious) book of the same name, but to find a sense of relaxation, stillness and spaciousness within myself, and to act from that place. To do what I was already doing but with more ease, calm and joy.
Coffee always felt contradictory to these aims, as many of you scuttling along the jagged precipice of the caffeine-fuelled schedule know. Because coffee keeps us on the treadmill of longing. It provides the gravitational centre of one’s day, whereby the first cup of coffee is the highpoint, and we are always either longing for this point or clinging to it in the brief time we are actually in it. It is very hard to feel easeful and calm when there is a fixation on some idea of how we are supposed to feel, which is brief, and often under or overwhelming when it does come.
But how to escape its murky clutches? I had, in various ways, become dependent on it, ie, addicted.
Now many people might be reluctant to use the big A word for something as commonplace as coffee (especially when I was only averaging two cups a day). But firstly, just because everyone is doing something does not make it okay (take, for example, Tiktok. Or wearing crocks). And secondly, although I think it’s demonstrable that coffee is an addiction in the habitual sense of the term, we can also simply define addiction as anything which has become a habit that we want to stop but feel we can’t.
Whatever the case, I’ve always felt that I needed coffee. And herein lay the problem. It’s not a good thing to need anything. Because the fewer things we need, the easier it is for our needs to be met, and for us to feel happy. Indeed, the quest for enlightenment can probably be simplified to something like reducing one’s needs to the bare minimum. As Anthony de Mello says, happiness is never about adding more things to our lives, but taking them away.
Reason 1. Neurological Addiction
On the neurological level, I had become addicted to the daily jolts of dopamine that coffee was providing me with, the pleasure hormone which fires in your synapses when something is identified as a reward. When we constantly feed ourselves with dopamine, we are wiring our systems to want more of the thing which provides it, to seek that hit again and again. But as we become habituated, we need more and more of whatever that thing is, or find we can’t feel normal or happy without it. Hence addiction and the restless dissatisfaction it brings.
Our society is littered with dopamine-emitting mechanisms. Social media is essentially predicated on it, from the like button to the never-expiring page-refresh to ever-shorter and more violently frenetic videos. Whatever the form of dopamine addiction, it is always problematic.
There are many reasons why this is so, but the one I want to focus on is that dopamine addiction prevents us from acting in our own true best interests, which requires some kind of long-term planning, instead keeping us hooked on the acquisition of immediate rewards. There is a sense therefore in which dopamine addiction masks our deeper needs, as whenever we are feeling low we simply snaffle another shot.
I have long had the sneaking suspicion with coffee that it was doing just this, masking some deeper feelings which required patient and loving attendance, glazing over the top of them in a chemical sheen, much like how prescription medication can cover up the signals our mind and body send to us to live our lives differently.*
As I’ve noted before, there is an interesting argument that the growing addiction in our society to coffee is a major indicator of our poor psychological health, as we all flee from the terror of our internal worlds into pleasurable and hollow distraction.
Reason 2. Psychological Addiction
Psychological addiction is just as problematic as neurological addiction and, of course, the two go hand in hand. What I mean by psychological addiction is addiction on the level of story: the story we tell ourselves about what we can and can’t do. So long as the story exists that I am dependent on caffeine, I cannot even begin the work of making this not the case. The possibility doesn’t exist on my horizon of possibilities.
My story basically ran as such: without coffee I will never find the motivation or energy to do any kind of demanding or meaningful work. Consequently, limited entirely by this story, My productivity for the day would last from the moment that first cup touched my lips in the morning to the post-lunch slump around 2pm.
Anything good I had ever written seemed exclusively to have come from a caffeine surge where, like a preacher being seized by the spirit of the Ludddd, some pent-up force would compel me to the keyboard and words would spaff out of me in great torrents. Coffee was off-the-shelf inspiration, available for only £2.99, EVERYWHERE. (By the way, my apologies if this article is lacking the usual zip. I am now having to work harder to channel the divine).
Still, What’s the problem? I hear you say. If you do your best work under the influence of this perennial product, which you can now make in ten thousand different ways and flavours (at low cost if you make it at home), who cares if it’s an addiction? It’s not like it will ever be in short supply.
Reason 3. Self-deception and Inauthenticity
Because, my dependency on the drug — (it’s not a drug, it’s a drink!) — made me question whether I actually really wanted to do anything I was doing at all. Or whether I had not in fact randomly selected a bunch of habits and goals that other people had told me were good for me/that I thought looked cool or impressive, but for which I had no intrinsic motivation (and thereby needed exogenous stimulation to pursue).
I’ve always felt that the things we should be doing in life are the things that really call us. And that if something calls us, it exerts a kind of existential gravity which draws us toward it. It won’t do the work for us, but it will show us unambiguously in which direction to move.
I have tried to recalibrate my life in the direction of what seems to call me. I’ve tried to ensure that it is set up towards pursuing things that matter to me and nourish me, in the hope that this can then be poured back into the world in the expression of the gifts I have been able to nurture as a result.
But if I needed this extra boost to be arsed to do the things that were supposedly my highest aims, did I even really want to do them?
Was I not covertly playing the same game that I had sought to escape — productivity for productivity’s sake! — simply replacing goals associated with traditional success with less typical but no less empty and inauthentic ones?
I needed to quit to see.
Reason 4. Anxiety
And none of this is to mention the ambient anxiety of the caffeine-fuelled life.
It’s strange that so many of us drink something multiple times daily which reliably makes us anxious. For me, I’d always taken the anxiety as a necessary evil for reaping coffee’s other benefits: OK, I feel mildly on edge while writing this article about inner calm and peace (true story), but by God my fingers are typing fast. I could probably pump out fifteen articles on inner peace by the end of the day! #bigtechspirituality #dharma-bros
I was so dependent on it, I’d never properly considered whether there was another form of energising myself which didn’t lead to me sucking my teeth and gripping the desk and sweating and gurning and shitting and… sorry, I wouldn’t go into such detail, but isn’t it mental that so many of us subject ourselves to that? [These are the symptoms I was referring to above].
