Sometimes personal experiments are extremely connected to deep and important changes I want to make in my life. This is not one of those times. This is going to be an experiment borne of two parts logistical necessity and one part morbid curiosity.
I’m not a huge coffee drinker, in volume, but I am a huge coffee drinker, in love. I love fancy fresh beans. I have a fancy electric kettle with a gooseneck that allows for precise pouring. I use an AeroPress. I drink two cups every morning and almost never exceed that.
That being said, I’m pretty sure I’ve had at least one cup of coffee every day for like… 15 years? Longer than that?
I don’t like knowing that I’m reliant on a drug to feel good in the morning and I’m curious what it’ll be like to not drink coffee for a week. Also, I messed up my coffee delivery subscription and I’m currently out of coffee until Wednesday. But I did just buy some very nice green tea that arrived late last week.
For the next week I’m going to replace my two morning cups of coffee with green tea.
Hypothesis: I’m going to miss coffee a lot. I’m going to feel kind of bad. But by the end of the week I’ll have worked through whatever caffeine withdrawal I might be feeling and I’ll be proud of the hard earned self-knowledge I’ll have gained. Or something like that.
End of Experiment Retrospective
This went wildly better than I expected.
Monday night’s sleep.
I thought that because I love my morning coffee routine so much it would be a total drag to not do it for a week. Luckily, it looks like my two cups per day habit isn’t enough for me to be hopelessly caffeine addicted.
Monday night (the first evening after replacing my morning coffee with green tea) was the only time I really felt any negative physical symptoms. A nice dull headache settled in by the afternoon of that first day and I felt absolutely wiped by 8 PM. I dragged ass until 9 PM before deciding to just give in to the inevitable and hit the hay. I then slept hard.
The rest of the week I went to bed and got up at my normal times (10 PM/6 AM). I didn’t feel terrible in the morning and I was able to go through my day feeling fine.
So, the takeaway from this isn’t that I’m now going to give up coffee. Instead, I’m going back to my morning coffee routine feeling much better about it. I know now that I’m not hopelessly addicted to caffeine. I just like coffee and I like the ritual of making it my fussy way each morning. It’ll feel nice to go back to it knowing I can drop it again without crushingly adverse consequences if I ever need or want to. I have a feeling that’ll make it taste that much better.