My Totally Serene *Year* Without Caffeine

A reflection & update.

Over a year has passed since I began my little experimental caffeine-free journey, which I originally chronicled in the essay My Totally Serene Life Without Caffeine over on Medium. I never got around to migrating that piece to Substack after Medium instituted an unskippable paywall, but now seems like the perfect time to rerun it and offer a quick one-year postmortem.

I originally quit caffeinated coffee on a lark, to see if I would experience the flu-like symptoms, depressive crash, and jarring career crisis that some of Reddit.com/r/Decaf’s most dramatic users report. Instead, I discovered that my mind felt calmer and clearer almost instantly, and the tension and acidity that always inhabited my stomach completely went away. And though most users on r/Decaf caution that fully adjusting to a life without caffeine takes the body anywhere from five months to a year, I made the transition easily, without so much as a single headache. Drinking decaffeinated coffee helped, and there’s research to back that up.

After a day or two without caffeine I was sleeping soundly, waking easily, shitting less explosively, having to actually attend to my hunger cues instead of suppressing them, and mostly accepting my own energy limitations rather warring with them. I understood that moving at slower pace rather than blasting out my cortisol receptors with a stimulant would lead to my being less productive, and I recognized that was a priority shift in my life that probably needed to happen. I also realized that most people lack the autonomy and economic privilege to be able to make such a choice.

A year later, I find that my sentiments about the decaf lifestyle are about the same as they were one month into the process. I continue to fall asleep easily, sleep soundly, and rise without difficulty. My first beverage every morning is water, which my stomach and skin both thank me for, and if my schedule gets disrupted or I have to run somewhere early, I don’t stress about where my morning dose of caffeine is going to come from. In the days before going decaf, making sure I had enough coffee in the house at all times was a constant stressor, and the next morning’s cup of coffee was always the final thought in my mind when my head hit the pillow. Now I appreciate a good decaf cup as a soothing treat rather than a necessity.

I can sit through long movies FAR more easily since quitting caffeine. Back when I saw Dune Part 1 I was a jittery, irritated mess, and left the theater in the middle of the climactic fight scene because all the sand was making me thirsty. Just last week, I saw Dune Part 2 and marveled at every languid, dust-speckled minute of it — with a large, fortifying can of seltzer in hand because I wasn’t too impatient to handle the concession line on the way in. I am more patient with my friends now, and a better listener. If a work meeting goes five or ten minutes over schedule I don’t have a meltdown.

Some days I feel a mental fogginess and the writing doesn’t come out how I’d like it to, but such days will always exist, and I’ve continued trying to make my peace with that. Caffeine never really helped me beat back the mental fatigue anyway, it only made my lack of focus faster and angrier. I’m still constitutionally a bundle of anxious energy and likely always will be, but it’s almost always manageable now, a rising alarm that I can quiet with a long walk, a few deep breaths, a vigorous chinchilla-cage-cleaning-session, or a strongly worded boundary-setting email. I don’t really scream and stomp around the house or feel like I will explode.

I have no intention of ever going back on caffeine. Quitting a once-daily stimulant has only brought positives into my life. Yes, I still splurge on foamy, sweetened decaf drinks at Dunkin' Donuts more often than I need to, and yes, my once-toxic overreliance on caffeine says more the pressure capitalism exerts on everyone than it does about me. But quitting caffeine is helping me detach from some of those pressures. And I wish that everyone had the option to try it.

So, without further preamble, here’s the rerun of My Totally Serene Life Without Caffeine, originally published to Medium on April 1, 2023.

I cannot stop reading the r/decaf Subreddit.

Posts on the site veer wildly from the calmly helpful, to the philosophical and rebellious, to the despondent. One moment a contributor will be helpfully explaining the difference between the Swiss Water decaffeination process and the conventional, solvent-based method of stripping caffeine from beans. The next, somebody will be spiraling in despair at their plummeting work performance and newfound sluggishness, begging to know when withdrawal symptoms will end.