All of which is to say that, although coffee had apparently become essential to my daily functioning, what it was actually providing me with was a sense I was living something of a lie, along with background anxiety and the guilty self-reproach of the addict. Through some combination of these along with the cost, the sense of constant exhaustion before the next hit, the stinking breath, the camel’s back finally broke…
The process of quitting and the other side
As anyone who has ever quit coffee cold-turkey before knows, the first few days are hard. I got mild but persistent headaches, and everything felt very foggy. I also felt extremely low, deprived of my daily dopamine.
The dopamine deficit makes quitting extremely difficult, because the mind typically hates to feel any negative emotions — especially the feeling of craving after something it can’t have — and will conjure up any kind of excuse not to feel so. And so I was inundated with worm-tongued invitations to give up on my giving up:
‘You’ll never feel energetic without it’;
‘Coffee is the necessary price if you want to achieve your goals’;
‘Life’s too short not to give yourself what you want’;
‘Everyone else is doing it!’
On several occasions, I nearly buckled. But somehow, the desire to overcome this addiction, which has always hung over my sense of freedom like a brown and sweetly pungent cloud, was stronger.
They say that it takes up to 72 hours for the caffeine to leave your system, but it actually took me about ten days to feel fully normal (wrestling with jet lag as I was). I suspect that the psychological hangover of the addiction is unique to each of us. Ten days is just how long it took my own desiring mind to accept I wasn’t going to give it what it wanted, whereby it stopped sulking and decided it had better get with the damn programme.
Beyond a strong motivation — in my case, a clear sense of where I wanted to end up and all the ways in which coffee wasn’t helping me get there — you need something more to help you quit though.
You need something to replace the coffee, to fill the gaps in your life its absence has left. That means, principally, finding other sources of dopamine, energy, motivation etc. Or, removing things from your life which cause you to feel like you need extra dopamine and energy just to get through the day in the first place.
Here are some habits, old and new, that have helped ease the transition:
- Replacing coffee with matcha, a slower release, less intense caffeine drink
- Exercising more, always in the morning
- Increased periods of total inactivity — ie actual rest, big reduction in phone use (by pausing each time before I use my phone and just asking — is there any reason other than boredom for doing this?), sitting on the subway and just watching people come and go mindfully
- Speaking to strangers and homeless people — this increases your mood and sense of possibility, which is exciting
- Stretching or yoga every morning
- News fast — reducing intake of depressing media
- Cold showers — tolerable and even pleasant straight after exercise!
- Decluttering my schedule — pausing my work with ActionAble, because I don’t have the time to do it with full commitment
- Mindful movement — recognising that moving at pace doesn’t need to mean moving with haste. Going quickly but mindfully.
- Neurosystem mastery course — I am extremely excited to be taking Jonny Miller’s course on discovering endogenous resources for finding energy and calm next month. If you don’t know about Jonny Miller’s work, he’s right at the forefront of breathwork, which I’m putting my money on as the coming mecca in all things well-being.
If you are interested please reach out to me. I get a kickback for everyone I refer!
Has it been worth it?
Now, one month on, I can say that it’s definitely been worth it. My energy is more sustained, smoother somehow. I feel more spacious and calm. The anxiety I felt has all but disappeared, except for the moments when something external spikes it (as opposed to it just being background and perennial).
And it turns out that I am motivated by the goals that I have chosen. In fact, it’s much easier to get in touch with my motivation, now that motivation isn’t buried beneath a dependency on something beyond it.
My days are without the jittery highs of before, but therefore also without the corresponding lows. And I’m realising that those highs were perhaps not so great after all, always laced with the dreaded foreknowledge that they were at some point all-too-soon to come to an end.
More than anything else, I have the satisfaction of having taken a step I always wanted to take. Whenever we feel that we are dependent on anything, we are saying that it has power over us. We are playing out a story where we are not free to choose exactly how we would like to act and be (again, let’s not get into free will here. The point is, we want to play out a story where we do feel free). It is hugely empowering therefore to be able to say ‘no’ to something when previously it had seemed like we had no say at all.
And the step feels hugely important in taking me along the path I have set myself, which is simply to better allow each moment to arise and pass without clinging to it or pushing it away. To let tiredness be tiredness and sadness be sadness, knowing that the energy and joy will come the more I can settle into acceptance of whatever is. (You know, Buddhism.)
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To be clear: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with drinking coffee. It may even be that coffee is contributing in a hugely positive way to your life. The point instead is to pay attention to the behaviours we habitually engage in and consider whether we have control over them, or they us. And whether we enjoy whatever influence they are having over our lives or not.
If we each do this with the various elements of our day-to-day, there’s no reason we can’t all construct a life that is exactly as we would like it to be.
*There isn’t the space to discuss this properly here, but if you are on prescription medication, I make absolutely no judgement here. It is simply my view — based on some research into the topic — that prescription medication should only ever work as a temporary analgesic, buying oneself the breathing space to change one’s life circumstances to be less depressing, as opposed to a long term fix, which is what coffee had become for me.
Now, it may be that it is exceptionally hard for you to change your life circumstances due to factors beyond your control, in which case off-the-shelf interventions are an essential life raft. Still, it remains the case that, based on the extensive research compiled in Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, the long-term outcomes for prescription medication are negligible when compared with behavioural changes like more exercise/better movement, eating better, breathwork, meditation, socialisation etc.) So if these options are at all available, they are preferable long term.
