Quitting Coffee Again

About 8 years ago, I quit coffee. It was, and still is, my only caffeine intake. I’m doing it again to see if it helps my sleep issues.

Motivation

When I first did it, I was motivated by 3 things that happened at the same time:

1. Primary Care Doctor recommended I get diagnosed for ADHD; specialist says I wasn’t, told me to Google sleep studies around diet (it was more specific keywords than that, I found good articles)
2. Saw an interview with Matthew Walker on Joe Rogan who talked about the half-life of caffeine. This lead to a rabbit hole of research.
3. I was having sleep issues and hitting fitness limits.

Surprising Caffeine & Fitness Learning’s

Both of those taught 3 key things that completely invalidated the “years of learning” I thought I had accrued from my fitness & diet years:

• caffeine has a half life of almost 12 hours
• yes, you can drink too much caffeine, resulting in disturbed sleep
• coffee was consistently sold as a table stakes benefit to fitness; little did I know it was sabotaging my entire life

There were other good learning’s that arose from that, but suffice to say I was immediately extremely frustrated. When I started getting into fitness, I approached it from a nerd perspective and just read everything I could, and watched all the YouTube videos. Not 1 person, fitness guru, dietician, nor sports science grad said ANYTHING about the negative effects of caffeine. There were only 2 consistent things you’d read/hear: “Don’t drink to much” or “you can use black coffee to break a fast”. That first NEVER had any explanation, or was expanded upon.

Most of the fitness blogs / thought leaders I really liked were super heavy on prioritizing your fitness pyramid into sleep first, diet second. Yet despite the common “turn off lights, avoid blue light on phone” etc. nothing about caffiene can ruin all of that, rather “use coffee with your BCCA’s to really make this workout count!”.

Life Changing

To say removing caffeine from my life was world changing was an understatement. The amazing things that changed and 1 horrible thing:

• I fell asleep immediately; like a switch turning off when my head hit pillow
• I woke up and could immediately function
• I woke up and felt “refreshed”
• I struggled to be creative as quickly

Let’s talk about them in order.

Fall Asleep Immediately

The immediately falling asleep was wild. I only experienced this 3 times in my life: twice when doing extreme workout routines and on particular days I was just so tired, or when extremely sleep deprived from traveling. Even those didn’t compare to this.

First, I’d start dreaming BEFORE I fell asleep. I read that many REM deprived individuals experience this, especially longer term alcoholics who will dream while they are awake. This is because the brain is so deprived of REM sleep.

Second, it was consistent falling asleep where you’re just “out like a light”. No long waiting, no getting comfortable, just “click”; immediately out.

Third, the dreams were unbelievably vivid. No nightmares except once (I had a slight tummy ache, which is normal for me to have a not-so-great dream when I don’t feel well). I still had the inability to remember most of the dreams, but still remembered way more details, and breadth then I’d usually have while on caffeine. This was consistent; every night, long, vivid dreams. Despite being fine and normal, nothing scary, I was still a bit apprehensive going to sleep some nights because I knew I was in store for some weird dreams. Despite me being an intense individual, I wasn’t used to having these intense of dreams, this often, for this long.

Immediate Wake Up

This one was weird too. Typically I’d struggle to wake up. Hit snooze 50 times, get up and feel super groggy until the 3rd cup of coffee. Mornings were always rough for me. I chalked it up to my circadian rhythms, just being a night person.

I’d be dreaming and then “I’m awake”. My eyes would open, and I’d be able to immediately sit up once I realized I was awake. I could even walk immediately to the kitchen. The sheer fact I was conscious, could sit up, and start my daily routines immediately was … just crazy. I often avoided people, social media, and my family on purpose because I just hated mornings so much and was such in a bad mood until the caffeine kicked it, and I was my normal, positive, high-strung self.

Refreshed

This one was the most wild. Once I stood up… I felt better. BETTER. Like “I’m glad I slept” and “I feel refreshed”. I cannot articulate the level of disrespect and anger I felt for those who would create medical forms asking you “Do you wake up feeling refreshed?”. I likened those people creating those questions as “Do you own 50 Lamborghini’s on your Unicorn ranch on the moon?” or “What will you invest in once we have world peace?”. These people are completely out of touch with reality. Nobody wakes up “refreshed”. Healthly or not, fit or not, we’re all tired, and even morning people I’ve talked morning people, and they too struggle to get started. Please remove this dumb question from these forms. It is a myth; nobody wakes up “refreshed”. I can’t take you seriously.

