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I weaned myself off of caffeine entirely seven months ago. Being free of caffeine has greatly improved the quality of my sleep and made my mood more even throughout the day. I really appreciate being able to jump straight out of bed in the morning without depending on that coffee to get my brain working.
I've used occasions when I had the flu to quit, figuring that I feel shitty anyway, so the withdrawal symptoms won't matter that much. Of course eventually I took it up again - unfortunately after a couple of weeks of withdrawal, it tastes really good. But what fascinates me is that being easy to quit might be part of why it is hard to quit. It's easy to say "heck, I'll quit tomorrow, it is so easy after all".
Quitting an addiction is easy, any junkie can do it... several times a day ;) I went cold-turkey a few years ago, lasted several months, helped immensely with palpitations and sleep-pattern problems. In fact, I should probably do it again at some point this year, but with kids and work it becomes difficult to plan the inevitable couple of weeks of "zombie time". Maybe doctors should start considering it a real addict…
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Benefits of quitting caffeine for me : - fewer head aches - much better sleep - reduced mid afternoon blahs - easier wake ups - ability to use small amounts of caffeine for medicinal purposes. (by itself or to enhance the effects of other drugs)
Huh, I get fewer headaches and wake up easier with coffee.
I weaned myself off of caffeine entirely seven months ago. Being free of caffeine has greatly improved the quality of my sleep and made my mood more even throughout the day. I really appreciate being able to jump straight out of bed in the morning without depending on that coffee to get my brain working.
Personally though, I love the taste and enjoy the experience of "waking up" with a cup of coffee over the course of the first 20 minutes of the day.
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Huh, I get fewer headaches and wake up easier with coffee.
That's because you're addicted. You're dependent on it to wake up, and when you don't use it, you get withdrawal headaches. You may need to go about a month caffeine free to see the benefits
The frequency of migraines for me is independent of caffeine consumption; I've gones months with no caffeine and suffered though migraines, just as I've gone through months of heavy coffee/tea drinking and suffered (a little less) through them
I weaned myself off of caffeine entirely seven months ago. Being free of caffeine has greatly improved the quality of my sleep and made my mood more even throughout the day. I really appreciate being able to jump straight out of bed in the morning without depending on that coffee to get my brain working.
I believe that's a fairly common experience (it was mine too when I quit for a year). Caffeine leads to highs and lows. W/o caffeine and having good sleeping patterns leads to higher average energy level and less highs and lows. Personally though, I love the taste and enjoy the experience of "waking up" with a cup of coffee over the course of the first 20 minutes of the day.
Yep, which is why I switched to decaf. Still the same taste (there are ok decaf coffees out there) but none of the bad effects of excessive caffeine.
(Most decaf still has ~10% of the caffeine of regular coffee, but even with 4 or 5 cups of decaf a day it's not enough for dependency; I get no withdrawal symptoms if I stop for any length of time).
I still drink the odd normal coffee (if someone/somewhere doesn't have decaf) but a maximum of one a day otherwise it will affect my sleep that night; it also gives me a proper coffee buzz for the short period after drinking it.
The thing to remember with caffeine is its half-life in non-smokers is 8 hours (it is 3 hours in smokers). I have a rule to never have any drink with caffeine after midday - if I break this rule even by an hour I suffer that night and the next day. Caffine is a morning drug.
As an aside, the whole "8 hour half-life" is astonishingly high, to me. Caffeine is nice, but it doesn't seem to have that strong an effect on me, and certainly nothing I notice 5-8 hours after. I drink quite a lot of caffeine these days, but even at times when I went off caffeine for a few weeks, I didn't get effect durations any longer than 1-3 hours.
I weaned myself off of caffeine entirely seven months ago. Being free of caffeine has greatly improved the quality of my sleep and made my mood more even throughout the day. I really appreciate being able to jump straight out of bed in the morning without depending on that coffee to get my brain working.
At what time of day did you typically have your last coffee?
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Huh, I get fewer headaches and wake up easier with coffee.
That's because you're addicted. You're dependent on it to wake up, and when you don't use it, you get withdrawal headaches. You may need to go about a month caffeine free to see the benefits