Everyone is giving up something these days. Even before this week’s flood of new year’s resolutions, we’re in the age of subtraction as people shed vices like old skins. Cigarettes, alcohol – those villains have been booed off the stage by the newly health-conscious, whose accusing stare is now turning to a fresh culprit: caffeine.
Like most sanitising trends, the anti-caffeine narrative is biggest across the pond. ‘Decaf desirability’ is ‘peaking’, the New York Times told us last month, as turmeric lattes, mushroom elixirs and chicory brews threaten to knock coffee off its perch.
Over here, a Guardian podcast wonders if it’s ‘time to give up’ our ‘invisible addiction’ to caffeine, and a professor arrives to tell GQ that caffeine can lead to ‘restlessness, heart palpitations, irritability’ and ‘insomnia’. Never mind Dry January – who’s for Joe-free January?
But I’m not myself until I’ve had my first coffee of the morning. I live for the moment the aroma rises into my nostrils, the bitter elixir descends down my neck and the chemistry starts to take hold. The lights come on. The machinery whirs. My day can begin.
An hour or two later I have cup two. If the gym looms, I might knock back a Red Bull. Lunch may involve cola or chai. Marathon training adds another ritual: the caffeinated energy gel, squeezed down like contraband toothpaste at mile 18.
None of this is a lot of caffeine by some addicts’ standards, but I feel bad if I don’t have it and a little while ago I began to resent the hold that caffeine had over me. That nagging resentment found full voice when my yoga teacher told me I’d never enjoy the deepest benefits of my practice if I had caffeine in my system. So I decided to give it up (the coffee, not the yoga).
I’d been warned that caffeine withdrawal was tough and it did indeed introduce itself with an almost personal hostility. Caffeine constricts blood vessels in the brain, they said. Remove it, and the blood flows back with too much enthusiasm. Well, it sure did flow: on day one I had the migraine of the millennium. Alongside it came weapons-grade nausea, as if every toxin that caffeine had ever smuggled into my body was now reminding me just how toxic it was as it queued for the exits.
Day two was more of the same and so, to my crushing disappointment, was day three. The physical symptoms were rough but the psychological challenge was worse. I knew that all I had to do was drink a coffee and the agony would disappear. It was like being locked in a cell with the key hanging temptingly on the inside of the door. Go on, you could just have one.
I knew that all I had to do was drink a coffee and the agony would disappear. It was like being locked in a cell with the key hanging temptingly on the inside of the door
But I dug in, only to be greeted by phase two of withdrawal: weeks of exhaustion, brain fog and the mental coherence of a pensioner waking from a post-lunch nap. Far from ideal for a freelance writer.
I’d previously given up two other stimulants: nicotine and alcohol. Stopping smoking was hard, because for a few weeks there was a long list of things I couldn’t do: sleep, concentrate, relax, think about anything other than cigarettes. Stopping the booze was a different challenge, defined mostly by mood swings, insomnia and tiresome peer pressure. But I endured. Fifteen years dry. No cigarettes since the turn of the century.
Caffeine was harder than either to quit but there were positives: life felt more real because I listened to my body, rather than using caffeine to borrow energy from a future me. But I found that consistent energy doesn’t suit the inconsistent demands of my day. And the brain fog lifted so slowly, so grudgingly, that eventually I cracked, raised the white flag and poured myself a cup. The first sip back – well, it nearly took the top of my head off. Absolute bliss.
I don’t regret returning to coffee. Yes, it can make me jittery and it’s no good for the equanimity I search for in yoga. In another life, in a Vedic idyll, I’d happily renounce the bean forever.
But I don’t live in that world. I live in this one, this grind of deadlines, sprints, hustles, and the perpetual need to be a bit more awake than one naturally is. That’s why, even as the anti-coffee backlash gathers a bit of pace, caffeine remains humanity’s favourite drug. I’ll raise a cup-too-many to that.
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