Some users on r/decaf treat quitting caffeine as one simple step on a broader life improvement journey, one marked by reductions in smoking and a new meditation habit. Others discuss quitting caffeine as a white-knuckled last-ditch effort for psychological survival. R/decaf posters share that quitting caffeine has improved everything from social anxiety, to Bipolar disorder, to GERD, to PMS symptoms. Still others say that stopping the substance has completely ravaged their career prospects and left them with sciatica, or a months-long flu.

Whenever an r/decaf user likens quitting coffee to stopping harder drugs like Vyvanse or heroin (which happens often), a fair number of replies tell them to quit being so hyperbolic. But others rush in to the original poster’s defense. Caffeine’s the most difficult habit of all to kick, many say, because depending upon it is so socially sanctioned. Everyone drinks coffee all day long! It can be found lurking chocolate, energy drinks, seltzers, protein bars, and teas! Offices foist the stimulant on their employees!

And the fatigue you get from stopping can be seriously brutal. So brutal that some r/decaf users plan entire vacations or sabbaticals so they can recover from withdrawal without having to work.

Quitting is difficult, r/decaf posters say; it can take anywhere from a few months to over a year of tapering and miserable-feeling symptoms. But it’s worth it, they constantly remind one another, so worth it. Off caffeine, they promise, you’ll be far more attuned to the natural rhythms of your body. When your motivation reaches its limit, you’ll know it. You may even find yourself becoming more aware of your emotions or other self-destructive habits you were using caffeine to paper over.

Off caffeine, r/decaf posters say, you’ll sleep far more deeply. You’ll no longer be plagued by anxious nightmares, and might stop ripping your cuticles apart. Your stomach will settle, so you can defecate with regularity and ease. And pretty often, r/decaf posters note, caffeine addicts use the boost they get from coffee or other drinks to mask larger problems in their life, such as ongoing malnutrition, a lack of access to green spaces, or severe depression. Throwing back the curtain of overstimulation and finding a deep well of exhausted despair can be clarifying.

Getting off of a stimulant can be tricky, in other words, and it does come with its costs. But the reward is being able to take an honest stock of what you’re truly, safely capable of — and every payment you’ve been quietly, thoughtlessly throwing into the open maw of your own energy debt.

I feel immense affection for every single person on this site. So many of them get so close to articulating that their real problem is a culture shaped by individualism and capitalism, where each one of us lives and dies by our capacity to produce and where striving to live ‘independently’ is seen as the ultimate goal. But few say it outright.

Instead, r/decaf users observe that caffeine floods them with anxiety and makes them snap at their spouse, yet it seems to be necessary in order to pay their bills. They hate that caffeine renders them sour-stomached and short-tempered, equipped with permanent “problem goggles” that turn all life’s hard truths into enraging threats — but they can’t afford to live at a slower, fuzzier, contented pace either. They’re trapped between the insight that their life is unmanageable and the cost of what such a realization truly means.

And so they take naps, and pop magnesium supplements for their headaches, and discuss strategies for titrating their dose.

After idly reading r/decaf for a few months, I knew I had to give quitting caffeine a try. I’d been a devoted caffeine addict since I joined the debate team at fourteen years old, and began drinking coffee to wake myself up at 6am on Saturdays for matches. Really, I was doing it in order to seem more adult and serious. Coffee was the drink of hard-working, high-achieving, impatient careerists — everything that I wanted to be. I was one of Chris Fleming’s laurel-chasing Teens Who Drink Coffee. And after I got hooked on the stuff, I never looked back.

That was the case until a profound case of burnout stole away my health and mental resolve for a period of about nine months back in 2014. I walked away from my illness realizing that I was Autistic, and that I’d been compensating for my social & developmental difficulties by being as productive as I possibly could. All the stimulants in the world couldn’t make up for the fact that I was fragile and human, and needed far more rest and food that I’d ever allowed myself.

