So I quit drinking coffee.
That’s it. That’s the BLUF (bottom line up front). If you want to stop reading here, you’ve gotten all the necessary information you need to know. Bullet points! Frameworks! Lists! I gave it to you STRAIGHT and FAST and HARD and, uh, at a delicate pace? I dunno. But go RISE AND GRIND and HUSTLE. No time for READING. READING IS FOR NERDS.
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Let me take you back in time, far away when men were men, women were women, and survival was the name of the game. In the mists of the Ethiopian plateau, life was hard. There was no time for lallygagging in the morning; you had to roll off your bed or mat or straw or whatever and get right to it. Those goats weren’t going to herd themselves, you know?
And there wasn’t anything you could drink to give you that burst of wake-up energy, that eyes-wide, I gotta pee right now pep-in-your-step.
There also wasn’t a morning commute either, which helped, but I digress.
So one day, according to legend (unironically the best source of history), an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi discovered that his goats would act kinda, ah, high-strung after munching on a certain berry. So high-strung they didn’t want to go to sleep like good little goats when the sun came down.
Imagine: you’re trying to get some shut-eye after a hard day of herding the goats, and the little buggers won’t stop making their stupid “MEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRHH!” sounds into the wee hours. And you had nothing to help you shake off the drowsiness after a sleepless night! No wonder coffee had to be invented.
Kaldi, a little perturbed, brought the news to a monk at his local monastery. The kindly monk thanked Kaldi, gathered some berries and made a drink out of it. He found it helped keep him awake during long hours of prayer. I just give the old boy credit for having to stones to ingest a hitherto unknown substance. Everything had to be done by someone for the first time at some point, right?
Either way, coffee was born. Coffee cultivation, and indeed coffee culture, is credited to the Arabs at first, mostly in what is modern-day Yemen (let’s not talk about Yemen . . .), and quickly spread through the near east, Europe, and eventually the new world. In Europe, coffee replaced wine and beer as the morning drink of choice. Imagine you’re bleary eyed from a hard night of whatever, you’re having trouble getting your motor going in the a.m., and then tossing back a few beers. Man, no wonder Europeans eventually explored and colonized the entire world—replacing alcohol with coffee was a game-changer.
It is said Americans drink 400 million cups of coffee per day. That adds to to 146,000,000,000 cups of coffee per year, which sounds ridiculous, but then I remember that for many, many years I was probably drinking the equivalent of 10-12 cups per day. On the high-end, that’s 4,380 cups of coffee per year. Yikes.
So Americans love the black stuff. Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts are everywhere (17,068 and 28,776 respectively), and those are just the bigs! Small and independent coffee shops are where it’s at. Because you don’t just drink coffee. There’s a coffee ritual. You smell it. You savor it. You enjoy it with food and with people. You have conversations over coffee. You think over coffee. It helps power you through your day. It helps you focus. It keeps you awake on long car rides. It helps overcome the noon swoon. It becomes part of your personality. Everyone’s got a personalized coffee mug or three. Coffee culture is truly a culture.
I, too, was a coffee culturer. Coffee culture warrior? Coffee man?
Yeah, I was Too Much Coffee Man.
Except I didn’t think it was too much. It was never enough, actually.
Coffee never kept me awake, never gave me the jitters, and never made me buzz around like a yippy little dog. I could drink coffee—black, always black—throughout the day and up to early evening and not have trouble sleeping. If anything, coffee helped me focus. It calmed me down, or so I felt. Maybe I’d sweat, especially if it was a hot day (I refuse to drink iced coffee), maybe I’d get a little extra pitter-patter in my heart, but that was it. Well, that, and I had to use the bathroom all the time.
And then a funny thing happened over the last few months: I started getting the worst heartburn. Just real bad acid reflux. It would wax and wane, and I always chalked it up to tomatoes or something, never coffee. Until a few weeks ago when it never waned. Heartburn so bad I wanted to puke. Coffee was the most likely culprit at that point, so for two days I just had one cup in the morning, and then about a week and a half ago, I just stopped.
Yes, you read that right: after over 20 years of increasingly heavy, regular, some might say inveterate coffee-drinking, I quit cold turkey.
I had a headache for the first day and a half. It was tough waking up and not going through the coffee ritual motions. What do I do? What do I drink? I had the noon swoon for the first time in two decades. That all passed after three or four days, and then I got the weirdest body aches. A bizarre muscle stiffness in my neck and shoulders, lower back, and legs. I felt calcified, seized up, and coffee called to me as the only lubricant that could loosen me up.
That went away not long ago. It’s been almost two weeks now. Do you know what I don’t have? Heartburn. And the need to pee every five minutes.
I wake up ready to go. My sleep feels better. My focus and energy level actually feel identical to what they did before I stopped drinking coffee. I’m saving money by not stopping for a cup here and there when I’m on the road (which is a lot). However, the part I miss the most is the ritual.
Brewing a pot midday, sipping while working, that lip-smacking “Ahh” we all do when the coffee really hits all the right places (except my esophagus and stomach, apparently). I miss that. I miss coffee with dessert. I miss sitting with my wife and having a cup or two before the kids wake up in the morning. I miss all of that—and it’s only been two weeks.
It’s company. Coffee equals company. Conversation. Friends. That’s an aspect of the beverage I never really thought about too much until I stopped drinking it. Do former alcoholics feel the same way? I’ll bet they do.
Maybe I will someday move on to social coffee drinking. Or just one or two cups in the morning. But for now, I’m enjoying how I feel. For now, I don’t want to risk a little coffee drinking turning back into a lot.
But you know what? It’s kind of nice not being beholden to caffeine (I don’t drink soda or tea). It’s like, I never needed it all along. The real treasure is the knowledge we gained along the way.
Here’s an interesting rub: being Greek, coffee is a huge part of life. What will I do at family gatherings, outings with friends, etc.? Will it even be a big deal? I don’t know, but I really don’t want to have any anytime soon. I feel like I have a good thing going.
Sorry Kaldi, and sorry monk whose name is lost to the ages. This berry that kept the goats up all night is not for me any longer. I guess I’ll just need to find something else to do.
- Alexander
Don't worry, I forgive you lol. In all seriousness, I ham up my reliance on the stuff, but I've always been a believer in one or two cups a day, tops. I've experienced withdrawal headaches and I've experience caffeine headaches. I also, thanks to a sinus infection, spent 1-2 years having to take Ibuprofen every day which I was not crazy about, a reliance which fortunately subsided by the end of last year. Like all good things (coffee in this case), as a wise fictional police inspector once said, "Man's got to know his limitations." Everyone has to find theirs at some point.
Good luck with that. I have two cups a day. I noticed that if I had more than that, I would get palpitations. I have considered quitting coffee as a daily ritual, without replacing it with anything else, but it feels like banishing a friend. It's literally my only vice (besides too much computer time).