Definitely, I read a recent paper on association between coffee and liver cancer in different european countries, and it was striking from their data that in several countries including Italy, Spain and Greece, 70-90% of the population drank only 1-1,5 or fewer cups of coffee a day. But its easy to get seduced by studies and posts from peatarians suggesting that basically the more coffee you drink, the better.It has for me. I really tried to get 32 oz a day to work, and probably did that for 6-9 months. But no matter what I would get lower back pain and some bloating from it. When I lowered the amount those subsided. I also was influenced by some elderly people in good health who I talked to at a few health food stores. Many of them drink coffee, but just do a cup or two a day. So it is definitely OKAY to do a small amount, and I would say outside this forum, that is the norm.
I've been going on and off coffee basically every 1-3 months for the past 3 years after being completely off it for more than 4 years previous to that, I relate to your experience in that I was definitely far more sensitive and less able to manage some of the negative side effects like tension, anxiety/paranoia and racing dark thought patterns in the beginning than I am now. What I mean is that basically every time I go on coffee again I feel predominantly positive effects the first few days up to a week, but then the negatives like upset stomach, brain fog and procrastination start to take over as I increase my consumption from 1 cup/day up to 3-5 cups/day. I'm guessing that caffeine levels will actually build up from day to day if you constantly overdo it, or else that its an accumulated effect of disturbed sleep quality, because I dont feel the negatives of excessive coffee right away.I can tell you that our experiences differ in that coffee did not sit well with me at first, and overtime has felt better and better. In the beginning it actually caused quite a bit of depression, so that might make our results incongruent.
Anyway I'm just gonna try sticking with two small espressos per day and see where that goes.