Resetting Caffeine

As I sit at my desk and write this particular post, I am nearly at the end of my third day straight without having a single cup of coffee. Yes, that's right - for the week August 3-7, I am going without coffee. No coffee; no tea; pretty much staying away from anything that contains caffeine in it (which also says goodbye to Coke).

Why am I doing this, you might ask? There are a number of reasons as to why I am undertaking a cold-turkey approach to coffee abstinence. The first is that, putting it simply, I stuff too much coffee into my body on a daily basis. Twice a day, I would have a double-shot coffee sometime in the morning, and in the afternoon I would make another in similar fashion. Not too long ago, I used to only have two single shot cups a day, but because I gravitate to the taste of coffee like gamers to a LAN party, I upped the quantity (and consequently the size of the cup!) of coffee I put into my cup every time I had one.

Over time, this amounted to a LOT of caffeine flowing through my bloodstream. Wanting to know what my health levels would be like if I managed to completely starve my body of caffeine, and thus have zero caffeine in my bloodstream, is one reason I have undertaken this coffee moratorium.

Another reason is that I am an incredibly light sleeper, and no doubt the coffee I have in the afternoon is not completely gone by bedtime. Plus with the cumulative effect of my caffeine intake over the years (especially since making double-shots the norm), I probably have a LOT of caffeine flowing around at night; not levels that equate with caffeine poisoning (an actual condition that one can bring upon themselves), but levels that keep me awake for longer than I would like. So in the interests of my sleep patterns, I have elected to wipe out the entire trace of caffeine in my system.

Apropos I have noticed that since I started my coffee fast, I have become incresingly tired at night, unlike past weeks. While it makes doing anything at night a pain in the bum, it does make it that slightly easier to get some shut-eye when I turn in. One of my goals seems to be in motion.

Another reason, hinted at earlier in the post title, is that I have no doubt that I have way too much caffeine in my system, so I am in effect "resetting" my bodily system, and putting my caffeine levels at zero.

This of course has repercussions for my body chemistry. When I first went from single to constant double-shots, I did notice (within the first two to four weeks of doing so) a change in cognitive and emotional attitude. I was prone to being more irritable and more dependent on the brown stuff. But once those two to four weeks passed, my body in effect achieved a new equilibrium with my caffeine levels, and thus my twice a day double shots became the par amount required to remain in that chemistry equilibrium.

That is, until I cut ties with the coffee altogether for the sake of my health, physical as well as cogitive and emotional. And so I set out to achieve a new, healthier equilibrium position, independent of coffee intake.

If any of this sounds familiar to you in your own life, you may need to do the same steps as I have done. Whether you go cold turkey or a slow wean-off over time, too much coffee can have some ill consequences in store, should your intakes become even slightly out of hand. The energy kick you get from drinking a cup just isn't worth it in the long run.

I may go back to drinking coffee, but probably not in the way I used to. Or I may not go back to coffee for quite some time. But for now, I look forward to seeing the results of my self-guinea pig trials of what the human body is like without caffeine roaming around within it. Who knows, I might not go back to coffee at all!