The Demon Brew
Recently, I made an awful decision. With the inexorable creep of winter boredom going unalleviated even now in mid-April, I decided in an flighty haste to quit caffeine. Like most urbanites, my morning begins with a ringing alarm, an unceremonious tumble onto the floor, and a desperate crawl to the coffee machine. This sequence has played out thousands of times in succession, the life of a working man, every day starting in this predictable, fated pattern. The rare times I found myself in circumstances that kept me apart from my morning cup, within hours a splitting headache would arrive, along with the familiar, rueful laments of an addict. Never again. Next time will be different.
Coffee is not a demon; it’s barely even a vice. But it is an addiction. I have lately been in the company of a few Buddhists, and have taken a particular liking to the free yourself from attachments thing. While caffeine is far from a drag on my life (in fact, I owe it a great debt), my body still lurches a little too eagerly towards a steaming cup in a way beyond my control. I am not ready or interested to quit my Self or renounce the Ego, but it would be great if I could survive a morning unmedicated. I love coffee, but I don’t want to need coffee. So I set out, mistakenly and in great error, to break the cycle.
My first try at quitting caffeine was cold turkey—a terrible mistake, second only to the decision to quit in the first place. Within hours, the familiar headache appeared, with no intention to leave. For two days I braved these miserable conditions: a lowered mood, a paralytic body, a near-total absence of brain activity. At the same time, work started getting hairy and making me so sullen that I began to allow a strange and baseless paranoia—nearly a dementia—about my job security to creep in. Realizing where this was headed, I gave in to the urge and made myself a double espresso.
The second try was more successful, but ultimately a failure. I tried to switch slowly from coffee to less-potent Earl Grey tea, then to green tea, and finally to herbal tea. The guiding principle of this strategy was gentle separation: reduce the morning pot of coffee to a single cup, and change subsequent mid-morning, late-morning, early-afternoon, and late-afternoon cups from coffee to tea. This was easy enough, but it didn’t work. The morning cup provided a sufficient jolt of caffeine for me to ride a sort of caffeine-wave throughout the day, topping it up every few hours with cups of watery tea. Moving to caffeine-free herbal tea was trivial as long as I kept the morning cup.
(The most important lesson I learned here is that herbal tea sucks. Does it ever taste like anything but slightly tart water? Where’s the flavour? The flavour is in the caffeine, isn’t it???)
Clearly, the evil Morning Cup was the linchpin of my addiction. The link for me had become psychological, reinforced with years of Pavlovian conditioning. Alarm bell go off, drink coffee. I attempted a third strategy: instead of quitting the M.C. outright, I placed a delay between waking up and drinking the coffee. I resolved to drink M.C.s only at the office, never at home. To get my M.C. I had to put on my boots and walk down to the office and then elbow my way past the morning zombies who coagulate near the espresso machine. And on the weekends? I’d buy my coffee at Tim Horton’s.
The trick worked. Within days, the M.C. was a thing of the past. I knew it worked when I shambled into the office one morning and forgot to have coffee. Like never even noticed. It was a busy morning, and I was wrapped up in some menial task and by the time I noticed it was three in the afternoon. With no headache.
Since then, I’ve gone caffeine-free. I still feel sluggish, weary, and braindead, and not seeing the benefits at all. The snow falling outside doesn’t help. But if you’re considering quitting caffeine, please learn from my mistakes. All of us deserve an addiction or two, especially when they taste so good first thing in the morning.
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