Giving Up Caffeine : Part 1

Since I was fourteen years old, possibly even before then, I have been drinking on average 8 to 16 cups of coffee a day. Roughly once every waking hour. This is mainly instant coffee, but I also drink “real” coffee whenever available. I am not a coffee snob — because I love it so much, I can’t possibly limit myself to only the “highest quality”. If it’s coffee I’ll drink it, and I will enjoy it.

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.