Then it happened to me. I did wake up refreshed. Every day. For weeks. It took me a long while to reconcile what was happening, and my anger towards feeling “misled” by the fitness industry deepened. Being older now, I don’t blame them. Many are young and aren’t as adversely affected. Many doing the writing/influencing have amazing genetics. The research and narratives around caffeine were buried; even the keyword searches or algorithms used to filter content on social did NOT surface anything negative about caffeine. All was positive with the silly warnings of “don’t drink too much caffeine” with nobody explaining what too much meant.

I later learned that caffeine is one of the largest traded and consumed drugs in the world. It’s not just an American “work till you drop, sleep when you’re dead” culture thing; it’s a worldwide incentive and cultural norm.

Brain Speed at 60%

I call this this one my “Brain Thesaurus Problem”.

This was the 1 negative, and why I stopped and went back to coffee. It felt like there was a “dark veil” across my thinking. Like I was thinking in slow motion. The only way I can give you an idea what it was like is imagine if I said “Give me some words of when something is really good”.

With coffee, I’d immediately blurt out in quick succession “rad, amazing, epic, super duper, dope, amaze”. But now… it was almost like I’d search for the words, and they weren’t there. I don’t know if some kind of wires just weren’t connecting anymore or what, but it’d take till about noon to 1pm to get back to the ability to fire on all cylinders. Physically I was fine. Mentally I felt really good. But, as a programmer, you are constantly being creative and connecting a lot of thoughts together whether through verbal communication, in chat, or in code while typing and reading. This was extremely frustrating.

The only thing I can think was my body’s natural Cortisol and Orexin deliveries to my brain in the morning were broken or unused since I started drinking caffeine heavily as a teenager, and coffee in in particular around 14. Given my high metabolism, and strict school schedule, I was always up early and eating, and caffeine usually played a role. That’s nearly 25 years of me ignoring/overriding those morning wake up hormones.

Anyway, given what I do for a living, after 2 weeks of this, I had to go back. Even just 1 cup of coffee and within minutes my brain worked as normal, further convincing me my body’s normal hormones were just broken for the morning.

Last Warning: Depression

I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way, and started to learn many industries seem to leave out important, negative details. For example, all the amazing hype around a Keto diet, I found no mention of the Keto Flu until after I tried it. Almost as bad as when I got Covid shots, I felt like I had the flu; felt like absolute trash, on the couch for days.

Quitting caffeine, even in the slow, wean myself off manner still had a horrible side-effect that thankfully was temporary: depression.

I get sad sometimes just like everyone else, and I’ve had episodes during my teenage years where things were extremely hard. But those were nothing compared to this. The worst depression I’ve ever experienced in my life was the 10 days when I was no longer drinking any caffeine in the mornings, not even decaf. It wasn’t the kind where you sleep more than normal, or feel detached from friends, family, your hobbies. This was a constant, deep in my soul “things are bad” feeling. I’m a strong will type of guy, quit smoking cold turkey, go 220% into new things I’m learning, can’t be hypnotized, etc. So when I get sad, I usually get angry, and that helps bring me out of it.

There was no anger here. Only emptiness and a deep sense that the world was sad. No dread, no anxiety, just an emptiness with me being stuck in some empty expanse of nothing, with no one, and a weak yearning to no longer be there. On the 11th day it stopped; there was like a 2% linger, but I knew it had “passed”. On the 12th day, gone totally.

You can see why I am now more careful when I hear about new things from the fitness and diet industry.

Why Doing This Again?

As I’ve gotten older, my energy levels have dropped. I’m still super high-strung compared to many I know, but it’s nothing like my 20’s. I first noticed a problem at 42 where I couldn’t finish workouts. I’d find the days I could power through, albeit barely, were when I had good sleep. People told me it was age, but I don’t think that’s 100% it. I took up Backpacking and riding a heavy motorcycle off-road, and found in most cases I had energy to do those things. After years of experiments during my 20’s and 30’s with sleep, diet, and exercise I could tell it was sleep and diet.

The second reason is AI. A lot of the LLM’s have accelerated the rate at which I have to review, and reject or fix, crap code. Social Media has made things worse as both bots and devs who don’t know any better have gone full AI Pyschosis, cargo culting the bad practices. This has galvanized me to help teach the juniors and mid-level devs the best practices, and hold back the rushing river of slop code and technical debt. To do that, I have to be at my best emotionally, and to do that, I have to fix my sleep, diet, and fitness. Given sleep is always the most important, I’m trying to fix it.

