I Quit Caffeine & It Changed My Life

My sleep is amazing. Anxiety is a thing of the past. My cortisol levels are low. My energy is stable. I'm productive in all hours of the day. I feel content and whole in my body. But guess what? That's not why I quit. And that's not the reason why I keep quitting. There is something greater than all those things than the better sleep. Anxiety. What is anxiety? I honestly don't even remember what anxiety feels like. But that's not the reason why I quit. The reason why I quit and what keeps me motivated to never go back and that which has changed my life the most is that I am now totally free from carrying around the burden of addiction. Not a specific addiction, but any addiction. I realized that caffeine is the last addiction for almost every person that I know. People are not struggling with quitting heroin as their last addiction or alcohol. It's usually caffeine. So what does it mean to be free of this addiction? What is the benefit of that? Is it just a status symbol? Is it just so I can, or you, now that you're free, can walk around and tell people, you know, I'm free. You're in prison and I'm free. I'm out of the matrix. Look at me. Is that what it's really about? Or is there more to it? Because yes, it does give you more confidence. Definitely. The number one benefit, I think, of quitting the last drug is that you become more confident, but that confidence does not come from comparison to other people. That confidence comes from you knowing that you are the same person in all hours of the day, that you are personally consistent. You are the same person. You believe the same things that you've always believed in. You know what you know, you know what you don't know. You no longer have confusion about your inner reality and how it correlates to the outer reality. You know who you are, that this is confidence. It's confidence. You are free from the addiction. You're free from the slavery. You're no longer being controlled by anything. You are free. Now, this is why you're confident. You're not confident because other people are in prison and you're not, but because you are free. That in and of itself makes you confident. So, you know, when you have sort of friends, you have people that you sort of know, or you don't know them that well, or you're thinking that they might become friends one day, but you're not sure. Maybe you work together. Maybe you have a couple of interests, but you're not totally on the same wavelength, and if they asked you to just hang out and do nothing, you would probably say that you have other plans. But if they were to ask you, hey, do you want to go share our mutual drug together, aka go to a coffee shop and have a little coffee date and share a cup of coffee, you might consider it. In fact, you might do it. That friend is your drug buddy, just like the alcoholics who have alcohol buddies or the potheads who have weed buddies. The moment they get sober, those so-called friend groups, they fall apart. Now what's even crazier with caffeine and why it goes even deeper with caffeine is that not only does your friend group fall apart, entire systems, financial systems, productivity systems fall apart. You will no longer want to be around your colleagues. You will no longer want to be in the career that you chose for yourself. The entire industry of people is no longer going to spark your interest because that was just an extension of those drug buddies. And now that you no longer have a drug that you are more interested in than the company, you can look at people and see if they are on your wavelength or not. And pretty quick, you know, if that's a person that you would want to be around with no drugs, not even activities. My best friends are the ones where I don't even know if we ever shared a meal together. I don't know if we have a single thing in common, but we're in the same wavelength. That's all that matters. If you see yourself being around someone in total silence and enjoying your own company, that's a friend. But if it's a common interest or if it's a common drug, that's not a friend. You're there for the activity and the drugs. And don't waste your life on that because relationships are important. You want to build relationships that matter and you want to do it from an authentic place. So you learn discernment of people, but you also learn discernment of activities and ideas by extension. So when you ingest the caffeine, you take the worker's drug, meaning you are now under the illusion that the act of doing is fun. And at this point, it doesn't matter what exactly you're doing as long as you're doing something. And if you think about it, the act of doing can be ridiculous. The act of doing can be thinking, thinking about something that might not even matter, an idea that might not even happen, but you're doing something and you're getting internally rewarded, just like if you were to do something that you truly love and you're truly passionate about, which is very confusing because now you look around the forest and everything around you is shiny, equally shiny. Nothing shines more or less. It's all the same. But this is a waste of time. It's a waste of your potential because believe it or not, you are destined to do something on this earth. You have a calling. You have a purpose. Why? Because you have certain talents and you have certain real interests, certain inherent interests that you want to unleash, that have the most potential for you to grow in, where you can excel more than anyone else ever could. So it's your duty to excel in those things, but you don't know what they are because everything in the forest is shiny. But when you become sober, there's only a couple of things that are shiny and you see them right away. You look around and you're like, that's one, two, three, and that's it. And you know exactly what they are. Now, why do most people not just immediately go back to doing all the things that they love when they quit the drugs? It's because there is this moment of grievance. Almost everyone that I talk to who go through this, they can't believe it. They can't believe that they are no longer interested in, let's say, table tennis, all these wasted jokes in the group chat through all these years, all these YouTube tutorials that you watched on the best racket or whatever it's called, and all this planning for the trips and all these weekends spent. And you even know the families of all these people that you play with. So much to let go of, right? So much attachment, so many people, so many ideas and thoughts and identities that you now need to let go of before you can even