In the years since that bout of reality-disrupting illness, I’ve become a stalwart advocate for neurodiversity and anti-work, arguing that all life is equally valuable, no matter what that life is or is not capable of. And I’ve tried to live out those values by doing less, disappointing people on purpose, saying no often, eating more, and curbing my compulsive social media habit.

But I still feel anxious and overwhelmed just about always — even opening my inbox to find meeting invitations can provoke an hours-long explosion of ‘calendar madness’ wherein I stomp around the house angrily, cancelling every obligation that I can think of and screeching nervous diatribes about how demanding everybody is into the voice thread app on my phone.

My stomach never stops churning with worry. When I try to fall asleep, I can think of nothing but reasons why I’m a total piece of shit who is fucking everything up and losing everybody close to me. Anytime something is asked of me, it feels like I’m being lit on fire. I’ve tried doing less, abundantly less, extravagantly less, and yet life is still too much— too fast, too demanding, too overstimulating.

Every single day since I was 14, I have asked coffee to fill the chasm between my will and what is expected of me. But after reading r/decaf for months, I wanted to know what an unalloyed, unfrenzied version of myself might actually be capable of — and what he wasn’t.

And so, on one especially grey and cold day in mid-February, I decided to quit.

Photo by Heather Ford on Unsplash

Despite how seriously r/decaf presents the prospect of quitting, and in spite of my nearly two decade dependence on the stuff, I found kicking caffeine shockingly easy.

On the first day, I rolled up to my desk with my standard medium-sized Dunkin Donuts iced coffee, but rather than sucking it down mindlessly, I instructed myself to sip slowly, and quit drinking the moment I felt my heart rate rising even a little bit.

This happened after about twenty minutes of work, or maybe ten sizable sips. At that point, the jolt of alertness that caffeine had given me morphed into distracting alarm. Tasks no longer felt accomplishable. Instead, they felt menacing. I resented every late student assignment submission or stray email that popped into my inbox. I let myself notice this rising anxiety. I put the rest of my coffee away in the fridge. Miraculously, I could feel my irritation receding, like a tide rolling out.

The next day, I did the same thing, taking slow, mindful sips from the same day-old iced coffee. This time, I could feel that familiar panicked, acidic feeling rising in my stomach after just five or six sips. The moment I noticed it, I put the coffee away. Yet again, the anxiety dissipated just as quickly as it had arrived. On the next day, I did the same thing, but I only needed about three shallow, birdlike sips before I started feeling stressed.

In this way, I made a single 16-ounce iced coffee (which in the past would have only lasted me half a day) last for four days.

After that cup was used up, I started ordering decaf. I bought decaf beans and started cold brewing them at home. When I found myself out at a coffee shop or diner, I ordered decaf Americanos or rooibos teas.

Aside from the mild hassle of having to check food and drink labels and reject offers of dark chocolate and Chai-flavored seltzers, adhering to my new caffeine-free lifestyle proved to be a breeze. I expected headaches, but I never got them. I thought I’d be unable to work, but I actually found a clarifying, calm kind of focus. I didn’t need naps, and I didn’t feel sick.

Any other time that I’d gone more than a day without coffee, a big bloom of tension had radiated across my temples and plagued me until I chased down a cup of joe to fix it. I’d feel sludgy and tired and my guts would stop up. But I’d never tried to quit on purpose before. Missing coffee had always been a random error, like stepping outside without underwear.

This time, I had planned for shitty feelings and withdrawal symptoms, and I didn’t get them. Just a few days of tapering coupled with mindful awareness of my body’s response to caffeine made that much of a difference.

My Autistic Journey Into Mindfulness

I’ve spent my life shutting out my surroundings. It’s time to try embracing reality instead.

devonprice.medium.com

Before quitting, I’d bought a packet of green vein kratom, because I’d heard it could help with caffeine cravings. I found that I didn’t need it. Research shows that drinking decaf does wonders to ameliorate caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and that was my experience. Instead of experiencing r/decaf’s trademark flulike symptoms and mood crashes my energy was cutting a long, reliable arc over the course of the day.

