Why give up coffee

For 10 years I've been a slave to this drink—downing at least two cups a day, and more often three or four—but last month, I decided that I needed to stop relying on it so heavily. It's not that I think coffee is bad for me in fact, it's been linked to a slew of awesome health perks , but rather, I just needed to see how life felt without it—did I truly need it, or could I actually survive, and maybe even thrive, without?

Heal your whole body with Rodale's day liver detox for total body health. Here's what happened when I decided to cut out coffee, and all caffeine for that matter, for 10 days—cold turkey.

Ask any expert and they'll probably tell you to taper your caffeine intake—sub out one of your regular roasts for a decaf coffee or herbal tea every day until you eliminate it altogether. That way, you reduce your likelihood of withdrawal headaches that rival your worst college hangover. The problem with cold turkey, as I learned on day two peak "I hate everyone and everything because of this throbbing headache" , is that your brain doesn't have time to adjust.

Here, a little biology lesson: Caffeine is similar in structure to adenosine, a chemical that normally binds to receptors in the brain to make us sleepy.

But when we drink things like coffee and tea, caffeine binds to these receptors instead, blocking adenosine, and keeping us alert and feeling awesome. The more coffee you drink, the more adenosine receptors your brain creates, and thus, the more caffeine it takes to keep you alert. We feel like hell when we cut out caffeine because way more adenosine floods the brain than normal, given the increased number of receptors that caffeine is no longer blocking.

This not only makes us super tired, but also dilates blood vessels, which triggers headaches really freakin' horrible headaches. The good news: If you keep abstaining from coffee, or stick to a reasonable cup or two a day, the number of receptors will decrease to a normal level, and you'll stop feeling like death. A bit of advice: If you're going to cut out caffeine, do not do it at the start of a workweek.

I did my experiment while I was taking a weeklong staycation—and thank goodness I did, since the number of naps I took would have definitely gotten me fired. I felt the jitters in my fingers and was fine with it since I knew it was caused by caffeine and there was this weird acceptance about it since I knew the coffee was doing its job. I needed caffeine to have more energy so when I felt caffeinated, everything was fine. But actually, not experiencing any type of jitters, small or large, is my favorite thing about giving up coffee.

Lastly, my diet is overall healthier now than when I drank coffee. This might sound odd because most people feel a sense of fullness or a "suppressed" appetite. Yes, there were some days when coffee could hold me over until lunchtime but then I would feel starving and eat more than I needed. I didn't have an unhealthy diet before I gave up coffee but there would be times when I wanted to eat pastries, muffins, or chocolate with the comforting drink.

Now that I feel more calm and relaxed, I don't stress or binge eat. I had no intentions to give up coffee for this long, but I love it. All of the things I mentioned like better sleep, more energy, increased productivity, and feeling calmer have all remained the same or got better which changed my daily routine. I start my day earlier with yoga first thing in the morning, go for a light stress-free jog, work more productively, and I don't experience any type of 3 pm crash.

I stay out later with my friends which I'm not sure is a benefit but I do have more energy to go out. Bottom Line: I am fully aware that coffee has its perks like stimulating the metabolism and boosting energy because I used to drink it for all those reasons. But right now, without it, I have no plans to drink it anytime soon. Coffee and I are on a break. Will we get back together? Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print this page.

Filed Under: Caffeine , Coffee. With many of us relying on it to get through each day, the idea of giving up coffee might seem overwhelming. However, drinking too much can cause headaches, insomnia and even ruin your teeth. Yet cutting back or giving up coffee can also have a negative effect on your body.

Tried giving up coffee in the morning but experience headaches for the rest of the day? In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too. Mornings were the worst. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.

That reconsolidation of self took much longer than usual, and never quite felt complete. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this molecule remade the world. The changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a fundamental level — the level of the human mind. Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.

By the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in east Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. Initially, the new drink was regarded as an aide to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dozing off during their religious observances.

Tea, too, started out as a little helper for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation. Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world. In there were more than of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman empire. The Islamic world at this time was in many respects more advanced than Europe, in science and technology, and in learning. In the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on Arab and Turkish models, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in by a Jewish immigrant.

They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated: within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every Londoners. You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information — in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation — was free.

Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Charles II, worried that plots were being hatched in coffeehouses, decided that the places were dangerous fomenters of rebellion that the crown needed to suppress.

Like so many other compounds that change the qualities of consciousness in individuals, caffeine was regarded as a threat to institutional power, which moved to suppress it, in a foreshadowing of the wars against drugs to come. Charles discovered that it was too late to turn back the tide of caffeine. The kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began to yield to a new spirit of rationalism and, a bit later, Enlightenment thinking.

Coffee became, along with the microscope, telescope and the pen, one of its indispensable tools. A fter a few weeks, the mental impairments of withdrawal had subsided, and I could once again think in a straight line, hold an abstraction in my head for more than two minutes, and shut peripheral thoughts out of my field of attention.

Yet I continued to feel as though I was mentally just slightly behind the curve, especially when in the company of drinkers of coffee and tea, which, of course, was all the time and everywhere. Herbal teas — which are barely, if at all, psychoactive — lack the power of coffee and tea to organise the day into a rhythm of energetic peaks and valleys, as the mental tide of caffeine ebbs and flows.

The morning surge is a blessing, obviously, but there is also something comforting in the ebb tide of afternoon, which a cup of tea can gently reverse. At some point I began to wonder if perhaps it was all in my head, this sense that I had lost a mental step since getting off coffee and tea. So I decided to look at the science, to learn what, if any, cognitive enhancement can actually be attributed to caffeine. I found numerous studies conducted over the years reporting that caffeine improves performance on a range of cognitive measures — of memory, focus, alertness, vigilance, attention and learning.

An experiment done in the s found that chess players on caffeine performed significantly better than players who abstained.