Cold turkey
I stopped drinking coffee last Monday. Cold turkey.
I’m on the fourth day now and my head has almost stopped hurting. But here’s the interesting part:
I feel much more alert
I’ve always had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Often having to be dragged out, kicking and screaming, by my wife. Now it seems that I just wake by myself earlier than I used to. It seems like I actually need less sleep when not drinking coffee.
A bit of background
When drinking coffee the body adapts to the caffeine, restoring normal functions like a finely tuned PID regulator (yay engineers!). This means that if you inject the same amount of caffeine each day into the system, it works like it did before the caffeine. Note that when always injecting the same amount of caffeine you never get that oft sought after caffeine high! In order to notice any “benefit” from the coffee you need to constantly increase the dosage, which is not possible in the long run.
The theory
Fortunately I didn’t drink that much coffee. My intake varied between about 1 and 4 mugs per day. Non-coffee-enjoyers will now be alert enough to notice where I’m going.
Thinking about the way caffeine works with the human body I realized that drinking different amounts of coffee each day will actually make me tired most of the time! The mornings would logically be especially hard, since all systems are waiting for that first injection of caffeine before being able to function in full. Coffee fail.
But what does it mean?!
I came to the conclusion that I can either drink the same amount of coffee each day and not enjoy any other benefits than the (wonderful grrglaaaahgll) taste.
Or I can stop drinking coffee and just enjoy life.
I choose the latter.