But no longer being drugged up with artificial urgency left me in a reflective and experimental mood. If caffeine could be such a strong determinant of my feelings and life outlook, what might other substances do? Normally that was a question that I’d find wasteful and extravagant. I used to think substances were only valid to use if they helped improve my work. Now that I was off caffeine, I didn’t care about that so much. Life seemed to be for living, for noticing and experiencing new things. So one evening I shrugged to myself, said “fuck it,” and tried the kratom anyway.

I dumped one heaping tablespoon into a pot of boiling water and tempered its infamous “dog’s ashes” flavor with generous squeezes of lemon. Then I curled up on the couch with an odd little book I’d discovered at the Leather Museum and Archive: a self-published BDSM guide written by a charmingly eccentric former blogger who’s now in prison for having provided housing to sex workers. I put on some music and read while I idly sipped at the drink.

Emotionally numbing relaxation and serenity rolled over me. I could not believe how mellow and un-guilty I felt. I wasn’t wasting time, reading for pleasure and learning about something so obscure as to be ‘useless’ to anybody else. I was just existing, and existence was pleasure. My music danced off my eardrums. The author’s conversational, typo-dappled prose didn’t annoy me or make me feel embarrassed for her, it just left me feeling close to her, like I’d been following her blog as a friend for a very long time.

For once my awareness wasn’t scanning my surroundings, looking for something wrong, looking for something I’d forgotten or failed. I was just there. And it was just fine.

…

My clear-headed calm carried over into the next day. I dozed deeply, but rose easily, yet another new gift of being off caffeine. When I woke, I immediately texted a friend to ask them to grab breakfast and go shopping with me. Normally I had far too much anticipatory anxiety to just up and make plans out of the blue like that.

Being around people is usually exhausting to me, a painstaking performance that demands a great deal of recovery time. But off caffeine, I discovered I could walk down the street with a bounce in my step and my eyes alert, yet not vigilant. I could look people in the eye. I could watch life unfold around me and observe people with interest, rather than perceiving them on some animal level as a threat.

I didn’t feel guilt about supposedly ‘wasting’ a day shooting the shit or blowing money on thrift store clothes either. I felt that moments like these were the reason to be a conscious being. When my friend told me about the dates they’d been on lately and the adventures they were having, I swelled with excitement on their behalf, none of my usual self-consciousness blocking me from that connection.

When I returned home at the end of the hang, I also didn’t feel squirrelly about the fact that it was a Saturday and I had no evening plans. Maybe I’d call my sister. Maybe I’d play a video game. Maybe not. Everything was fine. The weather had been beautiful. It had been a good day.

My problem goggles were gone.

A screenshot from my Instagram stories, dated February 25. I liken being off caffeine to being mildly stoned.

I was certain quitting caffeine would make me constipated, but that didn’t happen either. Rather than needing coffee to be able to shit, then having to dash to the bathroom after my first cup, I started waking up ready to use the toilet most morning, yet the need was never an emergency. I also started noticing hunger sooner, and actually addressing it rather than letting caffeine suppress it for hours until I became malnourished and hangry.

In general, all the movements and shifts of my body became more gentle once I stopped caffeine. I began falling asleep effortlessly, with no tossing and turning or nightmares. My sensory issues became muted — I was no longer enraged by the stomping of my upstairs neighbor’s kid. My skin cleared up a ton, and regained some of the soft bounciness I associated with youth.

Off caffeine, I could shift between tasks at my job more methodically, choosing where to direct my focus instead of leapfrogging from tab to tab as a series of random little alarms went off in my head. I could read books and not constantly feel my attention tugged toward this phone notification, or that order delivery status I just had to look up. I sat through long meetings without getting jittery. I didn’t get mad when people couldn’t get to the point. I let more things go.

Most startlingly of all, all the tense acidity in my stomach had completely vanished. I thought my gut was where my body inevitably stored anxiety. Every afternoon found me gulping down water to try and dilute the burn in my torso that had grown as the afternoon wore on. But that went away completely once I stopped caffeine.

