I Stopped Drinking Coffee After A Decade And Here’s How I Feel
I’m convinced the benefits of coffee don’t out weigh the costs that come with drinking it.
More and more today, studies are revealing many different health benefits from coffee. From cancer to fat burning, coffee is considered a healthy food.
However as legendary Stanford economics professor Dr. Thomas Sowell often says upon considering adding something with an intended benefit (in this case, coffee’s health benefits and how you feel), you must ask:
“At what cost?”
Very often the intended benefits of things don’t outweigh the costs associated with their use — and I think coffee falls in this camp.
Whether it’s software intended to create an efficiency and generates inefficiency as a result of it’s user experience and/or implementation (both of which are quite hard to get right), to coffee which has cancer fighting benefits, at the cost of creating bad sleep and often other lifestyle side-effects are what enable a cancerous environment in your body in the first place.
F this study for example, this study published by the journal of national sleep medicine, of (and many others like it), it turns out that coffee impacts rem sleep significantly.
The conclusion of the study was:
“The magnitude of reduction in total sleep time suggests that caffeine taken 6 hours before bedtime has important disruptive effects on sleep and provides empirical support for sleep hygiene recommendations to refrain from substantial caffeine use for a minimum of 6 hours prior to bedtime.”
It’s also become very clear that your sleep is one of the most important parts of good health, and that not getting it enables diabetes, poor immune function and more.
Of course, one should think for themselves and decide based on their experience and how they feel, and that’s led me to my recent strategy in health and fitness — to focus on removing things (fasting often, one meal a day) less on adding (taking supplements, hard workouts).
I’m now cutting coffee as much as I can. Why drink it if you don’t have to and it’s not great for you?
But First: Why I’m Writing This
I’ve been a coffee drinker for a very long time — until about a month ago when I decided to stop. I LOVE coffee.
Why wouldn’t I? It’s a meditation, as I would relax over a warm cup. Whether I was recovering from a burst of work and getting ready for the next one, or starting my day with reading and writing (ah heaven!). What’s not to love about any of that? So know this isn’t some crusade against the coffee industry or any type of political agenda.
It’s just one sad ex-coffee-drinker who values health and performance just a bit more than the love for his coffee — and has seen a breakthrough in sleep and general energy since stopping.
Photo by mwangi gatheca on Unsplash
The fact is, if you drink coffee on a daily basis even once or twice, the caffeine will stay in your system and the habit will keep you from getting optimal sleep. And optimal sleep is absolutely critical for optimal health and healing.
When I realized all this, on top of a host of other things, I decided to stop drinking coffee.
Here’s what happened.
My Sleep Got Much Better
Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash
I’ve been sleeping like a baby since I stopped drinking coffee. And falling asleep has become easier. Most importantly, waking up more naturally with high energy has become the norm.
I like to wake up at 5am most week day mornings, and that means getting to sleep on time to get enough rest is critical. This isn’t easy when you’re in bed at 8:30 trying to fall asleep by 9pm. I’d very often lay in bed trying to fall asleep and wouldn’t be able to even though my mind and body have been trained to do so.
As I look back on the nights I’d struggle to fall asleep, there was a subtle feeling of being physically taxed (probably from the adrenaline, as coffee can exhaust your adrenals which impacts hormones) which stirred up a subtle stress a more active mind.
This doesn’t happen anymore.
Now I feel more natural in bed and fall asleep easier. I also wake up in the morning more fresh — most often before my alarm.
My Next Reason: Discovering The Importance Of Gut Health
The gut is now considered our ‘second brain’. As this article in Scientific American says:
“The enteric nervous system (gut) is often referred to as our body’s second brain. There are hundreds of millions of neurons connecting the brain to the enteric nervous system, the part of the nervous system that is tasked with controlling the gastrointestinal system.”
Besides taxing your adrenal glands, the gland that pumps out the stress hormone cortisol each time you drink (it’s worth repeating, when you wake up, cortisol is high already), it decimates the lining of your stomach and can cause (or eventually cause) ulcers and gastritis.
The bustle did a great piece and quoted Dr. Shawn Khodadadian’s, he says:
“Because of coffee’s acidity, it can adversely affect the lining of your stomach and intestines. If you drink a lot of coffee over an extended period, it will worsen any existing conditions you may have.”
He continued to share what he recommends to his patients:
“If you have GI problems like Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, or ulcerative colitis, you should not drink coffee, period. It will exacerbate your symptoms.”
This advice may not be aimed at the every day person who drinks 1–3 cups a day, but I do believe a daily dose of anything more than one cup is costing us rather than helping.
Personally, I haven’t had any issues with ulcers or severe stomach problems however I will say, that since I’ve stopped drinking coffee, my body seems to be more cool and calm, and bowel movements not induced by coffee seem more natural than from drinking my morning joe.
However it’s also worth noting that it seems intuitive that being ‘regular’ equates to good health, but the most important thing is how well we’re absorbing the actual things we’re taking in. Because most of what we do take in, ends up leaving us which isn’t healthy. So as much as it seems intuitive, ideally, we’re keeping more and letting out less waste.
This is actually why a lot of people who are considered ‘skinny’ even though they ‘eat whatever they want’ — they’re often coffee drinkers with bad stomachs and don’t absorb a lot of their intake.
Conclusion
Every day I see new studies saying something is good and another study saying the same thing is bad. So if there’s any main takeaway from this experience is to listen to yourself more than anyone.
What inspired this writing was how I felt after stopping coffee. The results for me have been significant. However we’re all different and live differently.
There are of course
different diet frameworks and nutrition protocols that can have coffee be consumed in a healthy way. I’ve never been bashful in admitting I tend to be extreme in everything I do.
For example, founder of Bulletproof Coffee, Dave Asprey often says to do your bullet proof coffee and skip breakfast and lunch leading into your one meal of the day intermittent fasting routine.That, for example is a healthy way to consume coffee, whereas most of us use it as a crutch (I know I did).
Another leading trainer I’ve followed does that and is ripped and in amazing health.
But then the question becomes, is that how you’re consuming it? Once a day with lot’s of exercise?
Since I’ve cut coffee (for two weeks), my sleep’s gotten better. Energy levels are much higher and it’s one less habit I now carry with me. Perhaps most importantly, it’s kind of nudged me toward morning exercise to ‘wake up’ as well which has been amazing. In a sense, I’ve replaced it with that.
Not going to coffee shops all the time has also been a time and money saver.
I of course won’t say I’ll never drink coffee again because I loved it so much. However I did the same with drinking six years ago and never went back.
For some reason, I think coffee’s going to fall in that camp.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +446,678 people.
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