My 1 year anniversary of Quitting Coffee/Caffeine

All right where to start ..

I’m tempted to grab a cup of coffee to write this up! No joke.. sort of a testament to how I view addiction.. I’ve beaten it, and that doesn’t mean I can’t have one every once in a while. I’m not an “addict” — I don’t “relapse” if I have some. If I decide to drink coffee now, I pour like 2–3 ounces and I am jacked up for hours; I can use it as a party drug or for a creativity session. Maybe once a month…once a quarter…doesn’t matter. I can feel it overwhelm my adrenals, making me a bit dizzy and ready to chat like I hit a line of lite cocaine.

Why did I want to quit in the first place?

I was planning on going to a health retreat with my wife in Costa Rica right before COVID stuff started locking everything down, and they were strictly prohibiting caffeine. I absolutely had to be off it for that — I didn’t want to ruin the entire week by me being addicted to coffee and not being able to get my hands on it. I figured this was a great time to give this a shot, and if it sticks, even better, maybe I can get off for life. What do I have to lose just to see what I’m like off of it?

What were my beliefs about coffee?

Coffee gives me control of my life. At the drop of a hat, I can turn a bad mood or tired mood into 4 incredible hours of dopamine-infused energy and I can easily get into flow. Coffee is healthy for me; the studies say so. I am more talkative and personable when on coffee. I love the whole routine of making a coffee. I love the smell of coffee. Coffee coffee coffee.

Timing

It is really hard to be in the perfect place in your life to quit coffee. It may even currently be solving more problems in your life than it is causing. You have to make sure it is the right time in YOUR life or there’s no way you will succeed. Like with everything, quitting coffee is not a panacea. You have to have healthy things to fill your day with to replace the times you were riding on coffee dopamine. You have to have time and space to give yourself to rest and reset. Many of us get addicted to things easily. One current addiction of mine which happens to be one of the healthier ones I’ve had — I am currently addicted to working. I fucking LOVE building my business. I think working hard is healthy for me right now and I’m over-doing it at times, but there will be a time where I may need to decide if I need to scale back and give other things in life more attention.

How much coffee did I drink?

I had been drinking coffee regularly for 10 years. I always had my share of soda and coffee but once my corporate job started when I was 23, coffee was a normal part of the day for everyone and it helped break up the monotony. I totally undersand why people drink it. I’ve been there. I am a firm believer that it DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH coffee you drink. I had 1–2 cups of coffee per day. But deep down I knew this was unecessary and potentially harmful. Maybe it’s fine for some people. But for ME — I am constantly jacked up on adrenaline from trading and business, my gut was just telling me the caffeine was flooding me with extra adrenaline and over time I would pay the price.

How did I do it?

Cold turkey. Well.. I tried..I lasted one day until debilitating headaches set in. And I have a history of bad migraines. My solution was this: whenever I started feeling like a headache was coming on, I’d pour a cup, and just take a few sips until I felt better. This did the trick for the first 7–10 days and then I was fully off.

How did it go?

From what I remember, the first 14 days were mainly physical/brain distress. Really wasn’t all that bad, but I’m an entrepreneur and I am able to work whenever I want … so I gave myself plenty of time and space to not worry about working so efficiently and allowing myself naps and chill time. Getting past the physical symptoms was the easy part.

Days 15–60 were absolute hell. I had a 5-month-old baby and sleep schedules were already destroyed, so wasn’t always sure if the stress due to the baby was killing me or quitting caffeine. It was both. There were many days I was completely bipolar — feeling bliss, and then crashing and burning and being angrier and more sad than I ever felt before. My wife laughed at my craziness a lot. I was heavily leaning on friends to talk me off the ledge during very stressful times. There were days I felt like I lost my best friend. Emptiness. There were days I completely lost it on my wife and baby. There were days I was unsure if caffeine had changed my brain chemistry permanently and that I was actually manic depressive and caffeine was now the fix and that was ok. There were days I had a little bit of coffee! No big deal. I’m not an extremist. My goal was to remove the addiction, not to win a challenge or tell my friends I did it.

Day 60 I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt like I was turning a corner. I was having more and more good days. My new beliefs were starting to crystallize. I just knew if I pushed it out a little longer, that I would be completely free at 90 days.

Day 90–100 I was free. My life is great. I just knew it deep down. Caffeine is cocaine. Simple as that. Caffeine is beer. I like beer. I used to like cocaine. Would I ever allow myself to have my entire day reliant on beer/cocaine/anything-for-that-matter consumption? Absolutely not. Everything was just clear.

Strategies that helped

Unfortunately the #1 thing that beat this is TIME. You cannot replace it. You have to go through the time to allow your body to fully cleanse, reset, and recover emotionally. I’m not going to talk about supplements because none of them helped all that much. I don’t think replacing coffee with a different type of caffeine is a good idea.

In an attempt to bootstrap energy in the morning and in the afternoon, I did 1–2x per day:

Wim Hof Breathing for 10 minutes
10 minutes of meditation
10 minute cold shower

This helped but almost every “technique” I used was fleeting — it didn’t SOLVE everything, it just changed my focus for the time being but still the nagging feeling that I wanted coffee and maybe I had done the wrong thing and I’ll just have one cup … those feelings still came back

I got a coach off reddit for free — he was awesome. We did probably 10 sessions, and I decided to pay him for all of the sessions when I finished. I decided a couple months later to bring him on as my business coach. He has been absolutely paramount to my business success — some major discoveries have been made on our coaching calls that have propelled my business forward. All you need in a coach is someone that gives you a space to dump your thoughts out. It helps to have someone with an entrepreneurial spirit and some know-how as well. He is a 26 year old in Poland … anyone can be your coach!

