☕️ I QUIT COFFEE 6 MONTHS AGO _ Why, Benefits & How to

So I quit coffee or pretty much all caffeine in September of 2021 and I can honestly say that I've never felt this good. I've never had as much steady energy throughout the day, I was never able to focus as well and I never slept as well either. Plus I experienced many other benefits that I didn't even know were possible or were related to my caffeine consumption. I've really been looking forward to creating this video for quite some time now and I think it's especially due to the fact that I used to be quite the coffee addict and I have been for the past 20 years and I never thought that I would be able to survive without caffeine for such a long time. But it goes to show that it's possible to break the habit or the addiction whatever you want to call it and if I can do it I'm pretty sure you can do it as well. And I'm going to break up this video into different sections so you can skip right ahead to whatever interests you and I'm going to start out with a little bit of my story with coffee and caffeine, then why I decided to do it, how I did it and last but not least the benefits I experienced when quitting coffee or caffeine altogether. So as I said I've been drinking coffee for pretty much 20 years which is quite scary to say. I started out when I was around 17 or 18 I'm not quite sure but I remember my parents being avid coffee drinkers so it was very normal in our household to drink coffee every day several times throughout the day and I remember in high school that my parents would wake me up with a cup of coffee and yeah that was quite a nice routine which I actually kept going for the past 20 years. So when waking up either I would make myself a cup of coffee or I would actually when I was on vacation be known to ask my friends or my partner or whoever I could ask to bring me a cup of coffee in the morning because I was basically unable to function or get out of bed without my cup of coffee. So I've always considered myself to be pretty addicted to coffee or caffeine and I tried quitting a few times over the years but I was never never able to stick with it and every time I tried I felt like uncomfortable I could feel the withdrawal symptoms and I felt like I was stuck with this addiction for life. At the same time I would say that I was still a quite moderate coffee drinker. I usually had two to three cups per day which I know is not very little but at the same time not like crazy compared to other people and throughout very stressful times I may have added in a fourth cup but usually I would stick to my one cup of coffee in the morning and then either another cup of coffee or another cup of espresso in the afternoon. And I also consider myself to be pretty lucky that I've never liked the taste of any kinds of sodas or energy drinks and so I never had any of those. So first of all I've known that coffee or caffeine affects me very like pretty negatively for a long long time now and I don't remember exactly when I started researching but I remember quite a long time ago I noticed that I was very jittery and unfocused and just all over the place after drinking coffee. And I think that it's mostly through the research that I was doing that I started to become more aware of the potential side effects that caffeine could have on me and I basically started checking in more and more with myself and my body and seeing how coffee made me feel and I think that that's how I found out about like certain side effects that I was having from caffeine. Another reason that I decided to quit during this particular point in time was that I noticed that my anxiety levels were generally pretty high or elevated during that time. I noticed that first of all I would get worried about anything and everything without any particular reason really. And then another thing was that any challenges or anything that was uncomfortable for example at work would make me nervous to an extent that was not reasonable anymore. And once again through research I found that there was a strong link between caffeine consumption and anxiety and once again I was definitely motivated to try and see what it's like without caffeine. Next I felt like throughout most of my life I was lacking mental clarity and focus and that's always something that I have been striving towards through diet, through exercise, to yeah just trying to be healthy overall. But I felt like and again through research found out that it may there may be a connection between me being scatterbrained and all over the place and basically not being able to get as much done as I would like to and caffeine. So yet another motivator for me to try it out. And kind of related to this is the fact that caffeine is extremely acidic and I've been trying to lead a healthy life and have been watching my diet and what I eat for such a long time and yeah consuming something as acidic and like technically pretty unhealthy as coffee on a daily basis really yeah didn't really sit right I suppose. When it comes to how I did it I'm first going to talk about the mindset part because in my opinion mindset is by far the most difficult thing to tackle when it comes to any thought of habit change or overcoming an addiction whatever you want to call it and yeah when it comes to mindset I think the most important part for me was again doing a ton of research and watching a lot of youtube videos and also I think the most important piece of the puzzle or the piece of information that motivated me by far I hope that's correct. But yeah his book is really mind-blowing and he's a doctor who basically just took a ton of research and simply combines all of his findings in this book which pretty much conclusively lead to the negative side effects that caffeine holds. So yeah for anyone who's interested in quitting caffeine I would highly highly recommend this book. It's packed with knowledge and it's also a very easy and like kind of entertaining read I would say and I'm also going to quote it more throughout this video. When it comes to the specifics of cutting out caffeine from my diet I want to start off by saying that I was already down to two cups of coffee when I started the elimination process I suppose and yeah what I did is pretty simple I just cut out coffee extremely slowly over the course of two months I would say. So I went from two cups of coffee per day to one cup of coffee in the morning then one espresso in the afternoon then one espresso in the morning one espresso in the afternoon to one espresso in the morning to one green tea in the afternoon and so on and so forth and week by week slowly reducing my caffeine and my caffeine intake until eventually during a holiday actually I cut it out completely and I have to say that through cutting it out so very slowly I didn't really even experience any of the withdrawal symptoms that I used to have in the past so I can definitely recommend tapering off slowly if you still want to like function and be able to get work done and live a normal life. So one of the main concerns that I was having when quitting caffeine or even just thinking about quitting caffeine was first of all the fear of not having this like boost of energy and not being able to function at all and second just the thought of missing this warm comforting beverage in the morning and yeah that's what I was trying to replace when quitting caffeine. So once again I did a ton of research and looked into the different alternatives I could be using as my like morning comforting drink alternative once again and what I found was a very good decaf coffee that I'm currently