No longer blasting my brain’s cortisol receptors with about 200 milligrams of stimulant per day, I found I could appreciate whatever I was doing, rather than speeding constantly ahead, as if life were nothing but a series of annoyances leading the way to death. Walking to the tanning salon, riding the bus to a friend’s birthday party, shopping for produce, lining up to board an airplane, making small talk at the bar, reading a poem; nearly every moment of existence could be languid, reflective fun.

Being off caffeine felt like being high all the time. No, it felt like enjoying being alive.

The poem Snapchat at the Magical Arctic Puffin Exhibit by Shelley Stewart Cato

About a week ago, I went to visit the local gay bathhouse Steamworks to soak in the hot tubs and have casual sex. I always enjoy going to Steamworks, but normally social anxiety prevents me from looking anybody in the eye. Since cruising culture relies on an elaborate system of glances and unspoken body cues, this put me at quite a disadvantage. Laying down on a bed with a blindfold on and my holes exposed had been my usual solution.

Off caffeine, my nervous dissociation ended. I walked through the sauna’s dark hallways and steam-blanketed passages with confidence, holding long glances when I wanted to, stoking the flames of others’ desire. If somebody approached me I sized them up, then broke my gaze pointedly if I wanted to be left alone. When a hirsute, bandanaed man came up to me asking where all the trans guys were, because he was looking to “try” one, I rebuffed him with a wry laugh and sent him on his way.

It was bizarre, feeling so socially capable and self-possessed. Was this how neurotypical people felt all the time?

Eventually, an adorable, mopey-haired guy with glasses waded past me in the hot tub and caught my interest. I puffed my chest up with pride instead of trying to hide it. I radiated sexuality in his direction intuitively, without being able to describe how I’d done it. I just knew I was telling him to come be near me. He picked up on my messages, and sidled up to my side. My hand found its way between his legs. Soon we were fondling one another, and then fucking.

A gaggle of nude, erect men gathered to watch and jerk off to us, and I found myself redirecting traffic and removing hands from his and my body with ease. “No thank you, we don’t want anyone joining us, but you can watch,” I heard myself say many times — charmingly, winningly, even earning smiles back from the men I’d just rejected. I’d never felt good telling somebody no before.

Later, when the sex was done, I watched myself saunter up to a table at the front of the locker room, jot down my number on a suggestion card, and hand it to my new companion with a grin. “I don’t have my phone on me, but here’s my number if you want to keep in touch,” I said, and I could feel myself smiling.

He grinned slyly back. I got a text back an hour or so later. Somehow I knew exactly what to say, how to allure my way into getting what I wanted.

I’ve heard from other people that I have a kind of unconscious magnetism, but it’s never been something I’ve been able to control. I’ve never felt charming. I’ve never enjoyed people’s attention being on me. But that hadn’t been a problem since quitting caffeine. Now I could initiate conversations at parties, navigate hookups without inhibition, dispatch people into action, and even intervene in awkward moments. I could appreciate what was happening around me, observing and interpreting instead of feeling trapped, as I previously had been, behind layers and layers of questioning glass.

I have gotten more tired since stopping caffeine — all the warnings on r/decaf were true in that respect. But it turned out I’d been tormented all my life by a surfeit of energy. I was used to thinking too much and too quickly, distracted at all times by a haze of past wounds, worst-case interpretations, and hypothetical scenarios. Quitting caffeine sedated me enough to think deliberately, and peacefully, about what was actually unfolding before me, rather than what I feared was.

All my life I’ve believed my anxiety kept me sharp, that I seemed so smart and was so accomplished because my mind did so much more than other people’s. I thought that I was made to suffer, that torturing myself internally all the time was the price of my talents and unique point of view. I’m so happy to be finding that really isn’t the case. Or if it was the case, I’m finding that I’m comfortable with being less impressive if it means suffering less in turn.

