On Quitting Coffee
In which I stop drinking coffee, go over why I drank it in the first place, and talk about how my wife feels it's a hilariously dumb addiction and equally goofy withdrawl.
If you spent any time speaking to someone at bars in a city over the last decade-plus, chances are you found yourself in a conversation on how the structures that power our world — including and especially capitalism — are the friggin worst. No matter the subject, someone — often bartenders, in my large sample size — will pivot or, after a long enough time, will pivot a conversation on how things are unfair, oppressive, and ruin lives by the billions.
These people are, statistically and experientially, not wrong. They are angry, as are many people living under such structures (as am I at times). Most importantly, they are blissfully unaware of the fact that you, the listener and/or active party in their conversation, really don't want to talk about the evils of capitalism right then and there, in that bar, at that moment, especially since they likely have no solution and will continue to spiral as they order more beverages.
Younger me listened to these people and waited for something novel and actionable to come from them. As I got older, I learned to shift their conversations in a direction or just leave the conversation and find something else to occupy my time. These days, I simply stopped going to bars unless I'm meeting a friend — usually someone who won't pivot conversations into the unsolvable evils of capitalism. In turn, I stopped drinking almost entirely because I found myself in these conversations and thought that the best way to avoid them was to thumb my nose at capitalism myself, not fully buying into the idea that I need to consume poison because it's just "something people do."
(I admit I will occasionally have a glass of wine or champagne at my wife's urging. I will also admit to uncharacteristically drinking an entire bottle of wine and eating a whole steak with coworkers a few months back because my company was footing the bill, I was celebrating a personal victory, and I had surprisingly low anxiety in the moment — circumstances I am unlikely to ever face again.)
Yet despite souring on the idea of drinking alcohol and spending my free time in these establishments, I still drank a lot of coffee, a wholly similar drink with its own set of ills.
A Poor Remedy for ADHD
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2020 and it made many weird quirks and mental/emotional roadblocks make total sense. As I write this next to a pile of half-empty notebooks and two stacks of books that I have yet to read — a feature you can find throughout every room in my house, as creating piles is something I've done for over thirty years. An ADHD diagnosis made sense of this and even gave me permission to continue to do so and take these piles further, while absolving me from the shame I felt from having them in the first place.
As I was diagnosed with ADHD, I noticed that coworkers who also had ADHD were struggling to get various medicines pertaining to their condition. This idea of relying on something to perform basic executive functions and suddenly not having it terrified me, so I decided to learn how to live with ADHD and not take any medication. (Driven to Distraction is a great manual on this, and something I reread once a year.) At the time I made this decision, I had also recently stopped smoking cannabis and cut my drinking to near zero. (I had never done any other drugs of note outside of this, for what it's worth.) Thus, the decision to forgo ADHD medication was an easy one and rooted in my already barely-existing substance consumption.
At the same time, I realized that drinking coffee did make me more focused, productive, and energetic — all things one supposedly gets from using amphetamine salts for ADHD. Despite working for Starbucks 20 years ago, I never drank coffee at all until 2016, when I suddenly got really into cold brew. (I stopped that a few months later after realizing it increased my resting heart rate by a lot.) Now in 2020 and going into 2021, I started making coffee a daily part of my ritual, heading to Southside Coffee daily for iced beverages or making it at home. In 2024, I even bought a semi-fancy espresso machine to make said drinks at home, getting shipments of beans from Denmark by the pound to get the best beans for the lowest prices at volume. I would drink coffee once, twice, sometimes three times a day, powering through lack of sleep and doing what I thought at the time was my best work.
The Comedown
At the time, I should have recognized this as obsessive behavior and something that carried some detrimental effects. I did notice that my agitation and time to fall asleep both increased, while I would become emotionally withdrawn for days if not weeks. I would also have very hyper or "amped" conversations if I combined coffee with ample sleep (or, at times, very little sleep), which may have scared a few folks off or chafed against peers. Sure, I was getting the productivity benefits of coffee, but I was also having greater anxiety, being a tad more curt, and less "present" in my personal life.
Things came to a head where, after a sleepless night, I had an argument with a friend that I legitimately did not remember starting, nor realize how it was started until well into the argument. I apologized and quickly came to the conclusion that my anxiety had, at that moment, never been higher, and coffee consumption (coupled with lack of sleep) begets anxiety. No benefit in productivity was worth the negative effects brought on by coffee.
After glancing at the /r/decaf subreddit and talking to my wife, I opted to taper off of coffee as quickly as possible. I decided earlier this summer to start drinking matcha and cut the volume of matcha I drink to zero over a period of time. What I didn't anticipate was that, by no longer drinking the amount of caffeine I was used to, I had instantly foisted myself into a depressive episode. (Thanks to therapy and a familial history of depression, I am able to instantly recognize when I am in such an episode.) This continued on until recently, when my near-total caffeine withdrawal subsided and I was able to live life as someone consuming way less caffeine for the first time in nearly five years.
The Other Side
Nearly at the end of my retreat from caffeine — I am drinking half a teaspoon's worth of matcha powder until the end of this week — I'm excited to experience life without consuming any stimulants.
Part of me sees getting off caffeine as a half-assed attempt at slacker-like anti-capitalist resistance, seeing no need to do something to my detriment for productivity's sake. After all, if coffee increases productivity and increases beverage and bean sales, removing myself from that mechanism would not only remove myself from this specific flywheel of capitalism, but also probably not contribute to the greater ruining of the environment that picking and roasting coffee surely contributes to.
That part of me is probably full of it, as my entire reasoning for getting off of the stuff is how it made me feel was worse than any benefits and increased productivity it may have provided. (I never measured or A/B tested.) Yet whatever the reason, I feel better on the other side of things.
My wife finds all of this to be a tad goofy, given my lack of any history with major substance use. (A running joke we have between each other is that she, a former two-pack-a-day smoker, found my repeated and eventually successful attempts to quit social smoking "a pack a week" amusing at best.) "Just don't drink coffee" is something she's told me many times, in which I would fire back with empirical evidence of benefits related to ADHD or productivity, followed by "I like it." I am not withdrawing from opioids, or fighting off the shakes; this is still a beverage sold at every corner in every city, often to children and spiked with chocolate.
In the end, I feel better and look forward to channeling my natural energy into a more productive and important hobby: buying more notebooks and books of which to stack around the house.
What I'm Listening To Now
Baby by Dijon sounds like if Janet Jackson at her peak was fed through a paper shredder and reconstructed in the best possible way to create the most eclectic and catchy pop around. Dijon's previous record, Absolutely, is among my favorite records of the last five years. This is just as good, if not better.
Five Things I'm Checking Out
- Showtimes for Caught Stealing at my local low-rent theater
- Taylor Lorenz maybe sympathizing with nazis
- The new Digg
- This compilation of the Burning Hammer, the most devastating wrestling maneuver only used 7 times by its creator (and rarely by others thereafter).
- Instapaper coming to Kobo, which might sound to anyone who doesn't know what either are like "Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy Dunne" but for learned people.
You made it this far. I have two weeks off and am writing a whole bunch of these so they can go out with some degree of regularity. Is that weekly? Twice weekly? Who knows, but expect more of these. See you soon.
-Scott