having in the mornings and it's a company that decaffeinates with water instead of chemicals so I find the decaf to be very mild compared to other decafs which kind of give me stomach stomach aches because they are so acidic like even more acidic than regular coffee I think and so yeah first of all I'm having decaf coffee in the mornings another thing that I really like to do is to have cacao in the mornings I just use like the baking cacao and have one teaspoon of baking cacao and hot water and like a splash of almond milk and it's really really good and yeah when it comes to the caffeine in there first of all decaf has about I think two milligrams per cup compared to about a hundred milligrams per regular cup of coffee and the cacao has about six milligrams per teaspoon and I think for me I'm totally fine with that like I don't have to go 100% caffeine free and I also still eat chocolate pretty much every day not a whole lot but still so I don't expect myself to be 100% caffeine free and I know that cacao also has theobromine in it which is also a stimulant but it's a very mild one and is supposed to have a lot more benefits than the downsides that you experience from caffeine so I'm fine with I guess taking that risk what I've definitely decided against using though is green tea since green tea does have around 25 milligrams of caffeine per cup and I feel like I would be back at my regular caffeine consumption habit within no time so I'm not risking green tea even though I generally always used to like green tea and I know that it does give you a much like milder stimulating effect and I think it's still like a different story than coffee but yeah I personally have decided against it and I want to start out by saying that it took me probably around three months to start experiencing the full benefits of quitting coffee I think what a lot of people don't realize is using caffeine for such a long time really throws your body off balance and it's naturally going to take quite some time to get it back into balance and I feel like even now my like focus and my energy and a lot of other things are still improving so first of all I used to wake up quite often throughout the night and especially during stressful times I would lie there for an hour or two and ruminate on all the things that happened that day or that would or might happen the next day and that has pretty much completely disappeared like if I wake up at night I usually go right back to sleep and all is fine and another thing is that when I do wake up I most of the time obviously not all of the time but most of the time I do feel rested and refreshed and I just feel good and that definitely didn't used to be the case when I was still drinking coffee and what I got to learn was that when you wake up usually after a good night's or like after a longer period of time of sleeping you're basically in withdrawal mode so you wake up and your body is withdrawing from caffeine so you don't feel so great and you only start feeling back to your normal self again once you consume coffee or caffeine in any other form and that just completely fell away so I wake up and I definitely still don't jump out of bed because I'm just not that kind of person but I wake up and I feel good and I don't feel like I need anything in order to feel normal or for the headaches to go away or anything like that I think what a lot of people are not aware of is how long caffeine actually stays in our system and in Caffeine Blues it is once again talked about how the half-life of caffeine can be anything between 3 and 12 hours and that only means the point in time where half of the caffeine is detoxified and out of your system so that means if you drink your first cup of coffee at 6 a.m and you're a slow metabolizer you might or could potentially still have half of the caffeine in your bloodstream at 6 p.m and the issue with that is that due to the book caffeine minimizes or completely eliminates your deep sleep phase which is so essential for you to feel rested and alert the next day. As I already mentioned I'm not the most energetic person in the world and I still need a lot of sleep but generally my energy has been so much better and so much more stable. I think the main benefit for me is first of all waking up and not feeling groggy and then generally just not experience these crazy highs and these crazy low lows from drinking caffeine and then experiencing withdrawal and so on and so forth. So again I feel like my energy throughout the day has been so much more stable and due to the fact that I'm just sleeping so much better I feel wake up and feel alert and ready to tackle the day. I think that this statement is pretty mind-blowing especially because you really don't read about this anywhere or at least I didn't until I dug a lot deeper and did more research and read this book and I can definitely say for myself that my anxiety levels and generally my stress response has gone down a lot. And while I'm already talking about this the author mentions quite often how caffeine is also linked to depression and while I've never been depressed before I definitely know that my mood is overall a lot steadier and again I think I used to experience kind of mood swings or mood lows in the afternoons and nowadays that just doesn't happen anymore and I'm pretty convinced that it's due to the lack of caffeine in my system nowadays. One of the most shocking things I learned from reading Caffeine Blues is that caffeine not only constricts your fine blood vessels in your extremities and therefore resulting to cold hands and cold feet but also constricts the fine blood vessels in your brain and you can probably imagine what it does to your brain when the blood flow is reduced. And another related and similarly shocking and interesting fact I learned is that the withdrawal effects or withdrawal headaches you experience from quitting caffeine are actually from the dilation of your blood vessels in your brain that have been constricted for such a long time. And I have to say that this is one of the facts that definitely motivated me to quit coffee for good and just knowing that I think that it's no surprise that I used to lack mental clarity and focus and at the same time it's also one of the main benefits that I have experienced since quitting. I am able to focus so much better and for a longer period of time and yeah it's pretty amazing. The author also talks about how your brain under the influence of caffeine pretty much becomes one-dimensional and how caffeine really cuts you off from your higher reasoning skills. When drinking caffeine you're pretty much in constant defensive and emergency mode and you can probably imagine what that does to your brain. And again the book has provided a lot of helpful information when it comes to women's health and the link to caffeine consumption. For example I thought it was really interesting to learn that women generally detoxify caffeine a lot slower than men and also that there's actually a confirmed link between the existence and the severity of PMS and caffeine consumption. All right to end this video I really want to mention that I only touched on a few points or a few benefits that I personally experienced when quitting caffeine and if you're at all interested in doing the same I would highly recommend reading Caffeine Blues. Again it's a lot valuable information and he touches on a lot more potential symptoms or links to caffeine that you may be experiencing and either way I hope that this video was helpful. If you do have any questions ask them in the comments and I'll talk to you soon. Bye!