After three months of no caffeine, having experienced no physiological changes, I can definitively say that giving up caffeine offers me no benefits other than saving a little bit of money.

Coffee relaxes me while also helping me stay awake for longer. And I really enjoy the taste. With no negative side effects, I can’t see a reason why I’d ever stop drinking coffee.

During my own research in the last 3 months, asking people how it affects them, in the last 3 months I do know that it makes some people anxious or makes them need to go to the bathroom often. But caffeine affects different people in different ways and these have never been issues for me.

In closing, I now have an answer for whenever someone says coffee “bad” for me.

Update

On the first day, I had about six cups of coffee. Since then I’d say I’ve been averaging about eight cups a day. So it’s sitting at the lower band of my previous rate. It might increase or it might stay the same.

The day I started, I didn’t experience anything noteworthy. However, for the following two days, I had some intense muscle cramps that made made me think that I had the flu. I probably should have looked this up beforehand, but it turns out that muscle cramps are one of the possible symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.

This didn’t last long though. On the fourth day, I was feeling 100% again and have been since.

In terms of the benefits of giving up caffeine, I haven’t noticed any improvements in my daily life. I don’t think any more or less clearly. I don’t concentrate any better or any worse. I don’t feel any more or any less jittery or irritable. I don’t feel any more or any less anxious.

What I have noticed, though, is that I have been sleeping worse. Moreover, it is noticeably more difficult for me to stay awake after 22:00, whereas before I would not even feel mildly tired even if I was pulling an all-nighter.

I still want to drink coffee, but I don’t have any serious cravings. I’m surprised by this, because everything I have read has indicated that the more caffeine you typically drink per day, the worse the withdrawal symptoms are. This study does allow for genetic differences in the experience of withdrawal symptoms. I know my grandfather drank a similar amount of coffee as I do now with no obvious side effects. I don’t know if he ever tried to give it up though.

According to the study, symptoms typically last for two to nine days — considering this, I doubt I’ll be experiencing anything new between now and next month. But for good measure, I intend to continue my experiment for two more month as planned.

I’ve made it this far. Here’s hoping I make it to the end.

But 8 to 16 cups a day sounds like a lot. That can’t be good for you, right? If you drink it with sugar, then yeah, that’s pretty bad. But I don’t drink coffee with sugar. Even so, when I was nineteen years old I started to wonder if I could actually be addicted to coffee…

So back then, as a mini experiment, I gave up coffee (and tea, which I don’t drink often) for seven days. I didn’t wean myself off slowly in preparation; I just stopped drinking it from the next day. And to my surprise, there were no withdrawal symptoms throughout the next week. I didn’t even get headaches, which many people report to be an effect of giving up coffee. I concluded that I was not addicted — I just really liked coffee.

So I carried on drinking and never stopped.

Recently, however, I’ve been wondering if maybe I didn’t run the experiment for long enough. I still don’t believe that I am addicted to coffee or to caffeine, but are there maybe some negative physiological effects it has that I won’t notice unless I give it up over a longer period? So, starting from today, I am redoing my previous experiment. But this time, it will be over a period of three months. I plan to post an update every month to log any changes that I notice.

I’ve had no coffee (nor any other kind of caffeine) today, and so far all is well. No headaches nor cravings… no improvements either. Let’s see if this is still the case in thee months time.