The glorious energy boost I’ve gotten by abstaining from coffee
Over the years, I’ve sometimes heard people rave about how they cut out caffeine (or just coffee) and have way more energy. My reaction has typically been to feel kind of dismissive / not really believe them / assume that means that they need to sleep more now, or have less flexibility in how much they sleep.
I kind of stumbled into cutting out coffee a few months ago, and it’s just given me a lot of energy for free (i.e. without having to take more time for sleep or make any other non-trivial tradeoffs).
I wrote this up to remind myself why it’s been super worth it for me, and decided to post it here as well in case it is helpful to others.
tl;dr:
Not drinking coffee is SUPER worth it for me.
On the same amount of sleep as before, I generally:
have more energy throughout the day
avoid what was previously a terrible late afternoon crash
feel less tense / anxious
often have energy into the night
Given that energy is one of the top, if not the top, constraint in how good I feel and how much I can get done of the stuff I want to do, this feels magical. It’s well worth giving up the awesome jolt that coffee provides.
Previously I was drinking a fair amount of coffee:
(typically:
1 100 mg caffeine pill + 1-2 cups of coffee/day on weekdays, never after 4pm
typically 1 100 mg caffeine pill + 0-1 cups on weekends (when I got 9h of sleep)
Now I:
Drink 0-2 cups of English Breakfast tea a day (typically 1, sometimes 3)
Will drink tea after 4pm sometimes
Haven’t had a cup of caffeinated coffee in weeks or months (I think I had half a cup, a month or two ago. I also had a decaf cappuccino a couple weeks ago).
How have things changed?
(Both before and after, I got:
7-7.5h of sleep on weekdays
9h of sleep on Fri and Sat
A 30 second blast of cold shower (typically at the end of the shower) almost always
This seems much more important now than it did before in terms of waking me up
Working out in the AM probably 4-5 mornings a week
The big benefits:
The very big ones:
I used to feel pretty terrible in the mid-late afternoon / early evening—exhausted in my body, such that it felt very difficult to do anything productive for 1-2 hours during that time. I often felt the need to take a nap if I hadn’t gotten 7.5-8 hours of sleep at night. And even after the nap / break I felt very sluggish
I now still feel sleepy (and still end up taking a break for an hour much of the time, spanning meditating/napping and having a cup of tea/snack), but I can power through it if needed, and the slump feels much, much more minor.
I used to feel very sluggish and low on energy at night / after dinner.
I now often feel myself having a good amount of energy till I go to sleep (and I am still able to go to sleep pretty readily)
I feel more energetic in the morning during the workday—rarely do I feel like I’m dragging hard until coffee kicks in (which was not a rare occurrence previously)
I feel less anxious / tense in my body. Previously, feeling tense/tight in my body after a cup of coffee was not a rare occurrence; now I never have it (I still experience anxiety, but not that specific terrible flavor of anxiety, and I think I have less anxiety/stress overall)
Other impacts:
Immediately upon waking up:
I still feel a little out of it / sometimes grumpy (esp during the workweek), but rarely feel exhausted
Though I am probably sleepier till my shower than I was before
Upon starting my workday:
I am sufficiently clear-headed and motivated to work just fine
A little harder on the weekends, because I don’t have the adrenalin/cortisol flowing. But my AM productivity on the weekends was pretty spotty even before.
I can perceive a difference in my energy levels when I drink (alcohol) lightly (1 drink), moderately (2 drinks), or heavily (3+ drinks) and if I drink shortly before bed. That motivates me to drink less, and gives me an additional lever for more energy.
How did I get here?
I don’t exactly remember, but I kind of stumbled into it—I think I had a 4 day weekend and so ended up better slept than I typically am, felt the need for less caffeine as a result, and that just kicked off a virtuous cycle.
Other thoughts:
This brings to mind the question of whether I’d get even more benefits by giving up caffeine entirely (or say, switching to green tea). I wonder if that would be the case, but currently I like having the ability to jolt myself / have energy at the times I want it even if I underslept a little, so am not planning to experiment with that any time soon.
[EDITED] I recommend tea (black, green, oolong or white—i.e. white leaves, not with milk). As well as being rather lower in caffeine than coffee, tea includes L-theanine, which (a) increases the benefits of caffeine (viz. attention, accuracy, energy) and (b) counteracts jitters and headaches from caffeine.
Oolong tea usually has a bit more caffeine than the others, though green & white teas have a somewhat better ratio of L-theanine to caffeine. But caffeine and L-theanine contents are very variable anyway.
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#nutrient-nutrient-interactions_caffeine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4787341/
Seems like a good middle ground, especially depending on the person or as an alternative to quitting cold turkey. But the active ingredient is still basically the same, which has been in use for thousands of years (like alcohol) and probably started before humans were very good at self-evaluation and problem solving.
