Caffiene - Can I live without it?
It’s been an exciting caffeine free journey the past 15 days. I’ll start off by telling you how my day looks like right now. I go to bed around 12am, and I wake up around 7am feeling fresh and energetic. I drink some juice, and go out to start my day. When I come back home, I’m still feeling fresh the whole day! The kind of freshness I have not experienced consistency in a long time, probably for the past 5 years. I had come to believe that I can only feel this alert if I have a cup of coffee in the morning. I’m a person very concerned with being addicted to anything and I’m happy to report that you can get rid of caffeine withdrawal in less than 15 days.
Let’s be honest though, it started off as a week without drinking coffee and the first 5 days were very challenging! I remember having throbbing headaches and strong urges to eat or drink anything that had caffeine! “Just one small piece of chocolate” or “Just a few sips of coca cola” I would tell myself. I had to start off by tricking my brain that it was still getting that hot sugar infused drug of a drink, so I would just drink hot water with honey and ginger, whenever I got the urge to have a hot beverage. The fact that I had a cold the first three days didn’t help the situation but all the ginger tea made my cold go away very fast. I think I had over 10 mugs of that tea the first 2 days.
Day four was a real challenge, I felt that I was making no progress because I still had a headache by lunch time and I was starting to think this feeling would not go away. I attempted to soften the blow by having some lightly caffeinated tea, or eating a few pieces of chocolate, but it just felt like cheating.
If having just one cup of this drug would help get rid of the pain and make me feel good, why hold out?!
Fortunately I had watched an educational video about caffeine addiction and the effects it has on your body. It literally affects the way your body produces and responds to certain chemicals like Adenosine and adrenaline . As mentioned in this fun Youtube video, caffeine literally alters the way your body responds to the sleep inducing chemical adenosine. With over consumption of caffeine, your body will literally require more adenosine and hence more coffee to stay at your normal level of alertness! Not only does it affect your sleep though, it also makes your body produce more adrenaline the same way that drugs like cocaine do, just at a lower rate.
source: ASAP Science / YouTube
The key take away for me from that video was that after a short while, you can bring your body’s receptors to adenosine back to a normal level.
**You CAN wake up early in the morning and feel fresh without coffee!**
With this motivation to bring my body back to a normal state of sleepiness, I kept fighting the headaches, and continued drinking my ginger tea. Gradually, each day I could pass the day with little headache, and eventually could pass the day without even thinking about coffee.
One crucial help was substituting the trigger for coffee with other drinks I like. Whenever I was in a cafe with friends, I would just order a juice or some caffeine free tea. Being in Ethiopia, it’s almost impossible to not smell some coffee or be offered to get a drink. So instead o being rude, just get some green tea or one of Ethiopia’s famous avocado juice.
Today, I was looking at the date and I realized that it’s been exactly 15 days or so since I had a drink of coffee! I couldn’t believe it. Now, I didn’t even notice it. So to celebrate, I’ve ordered a nice Ethiopian style “bunna beh wetet” 😃 .
WHAT?! Did you think I was going to stop drinking one of my countries largest prides and cultures?
Plus the coffee ceremony in itself is a beautiful sight to behold.
Well the point here is, I now wakeup without the aid of any drugs and I can have a coffee every now and then, without feeling like I need to have 3 more of this jittering drug to pass my day. That’s a great feeling.