No Coffee for an Entire Year

It was after two hours on hold and being transferred between three different call centers that I finally snapped.

I unleashed a tirade of frustration on a customer service employee who, in retrospect, probably didn't deserve any of it. The moment the last angry word left my mouth, I knew I had been an unbelievable jerk.

Yes, the problem I had called about still hadn't been resolved. Yes, an entire afternoon that I desperately needed for a multitude of other tasks had instead disappeared into the soul-sucking abyss of customer service hold music.

None of that mattered.

I had been rude to the wrong person.

As I sat there feeling thoroughly deflated and ashamed of myself, I wondered what I could do to make sure it didn't happen again. In my hand was a now-room-temperature cup of coffee with a double shot of espresso added. I looked at it.

There was my scapegoat.

Perhaps all that caffeine had contributed to my spectacular loss of patience. Whether or not coffee deserved the full blame, I latched onto the idea and issued myself an edict: I would stop drinking caffeinated beverages for as long as I could stand it.

There was probably some accidental caffeine consumption along the way. Chocolate contains caffeine, for example, and I'm sure there were things I ate without realizing they contained small amounts of it. But when it came to coffee, caffeinated soda, and other obvious sources, I stuck surprisingly close to my self-imposed mandate.

For an entire year.

Here's what happened.

First, the Good

I tend to be an anxious person, and at the time I was also dealing with persistent depression. Neither was necessarily obvious to people who didn't know me well, but both affected my everyday life.

During the first few caffeine-free days, I had headaches.

Lots of headaches.

Once those subsided, however, I noticed something unexpected: the intensity of my usual anxiety seemed to decrease. I want to be careful about how I phrase that because I'm not suggesting that giving up coffee is a treatment for an anxiety disorder. I'm simply describing what happened to me.

My anxiety didn't disappear. It just felt less crushing.

I also noticed that by the end of the day, I wasn't experiencing the same degree of exhaustion. My temper seemed a little more even, too.

Then there was the financial benefit.

Coffee shops had apparently been accepting a sizable portion of my income as a voluntary tax on consciousness. Without my regular visits, more money remained in my wallet.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, my caffeine-free experiment had some less desirable consequences as well.

Then, the Not-So-Good

By the end of that year, I had gained about thirty pounds.

I also discovered how much I had relied on caffeine when I genuinely needed an extra burst of energy. On an unusually long workday or after a bad night's sleep, there was no emergency button anymore. My body would announce that it was tired, and I had little choice but to respond. Yes, apparently we are.

My depression didn't noticeably improve either. If anything, I sometimes found that I had less of an artificial energy boost available to help me push through a difficult day.

Taken together, the experiment was both better and worse than I had expected.

I felt somewhat calmer, but I also missed having caffeine available when I actually needed it.

After a year, I decided I had collected enough data from my extremely unscientific experiment. Being a coffee fiend clearly wasn't ideal for me, but neither was treating caffeine like a controlled substance.

So I slowly brought it back.

Then I Discovered the Coffee-Shop Problem

Not long after I started drinking coffee again, I made another disturbing discovery.

At one point, I calculated that I was spending roughly $90 a week at coffee shops.

Ninety dollars.

Apparently, I hadn't resumed drinking coffee so much as acquired a small recurring financial obligation.

I was also drinking more soda again, which added a considerable amount of sugar and calories to my diet. Despite returning to my morning Starbucks ritual, however, I lost around ten pounds during my first summer back on caffeine, although I didn't lose all the weight I had gained.

The experience also made me notice how interconnected my routines had become.

When I stopped at a coffee shop, I often bought lunch at the same time—usually something like a panini. Without the coffee stop, I sometimes forgot lunch altogether.

This was not an improvement.

My workdays could become hectic enough that if I didn't deliberately schedule meals, I simply wouldn't eat. Missing lunch made me less productive and considerably grouchier.

I had apparently spent a year thinking I had eliminated coffee when I had actually disrupted an entire ecosystem.

What I Learned

After trying both extremes, I came away with a decidedly unexciting conclusion:

Moderation works better for me.

Coffee isn't inherently evil, and caffeine wasn't responsible for every bad mood or stressful day I ever had. But I did learn that consuming too much of it seemed to make me more anxious and left me feeling burned out. I also learned that turning coffee-shop visits into a daily ritual could get astonishingly expensive.

On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy coffee. Sometimes I appreciate the extra alertness caffeine provides, and occasionally stopping for a cup of coffee and something to eat serves as a reminder that I'm allowed to stop working long enough to have lunch.

So these days, I aim for the middle ground. Decaf or lower-caffeine options give me the ritual I enjoy without leaving me feeling like I could hear electricity.

Most importantly, I learned not to blame a beverage for behavior that ultimately belongs to me.

That customer service representative may have caught me after two hours of transfers, an unresolved problem, and a double espresso, but I was still the person who lost my temper.

The coffee may have wound me up.

It didn't make the phone call.