How To Break Caffeine Addiction

By Gaz under Personal Growth

In a previous incarnation, my place of work had all their coffee machines on free vend. A big part of my job was to deliver internal training to our applications teams and show them how best to use the new API’s coming out of the core functionality team. I spent a good portion of every day moving back and forth between my desk, the core functionality guys’ desks, and meeting rooms scattered across the site… passing the free coffee machine at least half a dozen times. By the time I’d been doing that job for a few months, I was drinking at least half a dozen espresso coffees every day, plus a mug of coffee in the morning to wake up, and another mug or two in the evening at home. In total, almost half a gallon of coffee every day; more than 3 gallons of coffee per week.

It wasn’t something I really gave much thought to, since everyone around me was just the same. I then went for a long 4 day weekend away at my folks, and unbeknownst to me all the coffee I drank there was decaff. I went to bed on Friday with a dreadful headache, and woke up groggy and irritable, and (surprise surprise) my morning pick-me-up coffee didn’t make me feel any better. My headache came and went throughout the day, and I felt terrible. I had an early night, but slept badly, waking up early in a bad mood. I decided to take a walk to the corner shop for a newspaper to get some fresh air, and on a whim bought a can of cola to drink on the way back. Within half an hour, my mood lifted, my headache subsided, and I felt normal again. Not much later, I noticed the coffee jar was empty, and when I went to refill it, I saw the label: Decaffeinated!

The penny dropped, and I realised that I was physiologically addicted to caffeine, and had been suffering withdrawal symptoms since my last morning coffee on Friday. The caffeine in the cola had fed my body’s craving for caffeine, and that was why I felt so much better. I thought about how much free vend coffee I’d been consuming recently, and decided that I needed to break that addiction. Being stubborn and naive, I simply stopped drinking tea and coffee altogether and put up with a painful week of withdrawal symptoms.

Since then, I haven’t given up caffeine entirely, as it has a beneficial effect just before training. When I have time before setting off to Tae Kwon-Do, I’ll sometimes drink a single mug of black coffee to “zoom me up” for the session. Only once or twice a week though. The rest of the time, I avoid (non-decaff) coffee entirely, and stick to just one or two mugs of tea per day.

If you want to break your own addiction to caffeine, here is a much gentler method that will make it much easier on you. And your family:

For 1 week, replace half of your daily caffeine beverages with an equivalent caffeine free drink. Decaffeinated coffee might be a good option for you, as long as you’re careful not to slip back into regular coffee. Alternatively, switch to half-caffeine/half-decaff coffee. If your main caffeine intake is through cola (diet cola is just as bad!), switch to a caffeine free brand for half of your normal daily drinks, or mix up a bottle of half-caffeine/half-decaff cola and use that.

Since caffeine is actually reduces the net amount of water in your body, you could soon find yourself wanting fewer drinks per day. Unless you also drank other fluids while you were addicted to caffeine, your body was probably permanently low on water. I bought a set of scales to monitor my body water percentage, which should be close to 60% for a healthy adult male, and found that I was rarely above 55%. Since I weigh around 80kg, that equates to 4kgs of water missing from my body. After a week of half caffeine, the next stage is to gradually replace the caffeine drinks with water to bring your body back to a healthy water percentage. If you dislike plain cold water, try adding lemon and/or honey to hot water for a more interesting drink.

After a couple of weeks of gradual replacement, you should find yourself feeling normal with little to no caffeine in your system. Be aware, however, that all cocoa based products contain a small dose of caffeine, so eating chocolate bars, or chocolate cake, or even hot chocolate can easily lead back to physiological dependence on caffeine, so you should try to reserve those things for occasional treats, and not use them as part of your routine diet. More frightening is Red Bull and similar soda drinks, which contain about the same amount of caffeine as eight cups of cappuccino! I stopped drinking those entirely when I found that out.

On the subject of low body hydration, I still find myself between 57% and 58% body water content even now. When I figure out how to keep myself close to 60% most of the time, I’ll be sure to post about it.

I’ll be interested to hear how anyone else has suffered from and/or broken their own addiction to caffeine in the comments…

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