How Did My Life Change

While I went back to drinking coffee, I did some strict changes I haven’t deviated from the past 8 years.

1. I go to bed the same time every night; 11pm
2. I ensure I allow for 8 hours of sleep, even if I don’t get it. This means alarms are set for 7am. If I need to awaken earlier, I go to bed earlier even if I sit there waiting to fall asleep.
3. I ensure it’s dark at least 60-30 minutes before when I go to sleep; usually 10pm I’ll turn off all the lights (excluding my laptop, I’m a nerd)
4. I don’t drink caffeine within 12 hours of my bedtime; so I ensure to have my last coffee by/before 11am.

What’s Different This Time?

The first thing that’s different is I’m greatly expanding the wean time. I think I did like a month last time, where I did 3 cups for 3 days, then 2 for a few days, then 1, then decaf for a week, then none. I think that was way too fast.

I currently finished 2 weeks of just 2 large cups a day. Today is the first day of just 1 large cup. I’m going to try that for 2 weeks before I decide to make a change. Even on the 2 cups a day, I already noticed 2 days where I had the “Blocked Creativity” problem; I was trying to explain some code to a co-worker in our 9:30am meeting and struggled to find the words. I knew what was happening, but the wired connections weren’t there. After about a minute of struggling, it finally connected, albeit slowly… like when Starlink internet will occasionally just be slow for a minute and then slowly starts working again. If the 1 cup of day makes the above worse, I may go to 1 1/2 for a couple of weeks.

Even with just the 2 cups, I already started to feel my dreams get more intense. They aren’t as long, and I don’t have any of the immediate sleep, immediate wake up effects yet, but they’re getting close; I’d say 140% intensity compared to normal.

The other odd thing is I keep waking up SUPER early. This didn’t happen last time; I’d sleep consistently for 7 to 8 hours. This results in me getting super tired midday, often taking a nap, and then being super groggy the rest of the day. This was part of the impetus to try to fix my sleep in the first place. I’m hoping this is just a temporary health/diet thing. Summer is over and it’s already getting darker sooner, and it’s mostly dark in the mornings now so hopefully my body will adjust.

I’m also doing more cardio now, or at least trying. I was running 3 nights a week for 3 weeks + started improving diet (haven’t _totally_ cut out alcohol on weekends yet), but noticed the scale didn’t move at all. Usually when I start cooking healthy, it does. I’m about 178lbs, which was my max during my Powerlifting days, but since the motorcycle shoulder accident a year ago, I wasn’t doing my of anything. My normal natural weight is 166; that’s where I can do moderate Body Building / Cardio, and my body just “likes to be”. Perhaps age has increased things 😄. I’ve started Body Beast’s Lean version to lose weight for Halloween. I’ve been doing Body Beast off and on for almost 10 years, and I’ll usually do the Bulk version.

I’ll attempt to increase my cardio as the Lean version only has 1 day a week devoted to it, so I’ll probably throw in 2 days of running. The motorcycle and backpacking trips usually take it out of me, so will probably throw a couple of them in too. We’ll see how that pans out as usually 6 weeks to 2 months in, my body, even in my early 30’s, started to struggle with the “increase in weight balanced with the fact we’ve been doing this for 2 months of high intensity”. I’ve found since the intensity never stops, I could simply drop the weight some to ensure I have the energy to continue. I do NOT feel guilty anymore doing this either. I’d rather drop from my 20lb dumbbells to my 15 or 10’s just so I can keep going for 2 more weeks. I started skipping the cut phase and just extending the last Bulk phase for 2 to 3 weeks until my body just said “stop”. May skip that this time, and do the cut phase more aggressively this time.

I found my body is super sensitive to protein intake, meaning, muscle mass just drops. However, because I’m so high strung, I cannot live without carbs. So I may go try a vegan / animal protein on and off again the last week to see how that works. I’m not really into tracking macros or calories anymore, but I did have massive success using cardio + weights + vegan 6 days a week to decrease fat. However, this time I could compensate with some animal protein to see how much I can tolerate. That, and it’d only be for 2 weeks vs. 3 months like last time. We’ll see.

Anyway, will report back when I’m at 0 cups a day.