1 liter of water strategy: I still use this now. Whenever I am craving dopamine, be it in the form of coffee, food, whatever, I say ok — I can have the coffee, but after I drink 1 liter of water. The water almost always gives me the energy I was craving and I do not want the coffee afterwards. This isn’t going to work necessarily in the heart of your withdrawal period, but it works well for maintenance later.

Beliefs

Beliefs were the hardest thing to change and what held me back the most during my withdrawal. Once I changed my beliefs, I felt like I could see the finish line. I remember one amazing exercise my coach had me do where I said a strong belief I held “Caffeine gives me control of my life” repeated in 30 different tones — angry, sad, happy, joking, etc. and you are able to reflect at how ridiculous your belief may sound. I replaced this belief with “My power is beyond measure and I gain energy reserves each day.”

I believed that coffee was healthy, and when I read any accounts of it being unhealthy I shook my head. I started allowing some of the studies saying it was bad to spend some time in my mind and before I knew it I was agreeing with some of them.

I now believe the caffeine industry is similar to the tobacco industry. It has gotten away with so much for so long … it has an incredibly addictive substance with low side effects and it is hard to pinpoint the wide array of negative long-term effects caffeine can have, so no one is paying attention. Everyone similarly thought cigarettes were healthy until people started dropping dead with lung cancer. I think it will be even harder to upend the caffeine industry than it was the tobacco industry.

Something that challenges my new found beliefs — people in Blue Zones (areas with high counts of centenarians) have been known to drink some caffeine. Green Tea in Okinawa and potentially some coffee in Sardinia. I tend to think that the calmness and quality of their lives were more of a factor keeping them alive and happy than the caffeine. Here’s the thing with beliefs: it DOES NOT MATTER IF THEY ARE “TRUE.” The only thing that matters with a belief is Does It Serve Me? Does It Help Me Achieve My Goals?

Musings

I asked one of my friends how he quit and this was his one response:

Tom Brady doesn’t drink caffeine.

There was nothing else to be said here^. This struck a chord with me.

Tony Robbins sleeps 4 hours per night and is absolutely busting with energy all day every day. There are many people like this. He trained himself to be this way. This is not impossible for me to achieve either.

Babies and children are bursting with energy without a drop of caffeine.

Animals in nature are bursting with energy without a drop of caffeine.

People are EXTREMELY DEFENSIVE about their coffee habit. Post that you are quitting coffee on twitter and take a look at some of the comments. In-person friends and family are extremely unhelpful at helping you quit, and the wrong people will be trying to get you to have a cup again. Write a note to the most important people around you asking them to help you quit!

Here’s the ELI5 on how caffeine can be detrimental — it hijacks the receptors in brain telling you to sleep and keeps you awake instead. Your body then produces more of these receptors. You need more caffeine to fill the newly created receptors; a tolerance is built. You reach an inflection point where the amount of caffeine needed to satisfy the new receptors is causing too many other negative side effects. Plus you can’t get up easily in the morning. Caffeine is also proven to elevate levels of cortisol in your body, and pretty much every study ever shows that prolonged levels of high cortisol damages your body.

Can you remember how coffee felt when you first started drinking? I can. I actually remember years of preferring tea or nothing at all. I was confused how people drank the stuff. The first maybe 50 cups I had in my life I got too high and then too low, I was sweating, etc. After a couple of years I started loving the stuff as my body got used to it. This is also how I remember an addiction like dipping tobacco felt: I felt completely sick the first 20 times I did it, but after that, the body seemed to accept it and I received the buzz without as much of the negative effects.

Drinking 1 gallon of water per day and eating 75% of my foods in the form of water-based fruits and vegetables — this has also been life changing.

I started this 6 months after quitting coffee so I have been about 6 months running with this.

I am full of energy all day and I can also sleep or nap whenever I want. I am thriving on 6 hours of sleep and I am completely fine on 4.5. I still get my 8 hours when I can, but my energy is primarily determined by the amount of water I consume — Not by sleep, food, coffee. I feel superhuman compared to how I felt before. I feel a level of control I have never felt before. I wake up JACKED UP naturally before any alarm. It fucking rules. Another novella will be written at a later day about this.

Rewards for quitting

• Energy surplus — there are weeks where I am absolutely bursting with energy all week with no come-down. I truly feel like I have reserves now, where with coffee I was always depleted
• Having full control of my schedule/emotional state— I used to have to say “Oh we’re going to drive to your parents, need to make sure I have a cup of coffee.” “Oh my last coffee was 6 hours ago, I’m going to need to pick one up before X.”
• Less anger. Sometimes I think my dad actually wasn’t an angry guy … he was just flooded with adrenaline from drinking coffee
• I no longer fear days where I only got 3 or 4 hours of sleep the previous night. By having no addictions bringing me down and using water for energy, I can easily make it through
• No IBS (undiagnosed) flare-ups since I quit. This could be coincidental, and time will tell, but I have always had 1–2 flare-ups per year of extreme stomach pain for about 24 hours. I’ve never been diagnosed with IBS, but since quitting coffee and changing my diet to mostly fruits and vegetables, I have not have any of these situations.
• Dreams. Dreams become common and vivid after you quit.

Resources

This Alex Becker video helped me big time. Give it a watch if you are considering this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_xA70lWrDs

This book really helped me change my beliefs and get some negative intel on caffeine in the sea of people telling you it’s perfectly healthy:

Caffeine Blues https://www.amazon.com/Caffeine-Blues-Hidden-Dangers-Americas/dp/0446673919

Decaf Subreddit — this community helped me a tonhttps://reddit.com/r/decaf

Thanks for reading and feel free to hit me up on Twitter @TraderSoros if you’re thinking of quitting. LFG.