I actually feel pretty confident that your former behavior of drinking coffee until 4 pm was a highly significant contributor to your low energy, because your sleep quality was getting chronically demolished every single night you did this. You probably created a cycle where you felt like you needed an afternoon coffee because you were tired from sleeping so badly … because of the previous afternoon coffee.
I suggest people in this position first do the experiment of cutting out all caffeine after noon, before taking the extra difficult step of cutting it out entirely.
100 mg first thing in the morning and no more after is what I do. If I need a stimulant later I use nicotine which has a much shorter half-life.
Ah interesting point. That is helpful, maybe I’ll play with that.
I do find the effects I observed despite drinking tea until and even past 4pm.
To also report a null result: every now and then I try giving up caffeine, go maybe 1-4 weeks without it, and fail to notice much of a difference in anything. Then I go back to using it (around 100 − 400 mg per day), since it does make it somewhat nicer to wake up.
How long did it take to feel the difference?
I was drinking around 400mg to 600mg of caffeine before I stopped cold turkey. The first week I couldn’t do anything really, complete and utter lack of motivation. I started sleeping much better pretty much immediately, but It took about a month to get back to baseline productivity, real benefits in that area started after 6 weeks and tapered off to a new higher productivity baseline after 2 months of no caffeine. The real benefits are in the uniformity of motivation throughout the day and sleep quality, which strongly impacts everything else. Overall highly recommended.
I don’t remember, unfortunately, since it’s now been a few months. But less than a week, probably a few days.
I did this about 8 years ago and had some of these benefits—especially the superpower of afternoon power naps—along with one other very interesting one: I started having vivid, specific dreams and remembering them in the morning for longer. I ended up keeping a dream journal by my bed—I would half wake-up and scrawl a few key words, then go back to bed, then flesh them out in the morning immediately after waking and reviewing my notes.
Then I had a two-week trial, and, well, yanno.
I’d like to present myself as a plus-plus result to this same phenomenon. I’ve became sensitized to coffee and had to drop it completely, because the results started becoming calamitous.
I have celiac disease, have some sort of intolerance to milk, even lactose free, and have strong hay fever in the late summer. An overreactive immune system, in short.
By sensitization I do not mean an exceptionally strong stimulant effect, but the sort of sensitization that develops upon repeated chronic exposure to a specific pollutant, often familiar to industrial workers. Some examples are the dust of many exotic woods, many harsh chemicals and other stuff.
When I consume coffee, I get the normal stimulating effects in about 20 minutes. Roughly an hour after imbibing the negatives start developing:
- My energy levels crash, my joints, especially my in shoulders, knees and elbows start aching and lose flexibility. I get pulled into a hunched, tense posture. My feet sometimes get painful cramps
- I become distressed, panicky and lose the ability to lead effective trains of thought.
- Work and other accidents happen at an alarming rate.
- Often I crash so hard I have to lie down to sleep, which usually lasts from the afternoon to the next morning, when I absolutely have to wake up for work.
Any kind of coffee causes these symptoms, from cheap instant nescafés through quality capsules to freshly ground roasted beans. I once got violent diarrhea and got knocked out for about 20 hours from an especially strong little cup of artisan coffee from a hipster coffee shop. My friends who drank the same had no ill effects.
I’m definitely not sensitized to caffeine. I can consume tea, chocolate, caffeine pills, even the “big bad” monster energy drinks without getting any symptoms. Too much caffeine definitely has it’s negatives, but so does sugar, ever more so. For this reason I found sugar free energy drinks better instead of tea, which I drink only with sugar.
It took a noticeably long time to convince myself to drop coffee completely, even once symptoms were obvious. I acquired a good taste for it, consumed it by the mugful for many years without problems and the symptoms developed very slowly over the years.
When I’m tired and my willpower is weak, I still rarely find myself acractically accepting a cup if offered and there are no alternatives. I have an addiction to stimulants, clearly.
Other people’s disbelief of this reaction also made it much more difficult than it had to be. They act very sure of themselves, as if their beliefs are more applicable than my own direct somatic and mental experience. Having in mind the Typical Mind Fallacy and the Dunning-Kruger effect helps protect against this, but I found a simple “No thanks”, strictly without explanation, the wisest answer.
This report ballooned out quite much, but I hope it will be beneficial to others who find themselves in the same boat.
TL;DR: It’s rare, but one can insidiously slowly develop an inflammatory reaction to some other component in coffee other than caffeine.
Aaaaaaarrrggh man I think I am supposed to give up or cut back coffee but I… like it and feel sad about not having it in my life. (I like it better than tea, or other sources of caffein or other drinks). I think the thing I like here is a particularly gritty taste.