The title of this essay is deliberately cheeky — I’m aware that even without taking a daily anxiety-boosting stimulant, I will still have problems. I’ll likely never stop being a compulsive overthinker. Even if I am less nervous around others, I’m still pretty damn Autistic, which means I’ll keep missing cues and stepping on interpersonal landmines.

And the only reason I’ve been able to quit caffeine and move at a slower pace is because I have a cushy job as an author and a professor, where there’s significant flexibility in my work schedule, and even in the number of obligations I take on. That’s the difference between me and most of the users of r/decaf. I don’t need to chemically stimulate myself into endless productivity anymore. Many of the users on that forum seemingly have no choice.

I’m in the process of accepting that Autistic burnout has stolen skills and motivation from me that may never return. Saving up for an early retirement and eking out a modest, cheap existence with ample time to daydream, socialize, and be creative at my own pace has been my long-term goal for a while now. And now that I’m not creating an artificial sense of panic and urgency for myself with caffeine every day, that reality seems closer than ever.

I’m envisioning the kind of home I’d like to live in, and how I’ll make it cozy. I want to stop evaluating everything in my life only in terms of whether it helps me with work. I’m thinking of the spaces I’ll set aside to help shelter other people. I’m anticipating how I might be truly of service to others if I’m not rushing around all the time.

More Notes on the Adderall Not Adderalling

Plus: Coffee as the drug of capitalism. sluggish.substack.com

Caffeine is a widely popular drug throughout the globe, and it has been for centuries. Unlike other widely popular substances such as nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, or even other stimulants, access to caffeine is nearly always unregulated, if not actively encouraged. This is because, in addition to being addictive yet relatively harmless, caffeine has long been believed to boost energy while clarifying and focusing the mind.

In The Coffee Book, author Gregory Dicum and coffee & tea industry consultant Nina Luttinger write that “coffee has always been the perfect complement to dehumanizing industrialization.” In an essay on the bloody, imperialist history of the coffee industry, Benjamin Y. Fong states that, “throughout the history of capitalism [caffeine’s] harmlessness has been employed in the service of the endurance of harm.” Even the concept of the coffee break was concocted by employers, who hoped a mandatory daily pause for stimulant dosing would lend a bit more pep to worker’s steps.

Militaries around the world have long appreciated that caffeine can increase vigilance, improve reasoning skills, and shorten reaction time in service members running on little sleep. Of course, those same armies have often experimented with the effects of other stimulants and amphetamines on their bedraggled soldiers, too, frequently with traumatic effects. There is almost no limit these institutions won’t push the body and mind to, in pursuit of extracting more.

Most of us aren’t sleep-deprived soldiers, but we still reach for caffeine to try and juggle life’s demands. No person can work a full time job, prepare three nutritious meals per day, keep a home clean and well-repaired, stay up to date on all of the bills and the shopping, maintain a balanced social life, exercise, and manage to squeeze out a few extra hours per week on some kind of creatively or spiritually fulfilling pursuit all on their own.

Hell, an abundance of research (that I won’t ever stop crowing about) shows that the average person can’t even be expected to work for eight hours per day. Humans’ attentional capacity taps out at about hour three of the workday. Industrial-organizational psychologists have been noting this for decades, but business leaders aren’t listening. They’d much rather extend our hours, return us to the office, and expand the claim work makes upon our lives. They do this even when all the data shows they’ve already extracted as much labor from us as we can possibly give.

Caffeine exists to help us ignore the fact we’re expected to do the impossible. Many of the devotees to r/decaf are intimately aware of such facts. Unfortunately, except for a handful of incredibly privileged members like me, there’s little most of them can do about any of it. And so they cast about for replacement substances, pop multivitamins, take sick days to cope with cold sweats and migraines, and post questions to the forum for months, wondering when their previous, painful, impossible-to-sustain levels of productivity will be coming back.

If you’d like to read more about antiwork and the science of productivity, you can check out my book Laziness Does Not Exist.