Coffee Experiment
October 21st, 2022
Today is the day. After three months without coffee, I'm going to have a small cup. Nothing special, the same coffee I used to drink daily. Black, no additives.
UPDATE: Finished my cup at 10:24am. Nice timing.
I originally stopped drinking caffiene on reading a post in the misophonia subreddit. Someone was advocating their experience of removing caffiene from their diet and the benefits they felt because of it. I'd never thought about how caffiene may play a role in my own struggles with misophonia, but seeing that discussion made me think I should give it a try. What did I have to lose?
Since I was reluctant to just stop having coffee for the rest of my life, I decided to stop drinking caffiene for only three months and observe its absence in my day to day. Before the experiment, jitters, anxiety, and agitation were common occurences and I wasn't sure caffiene was the culprit. For all I knew, it could have simply been noise interfering with my well-being. After three months, I can safely say caffiene was a definite, but not solely responsible, contributor in the creation of those states of being.
In the beginning came withdrawl symptoms; headaches, feeling tired, and difficulty focusing really made that first week difficult. After that though, things improved with a noticeable reduction in my anxiety and agitation levels (no jitters either). Things started to feel a little off without the morning ritual associated with coffee. After the week of withdrawl, the days felt more like perfect sine waves, predictable and kind of unexpressive. When drinking coffee, days had more creative shapes to their cycles and felt more serendipitous. Coffee obviously modulates the way our brains form thoughts, but I hadn't really realized I'd been using coffee to do more than just wake up in the morning. I've missed the slightly chaotic aspects of how it alters the signals being synthesized in my brain.
With the small cup I've drank since writing this, I feel more awake and more contemplative. I always notice the apex of this effect when my eyes feel wide open. The skin around my eyes always feels smoother and my vision is slightly sharper. Its hard to explain but it feels like the subconcious parts of my brain start spinning and change the shape of my thoughts for the rest of the day. Its like somebody turned on a bunch of features in the software powering my reality.
My takeway from this experiment is this: coffee has benefits and drawbacks and I should be more observant and proactive in how I approach drinking coffee. Moderation, like so many other things in life, is key. Cutting caffiene correlated with a substantial reduction in negative emotions day to day. I don't know that I was necessarily as productive in a measured output, but I don't think I was using it as a crutch for quality, but maybe for quantity. Try it yourself. If you know how to reach me, let me know what you think.