I… suppose I am supposed to try decaf. I feel like in the past when I’ve tried that I didn’t really like the taste. (Edit: I just bought myself some decaf coffee of a type I think I might like. I like it… less than regular. It’s not the exact same brand I normally get so not sure if that’s a brand problem or a decaf problem). But, I’ll give it a try.
Thanks. :)
After much trial and error, I found that buying decaf beans (something like this for a dark roast, medium roast decaf beans are much harder to find, but they exist) and grinding them myself to use with a french press works best, I literally can’t tell the difference from how normal coffee tastes. There’s also the fact that you get used to a specific coffee taste after a while. When switching back and forth between coffee brands I noticed that the coffee tasted worst the first day after I switched brands, and then got better and better as I got used to the taste.
Yeah there is definitely a lot of variation in how good / crappy decaf tastes!
In January I went to the ER because I was having a lot of heart palpitations...still haven’t found anything conclusive to determine the cause. However, I had a visit with my primary care doctor and she told me to cut back on or preferably eliminate the caffeine I was drinking via hot tea.
I went from ~6 cups per day to <1 cup per day cold turkey.
It was a rough week, but now I have no desire for it and have a good amount more energy throughout my day.
(Palpitations have more or less disappeared, but I’m not sure if that’s because of caffeine, the 11 pounds I’ve lost, and/or something else)
Similar issues, diagnosed with bicuspid aortic valve, make sure to get a cardiologist to do approiate tests for yourself (echocardiogram etc)
Thanks! I was to the cardiologist this week going back beginning of June for echo, treadmill, etc.
When you say you sleep 7-7.5 hours on weekdays, do you mean as measured by a wearable such as Oura or Apple Watch, or do you really mean time in bed? There can easily be one hour difference, even if you think you don’t have problems sleeping.
I meant time in bed… My Fitbit does claim I get about an hour less than that in terms of actual sleep, despite not feeling like I have problems sleeping.
I never got into coffee, and was unaware of this.
Reading the other comments*, maybe I should try to increase my energy by finding ways I can sleep better.
*Like this one:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nf3HQgb7f7iEfC85D/the-glorious-energy-boost-i-ve-gotten-by-abstaining-from?commentId=DqekkHoB3RWvkFGCr
I have pretty bad energy-level problems and have been looking for more things to try to fix them. I’d always thought quitting caffeine would make it so I could attain my current energy levels without caffeine; it never occurred to me that energy levels after quitting could be higher. So this is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Every 6 months or so I do 2 to 3 weeks without caffeine the first several days are always terrible, but after that I return to my baseline pretty quickly.
Mrntally I don’t feel much a difference whether I’m drinking coffee or not. Lifting is much tougher without energy drinks or pre-workout. Running is a little bit harder for the first half mile or so.
Overall it isn’t too much a change for me. I guess it’s relevant that I’m young and didn’t start drinking caffeine until 3 or 4 years ago.
I’ve heard this is a good middle-ground between quitting coffee altogether and just keep drinking the same amount.
I love coffee. It’s a hobby for me. But there’s been advice to delay drinking coffee about 90-120 minutes after waking up because it allows the chemical in the brain, adenosine, to be accepted by its receptors and wear off. When you drink caffeine right away, it blocks the adenosine receptors and they just float around until the caffeine wears off, and then bind to the receptors making you sleepy. This is often what causes the afternoon crash.
I tried this for a week and enjoyed it. I woke up, worked out, and then had coffee instead of waking up, drinking coffee and then working out.
Interesting! So when you did this, did you find that you were able to avoid the afternoon crash?
Yes! I actually did one week where I did wake up—gym—coffee—work and then one week where I did wake up—coffee—gym—work and noticed the days where I delayed coffee, I felt much more alert around 3 or 4. I also had to wake up 30 mins earlier on those days to do my gym class before coffee. Though I did notice I didn’t perform as well in the gym.
I wanted to stick with it, but couldn’t because 1.) I love coffee and 2.) It was really hard to wake up at the same time on days where I wasn’t going to the gym, but still delay coffee.
This is where I’ve ended up too. In addition to minimizing the afternoon crash, delaying caffeine two hours seems to keep my brain somewhat less dependent on caffeine for waking up in general.
In the past, a day with zero caffeine would leave me barely functional. Now I’m drinking about the same amount of caffeine on average, but if I happen to skip it, I can still muddle through and just yawn a lot more than normal.
Been off caffeine for 5 months now, my resting bpm decreased roughly 6.5~ bpm, but also surprised at how much overall energy I have. If I do end up going back to caffeine I would probably monitor my heart’s resting bpm and see if there is a big difference between tea & coffee for consumption ( l-theanine being responsible I imagine). As much as I do enjoy the taste the removal of caffeine from my diet has shown me maybe we should take a step back and see if we are really gaining overall energy from daily consumption of caffeine (suspect weekly would be more efficient).