Caffeine addict (original) (raw)
February 22 2012, 11:27
Okay: today is now my... lemme count... 33rd day without caffeine. My last cup of coffee was on January 20th. And, boy, do I feel better for it.
Some folks can tolerate caffeine. I'm not one of them. I never habituate to it, not even after months of exposure; I never get back to feeling "normal" while it's in my bloodstream. Caffeine makes me permanently tense, listless, crotchety, and obscurely but pervasively miserable. But I keep drinking it because I like the taste and I like the few hours' rush that follow that first cup, and the way I can then stay up half the night being fantastically productive.
Alas, that energy doesn't come for free. It's borrowed from your own future, and the interest rate is fearsome, and there's a tough credit limit. By the second or third day, the caffeine simply stops working: no more rush, no more energy, just exhaustion and faint nausea. Then I lay off for a couple of days, usually at the weekend, and bank up enough energy to waste it all in the first half of the following week.
The way I model it these days, is: caffeine allows me to indefinitely postpone about twelve hours' worth of sleep, but not more. Sooner or later, that sleep has got to be paid back. And meanwhile, even if I'm not feeling it, I'm suffering all the ill effects of permanently lacking a good night's rest.
Giving up was... well, it wasn't on a par with giving up heroin (I assume), but it was tough at the time. I've paused in my caffeine consumption often enough to know the routine. It seems to take my body one day to notice. The second day, I suddenly get catastrophically exhausted in the mid-afternoon, and I go home and sleep for twelve hours. The third day, I'm a zombie with a headache. And after that, I start lifting out of it. Full recovery took a week to ten days.
Interestingly, the pharmacological half-life of caffeine is about five hours. So it takes at least six half-lives before I markedly notice the effects of drug withdrawal. Either I'm a mutant with an abnormally slow caffeine catabolism, or I'm sensitive to the stuff on the level of a few percent of the normal dose. (And I do notice that I have to be careful with decaf, which I'm still drinking.)
And now: decent sleep, better dreams, more physical energy, happier mood. For me at least, a life without caffeine is definitely a brighter one.
I still want coffee. I still want the rush. I still have to repress the urge, especially at work where I have the ingrained habit of drinking the stuff. But I count the days. It'd be a shame to drop that counter back to zero.