Henry Hagnäs

For the first time in my adult life I've been caffeine-free for a week now and I feel fine. Last saturday, the first coffee-free day, I spent in a haze of weird tiredness and a persistent 12 h headache, this was to be expected — especially since I quit cold turkey. Not sure I'd recommend that but I really didn't want a drawn out process and I figured it wouldn't be that bad. It was pretty bad, like a decent hangover, which is basically was. I napped intermittently and by the evening the headache was easing up and things got better.

Day 2, Sunday, was pretty much the same except without the headache, odd little quesy feelings in between feeling lethargic.

The rest of the week went by ok, the first few days I took naps when I came home and was a little more irritable than usual for most of the week, during the day I felt tired at times. Unfortunately my experiment coincided with this summers biggest heat-wave, so some of my sluggishness was probably more due to the weather than being caffeine-free.

Now that I'm becoming more stabilized (some articles say it might take up to 10 days) I can definitely feel that I don't really need the coffee to wake up or stay active, I'd guess I have pretty much the same amount of energy in me but I can't control when I feel energetic, which can lead to drowsiness and sluggishness at inopportune moments. This can be helped by eating a little snack (preferably something healthy) which kicks up the metabolism and off you go.

Would I recommend this to others? I don't know yet, it remains to be seen how it influences my productivity and energy in the coming weeks. As I said the heat has been pretty killer on my productivity (office doesn't have AC and my home computer is in a warm room). It was surprisingly easy to quit, but you should know I'm a morning person who don't actually need coffee for the wake-up itself most of the time. I don't use an alarm-clock either, I wake up sometime around 6 in the morning everyday by myself. If you think you need the pick-me-up to actually function at a time that your body doesn't really want to I wouldn't recommend quitting coffee, otherwise, why not try it?