Korven
Member
- Joined
- May 4, 2019
- Messages
- 1,133
I am making this thread mainly to keep myself accountable and to report on any positive/negative effects from quitting coffee (as a heavy user since 10+ years).
These are the main reasons for my 100 day no coffee experiment:
- Poor and unrefreshing sleep. I never get a good night's sleep and I am certain this is contributing to a lot of health/life problems. Coffee is the main suspect.
- TMJ symptoms, horrible neck and jaw and shoulder tension that has gotten gradually worse over the past years.
- Anhedonia/depression. The only time life is enjoyable is when I drink a cup of coffee and experience "coffee euphoria", which of course is fleeting and is soon to be replaced by dullness/boringness/restlessness. I feel like a robot or husk of a human? Like my emotional bandwidth is severely limited; I only have two emotions "on coffee" and "off coffee".
- Energy levels. I have made some good progress with my energy levels but they are not great. Again I suspect the poor sleep has a lot to do with poor energy levels.
- Rosacea that flare up on and off. Maybe from coffee-induced gut inflammation?
- Feeling "split"/confused. There was this experiment done on spiders where they were given different psychoactive drugs e.g caffeine, marijuana to see how it affected the spiders' spider web weaving. Sometimes my brain feels like the caffeinated spider web, which makes it difficult to make any good decisions or solve problems in life.
- Addictive behaviours. My hypothesis is that coffee causes a low-grade stress response that is fuelling cravings for things like porn and drugs.
I have been drinking coffee for a large part of my life and am a "you can pry coffee from my cold dead hands" kind of guy so this decision is not an easy one for me. As I mentioned, the immediate effects from coffee feel amazing to me, I literally get high/euphoric and pleasantly relaxed and socially outgoing. And the withdrawals symptoms are so bad that it is extremely difficult for me to quit this drug. But if quitting coffee would allow me to fix at least some of the problems mentioned above then I feel like it would be worth it, e.g getting a good night's sleep.
I will be drinking some black tea for the first week or so just to stave off the worst withdrawal symptoms but the plan is to wean off all caffeine long-term.
Cheers guys
These are the main reasons for my 100 day no coffee experiment:
- Poor and unrefreshing sleep. I never get a good night's sleep and I am certain this is contributing to a lot of health/life problems. Coffee is the main suspect.
- TMJ symptoms, horrible neck and jaw and shoulder tension that has gotten gradually worse over the past years.
- Anhedonia/depression. The only time life is enjoyable is when I drink a cup of coffee and experience "coffee euphoria", which of course is fleeting and is soon to be replaced by dullness/boringness/restlessness. I feel like a robot or husk of a human? Like my emotional bandwidth is severely limited; I only have two emotions "on coffee" and "off coffee".
- Energy levels. I have made some good progress with my energy levels but they are not great. Again I suspect the poor sleep has a lot to do with poor energy levels.
- Rosacea that flare up on and off. Maybe from coffee-induced gut inflammation?
- Feeling "split"/confused. There was this experiment done on spiders where they were given different psychoactive drugs e.g caffeine, marijuana to see how it affected the spiders' spider web weaving. Sometimes my brain feels like the caffeinated spider web, which makes it difficult to make any good decisions or solve problems in life.
- Addictive behaviours. My hypothesis is that coffee causes a low-grade stress response that is fuelling cravings for things like porn and drugs.
I have been drinking coffee for a large part of my life and am a "you can pry coffee from my cold dead hands" kind of guy so this decision is not an easy one for me. As I mentioned, the immediate effects from coffee feel amazing to me, I literally get high/euphoric and pleasantly relaxed and socially outgoing. And the withdrawals symptoms are so bad that it is extremely difficult for me to quit this drug. But if quitting coffee would allow me to fix at least some of the problems mentioned above then I feel like it would be worth it, e.g getting a good night's sleep.
I will be drinking some black tea for the first week or so just to stave off the worst withdrawal symptoms but the plan is to wean off all caffeine long-term.
Cheers guys
Last edited: