Regarding my addiction

[jayfurr]

I've gotten a lot of queries via email and Facebook and Twitter and so on asking why on Earth I'm trying to give up coffee.

I think the number one reason is that it disturbs me to be in the grip of an addiction so strong that abstaining one day makes me feel sick as a dog. That can't be healthy.

A secondary reason is that I've really had a lot of problems with sleeping in recent years. NO, I do not have sleep apnea. I know this for a fact. I did a formal sleep study with overnight visit last year and there's no sign of apnea at all. I do not need a CPAP machine. I suspect that the reason I'm so wakeful all night is that for years I've propped myself up with massive amounts of coffee all day. When I train I take a quart bottle of cold coffee into the training room with me -- and that only lasts until lunch. Then I refill it. That's a lot of coffee. Wonder if it could have an impact on my sleeping?

You might say "Then why not cut back to a reasonable amount? You don't have to go to extremes -- going from drinking two quarts a day to drinking none."

My response: see reason number one, above.

I tried going cold turkey back before Lent. That didn't work at all. So I cut back to one cup a day for Lent and thought, after a month of that, that it was time to go cold turkey again. As a result, I spent yesterday feeling fairly rotten. I was dismayed to realize that even having "weaned myself down" to a single cup, removing that single cup still gave me bad withdrawal symptoms.

I didn't have any coffee today, either. That means I've had no coffee at all since Tuesday morning. I actually don't feel all that rotten today. I don't feel great but I don't feel appallingly awful either. With any luck, that means that by the weekend I'll be past this and able to keep on going.

I'd like to know that I don't suffer from addictions and addictive thinking. I'd like that, but even if I remove coffee entirely from my life I'll still have habits I'd like to break.

In the end, I think a lot of my desire to lose weight (which I did, successfully, dropping from a guy who had to wear XXL t-shirts to a guy who fits comfortably into an L and considers an XL to be 'baggy'), lower my cholesterol (by eliminating meat and by exercising more), and so forth owes a lot to the people I've met doing the 60-mile 3-day breast cancer walks for Susan G. Komen For The Cure. The determination and will of people with cancer to fight the disease and reclaim their lives has inspired me, someone who doesn't have cancer, to place more emphasis on my own health.

Saying "I wish, back when I was younger, I had..." is so lame after all. But I wish I had. That being said, I'm doing what I can now.

Comments

I hear ya

[itchbay (from livejournal.com)]

A little more than 10 years ago, I decided to give up soft drinks for a variety of reasons. But I knew that to do so properly, I would need to break my caffeine addiction. I don't drink coffee, and tea isn't always available, and so I'd turn to cola to stop the headaches. I'd done it many times before, and I knew in a moment of weakness, I'd do it again.

I set aside an entire month to break the caffeine habit. Every day, I'd have my morning tea a little bit later, and I'd have a slightly smaller cup. By the third week, my morning tea was in the afternoon, and about 4 ounces. By the end of the month, I could go an entire day without it. Success!

I eventually went back to drinking tea, but not as regularly, and I've never had any kind of a headache from skipping my morning tea. I also drink sodas on occasion, but not nearly as often.

[ayse.livejournal.com]

I pretty much never take any kind of caffeine. I'm so sensitive to it that any caffeine after 2pm means not sleeping at night. People ask me all the time how I function without it, how I wake up in the morning. But the reality is that even people who drink coffee have to wake up without it, and then they have to fuss around and make coffee to feel remotely human. From what I can tell, it takes me less time to feel fully awake than the average coffee drinker, and I saved myself that extra ten minutes of messing with a machine or coffee pot. Plus, I'm actually awake, not exhausted and propping myself up with a drug.

So kudos to you for quitting the stuff. It can't be easy.

[jhvilas.livejournal.com]

It took me about a month to kick caffeine 20 years ago or so. $Deity knows how long it'd take now. But really I didn't usually have that much until I started this new job. Doesn't feel like I'll ever get used to it.

Really I can't drink much caffeine any more anyway. Coffee bothers me, and I'm not supposed to drink tea (oxalates) or colas (phosphoric acid, I think). But I cheat some.