My husband and I stopped drinking coffee last Friday (its been 5 days so far). There were several reasons why we quit, but the main one was that we didn’t want to bother with the hassle of seeking out happy* (or unhappy) coffee sources while we’re in the middle of nowhere during our upcoming trip. Right now we have been drinking tea (I’ve been on caffeinated tea and husband on caffeinated and decaffeinated tea). The plan is to switch to decaf tea by next week. 

I’ve quit coffee before to see if I could do it. About three years ago I took a 2 week vacation and stayed home and spent most of my time in bed with the most horrid headaches imaginable. I eventually went back to drinking coffee (one large cup per day, sometimes two on longer days).

So far we have not experienced headaches. Besides incredible drowsiness, it hasn’t been too bad.

I did nap alot this past weekend, and I was one of many who napped all over Manhattan (on the bench, in the park, on husband’s lap). The napping made the withdrawal easier to deal with. I can’t nap at work unless I hide under my table and curl up into a ball.

When I was writing this post, I thought I would post a huge list of reasons why one ought to quit coffee. But then I got sidetracked and started reading the articles without realizing how much time I was spending on it. One of those articles was  Caffeine: It’s the world’s most popular psychoactive drug.

An excerpt:

It’s hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn’t exist. 

"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep
expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."