by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-20 18:43:53+00:00
I'll throw in some data, too, cuz why not.

I quit drinking coffee a little over two years ago. I had a pretty strong addiction to it. I've got a Moccamaster that happily brews 10 cups and was drinking it 16oz at a time. There were plenty of days where I would need to run the Moccamaster multiple times. That said, it's tough to know exactly how much caffeine you're getting because there's a lot of variance in steep time, so YMMV. Coffee that I'd buy at a cafe definitely hit harder than what I was drinking at home.

I eventually went from drinking coffee, to measuring my caffeine intake with 100mg caffeine pills + decaf coffee for the routine, to green tea which said it was 50mg, to 50mg caffeine pills w/ 100mg l-theanine, to white tea which said it was 10mg, to nothing. I did that for about a year before eventually adding a premium green tea brand back into my cupboard, but only drinking it irregularly as well as having 50mg caffeine pills very irregularly.

One negative that went away entirely was armpit sweat. It was really common for me to have completely damp pits throughout the day due to the caffeine.

Another negative that went away was my energy would crash at the end of the day. I felt a bit sequestered into a timebox of when I'd be functional.

One thing I still fight with is cueing myself to "click on and do stuff" in the morning. It definitely gets easier the longer I go without caffeine, or the more structure I have in my day-to-day, but on open-ended days it can still be tough.

Also, if I do take any form of caffeine, my body immediately remembers the addiction and very much so would like to have more caffeine the next day. It seems great in the moment, but then suddenly one morning I wake up groggy, sort of like I'm hungover, and I'm like, "Oh yeah. This is what I stopped feeling and enjoyed, I remember now." and try to get myself back off of it. It only takes a few days for this to happen even at 50mg/day doses. This isn't entirely surprising because the half-life of caffeine is 8 hours, so 50mg/day builds up inside you at 6.25mg/day.

One positive is that it's really nice to be able to use caffeine in situations where opportunity cost is high rather than being continually reliant on it. I went to a friend's party a couple of weekends ago, we camped outside and stayed up all night, and I needed to pack up my tent the next morning on ~no sleep. Four ounces of coffee was enough for me to feel like a 100% fresh human all day. Super useful.

One negative is that caffeine absolutely fucks up my sleep schedule if I do take it now. It's not uncommon for me to struggle to fall asleep until 3am if I have any caffeine on a normal day unless I go run 7+ miles and drive my body into exhaustion. This includes something as innocuous as a diet coca-cola. (Note that diet soda has more caffeine than regular soda to account for the loss of energy rush from sugar.) I think this might be solvable with even lower mg doses of caffeine pills (like 10mg), but society is really geared towards marketing large amounts of caffeine to people so you have to be careful.

Overall, I am happy with the change and would like to continue with it, but it feels like a pretty fragile escape from addiction compared to other substances because most days I find myself wishing I was "more of a person" and caffeine tends to make me feel like "more of a person" but only temporarily and with a cost. So there's an internal struggle there. I contrast this with something like quitting marijuana where there's very, very rare days where I'll think, "It would be nice to be stoned!", but 99% of the time I'm just happy to be thinking more clearly.