begin to consider what you really love to do. I mean, you don't have to. It's not mandatory to go through this time of grievance. You can't just say, OK, cool. I made a mistake, table tennis. I know I invested 20 years of my life into this. That was a mistake. Boom, gone. You let go right away. You can do that, right? Most people, they go through the grievance and some try to cling on. Some try to still hold on to those old things that were only interesting under the influence of drugs. And you will realize sooner or later that the only way you can spark that interest, if it's something that is not meant for you, is by ingesting drugs. If you don't enjoy table tennis sober, if your five-year-old sober self does not enjoy table tennis, you don't enjoy table tennis. And the only way you can fool yourself into thinking that you do is if you take drugs. Which is obviously not the way, because you will feel like a fraud. You will feel like a liar. And that is going to destroy you. So I don't recommend that either. And once you know, you just can't unsee it. You just can't unsee. However, there's still going to be something that you have been doing all along that you might still enjoy when you're sober, or maybe not. Either way, if you start from zero and you only now found out what you love to do, you will excel in that way faster. And you will get to a level of expertise in this field way sooner than if you were to grind away 30, 40 years into something that was not meant for you. And the extension of that discernment of activities is the discernment of ideas. I have to think about ideas a lot. It's something that I do in my career and also here when I make these videos. And I write an idea for a YouTube video, for example. And if I'm drugged out, I can't tell if it's a good idea. I will say things like, let me sleep on it. Let me wake up and look at this idea in the morning and see if it's really a good idea. Or I will say stuff like, let me shoot the video first, and then I will tell if it's a good idea or not. Or let me see what the feedback is from the people. I don't trust myself. I don't trust myself to discern my own ideas if I'm influenced by drugs. So that's another benefit of being free from the last drug. It's that you can look at the idea right away and you can know exactly if it's a good idea or not and if it's worth executing. And if it's a good idea, you can execute the idea right away with no regrets, with no doubt, with no second thought. But I'll leave the sort of the contemplation of how far this extends into your life to you. All right. So I've been Justin Murkies. You've been listening to the NoCaf podcast. I know it's a short video today because it's a short message, you could say. But if it resonates with you, this can go really deep and you can fuel your quitting journey much more than you will with any of those other more tangible benefits, such as the better sleep and decreased cortisol and all that. If you can connect to what I'm saying here of you being more your authentic self and if you can see the benefit in that, if you can see how this aligns with your purpose here on earth, how you're meant to do this. If you see that for yourself, this is going to take you much further than anything else. And you won't have to worry about the withdrawals. You won't have to worry about what you're missing out on because all you're missing out on is a delusion that was never you. It was just a waste of time. Just like with other drugs, it's easier to see it with other drugs. Right. It's easier for you to see when I tell you that the alcoholics, they meet up and and they only meet up until they run out of alcohol. Then they have nothing in common. Right. Or the potheads who who meet up to hang out, but they all make sure that there's going to be enough weed at the party. Right. They don't talk about it directly, necessarily, but they they know it's in between the lines that that's why they're meeting up. Same with the coffee, same with the caffeine, same with the tea, same with the chocolate, same with this drug as well. Yeah. You would probably not meet up with that acquaintance from work if it wasn't because you were both going to share the same drug at the coffee shop. And when it comes to the last drug, I'd even say that it's stronger than all the other ones. If you're someone who is addicted to 10 different drugs, you know, you're addicted to opioids and psychoactive drugs and stimulants all at once. And you're totally drugged out on this crazy cocktail of drugs. You know, you might think that's crazy, right? You might think that's crazy. You're experiencing reality much different than the regular person. But the regular person who quits their last drug and goes to being sober, they experience the exact same magnitude of change as someone who goes from using 10 different drugs to being sober. It's the same thing. These drugs work relative. Now, I've tried drugs, you know, I have experience with drugs, unfortunately. And I can attest to the fact that it's all relative. If I consume coffee, it's like consuming mushrooms. It's like it's like taking a handful of psilocybin mushrooms and eating them all at once. That's what it feels like to drink a cup of coffee. In reality, that's what everyone is doing. So it's a total drug. It's a total drug. And it's really, really strong. We've just built up the tolerance so we don't see it. But when you get off it, the magnitude of change is just as extreme as it is when you get off the so-called street drugs. My life consuming caffeine and not consuming caffeine is night and day. I'm not the same person. I don't like the same things. Or rather, I know what I like and what I don't like, which is one of the biggest blessings in my life now. You know, how rare is it? How rare is it in general for people to say, I know what I like and what I don't like? Like I know, for example, I don't like table tennis. I really I really know that for a fact. It's not about table tennis, just the fact that I know what I like and what I don't like. When you're caffeinated or when I was caffeinated, I wasn't sure. I was like, maybe I just have to get into it. You know, because there are days when you're caffeinated, when you do enjoy those things, right, because you're caffeinated. So you're confused. You're confused because of the drug, just like people who go skiing. Right. I know a lot of people who go skiing, but they're really just getting drunk at the bars on the mountains. So do they love skiing or do they love beer? Right. Do they love alcohol? That's the question. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Until next time.