The Case Against Caffeine
I'm gonna be real with you.
The only reason I started drinking coffee as an adult was to help me take a shit every morning.
It was a daily habit for years, until one morning on the throne I thought: Isn't it wild that I rely on a drug to help me perform such a basic biological function?
So I quit.
Armed with some transition-period laxatives, I set out on my caffeine-free adventure and stumbled across some unexpected serious benefits. I want to share them now, so you can jump in on them too:
I got way more stuff done, faster.
My feelings of anxiety basically disappeared.
I felt more alert without caffeine, because I slept much better.
Toppling world's favourite stimulant will take more than just my story, so here I also present to you the rigorous findings of members from a fine establishment: the r/decaf subreddit.
For my more cerebral readers, I'll chuck in a bit of science too. But really the point is that you should do the experiment for yourself.
Just fuck around and you'll find out if caffeine-free works for you.
Anxiety
My Anxiety
Day 1 after stopping, I woke up, enjoyed some morning sunlight (shoutout Huberman) and felt oddly calm. There was a shitstorm brewing at work, but it didn't affect me that much. I checked in on how I was feeling...
... And I felt good. Looking back on all my caffeinated mornings, I noticed a pattern of feeling rushed, pressed and stressed. I thought it was just normal morning bustle. But I realised it was actually my physiology. I was anxious all that time.
That's right. I didn't even realise caffeine made me anxious. For years. Until I quit.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, you can take
’s instead - our resident Substack guru makes no room for you: your caffeine addiction has to go.
The Redditors’ Anxiety
I'm not alone. u/BlackMelb had the same instant response:
caption...
u/burnabar and I were equally clueless about our internal states:
And thankfully for u/ocen4200's wife and kids, they're no longer on the receiving end of his temper tantrums:
The Science Of Caffeine-Induced Anxiety
Caffeine does 2 things to the body.
Thing 1:
It binds to adenosine receptors in your brain.
This stops actual adenosine from binding to the adenosine receptors.
Adenosine is a sleep-inducing, slow the fuck down kinda molecule.
By stopping adenosine from working, caffeine makes your brain produce more adrenaline and dopamine
This chemical imbalance makes you feel more awake, more alert, and more stimulated. Especially when you're tired.
Thing 2:
It blocks an enzyme called phosphodiesterase (quite the mouthful).
Blocking this enzyme increases the amount of cAMP floating around in your heart cells.
cAMP is a molecular messenger.
When your heart cells detect adrenaline in your blood, cAMP is what carries that message and makes your heart pump faster.
So more cAMP means adrenaline has a bigger effect.
Result? Pounding heart and higher blood pressure.
Ok, I lied. Caffeine does more than 2 things. To read more about these things, check out
’s post here.
Beta-1 receptors (red cylinder) detect adrenaline (orange circle) in the blood. They then stimulate calcium release from the sacroplasmic reticulum of muscle cells (via cAMP), which causes muscles to contract. That’s how the heart beats faster and stronger in the presence of adrenaline. Source.
More adrenaline + pounding heart + higher blood pressure + more alertness = preparing your body for fight or flight.
Your brain interprets these physiological changes as a feeling.
For some, that’s a feeling of anxiety.
Like me, some of you might be so accustomed feeling this, that it doesn’t even register until you cut the caff.
Sleep
My Sleep
For my entire adult life, I struggled to fall asleep, and woke up before 7am, no matter what time I slept. I thought it was just part of getting older. I was wrong.
Day 1 off the beans, I admit I was a bit tired.
But day 2, I got to bed on time. I slept through the night. I woke up at 8am, completely refreshed. I felt more calm-yet-alert than I could remember. I was awake and ready to attack the day. And after a good day's work, I had no problems falling asleep in minutes.
I never felt like I needed coffee to help my brain feel more awake (only my bowels 💩), but I suspect most people do.
I learnt that quitting caffeine made me sleep better, which then made me feel way more awake the next day.
Weirdly, I also started dreaming way more, and I could actually remember my dreams - which I never could before.
The Redditors’ Sleep
The aptly named u/TheMindfulExplorer echoed my experience:
... as did u/unfluxa, who managed to unflux their fluxed up sleep:
u/Laraso_ weaned off even more drugs, AND also got his dreams back! I hope they are busy chasing them now 🤞:
The Science Of Sleep
If, like my past self, you only have a single cup of coffee in the morning and follow the standard advice of no caffeine after 3pm, why the hell does it affect your sleep so much at the other end of the day?
That's all to do with half lives.
Once you've chopped your oat-pumpkin-frappé-with-2-squirts-of-vanilla-syrup-topped-with-whipped-cream-and-a-sprinkle-of-cinnamon, the caffeine will kick in under 30 minutes.
But it takes hours for the effects to wear off.
In fact, it takes between 2-12 hours for your body to clear out just half of whatever caffeine you took in1. A 2-12 hour half-life is a big range. Some people might clear out the caffeine quickly, but I suspect I’m on the longer end of the spectrum - and some of you probably are too.
If you're an unlucky (or lucky) bugger like me and clear caffeine slowly, at 9pm you might still have half your daily intake's worth of caffeine swirling around your circulation. For people like us, drinking 4 coffees during the day is the same as downing 2 coffees just before bed.
Who in their right mind would do that?
But it gets worse, especially if you drink lots of caffeine throughout the day. In that case, you never give your body the chance to clear it out. So the base concentration in your blood slowly creeps up:
Could it get even worse?… Yes. Your body breaks down caffeine into a molecule called paraxanthine. Paraxanthine actually has stronger effects in keeping people awake than caffeine2, and has an additional half life of 8-10 hours.
This means the wakefulness promoting effects of caffeine and paraxanthine work round the clock, and disrupt your sleep quality whether you feel it or not.
Single doses of caffeine can affect EEG brain waves in mice for more than 2 days3 (sadly we can’t ask them how it makes them feel), and chronic consumption affects sleep quality in humans too4. These are just 2 studies of many that show caffeine reduces rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, which is the phase of sleep when you are dreaming.
That’s right people. Caffeine is literally killing your dreams.
Some studies give conflicting evidence, but their sample sizes are often small and their scope is limited5. And the point I’m trying to make here is that your individual variability is far more important than what any study can tell you.
Productivity
My Productivity
After shaking off the day 1 blues, I realised that my calm state of mind meant that I was rushing less. Sure, I was moving slower... but as my long-time readers will know, SLOW IS SMOOTH AND SMOOTH IS FAST.
I got more done.
I moved more smoothly.
There was less stress in the air.
And that made room for the sweet smell of productivity.
A softer, more sustainable focus. In quitting caffeine, I re-learnt some important principles:
Movement does not equal progress.
Speed does not account for direction.
The Redditors’ Productivity
u/aspiringtobefree met their aspiration to be free of caffeine, and reported:
u/Annabelle-Sunshine whips out the overcooked "headless chicken" figure of speech, but I'll forgive her because she's supporting my case:
Finally, u/drunkslp8918 shares a short statement that cuts the fluff:
The Science Of Productivity
Sadly, the science falls short on this one. Most studies show that caffeine increases cognitive ability, memory and speed at performing intellectual tasks.
But there's 2 reasons the science doesn’t cut the mustard.
First, lots of these studies ask participants to do constrained tasks (like pointless brainteasers) in a set time.
This type of environment clearly doesn't account for the complexity of real life, where different tasks have to be prioritised, and procrastination is rife.
Sure, if you told me I had to do 100 sums as fast as I could, caffeine would probably make me do them faster. But you clearly can't extrapolate that result easily.
Despite that, people make this illogical leap all the fucking time. They take “productivity” results in the narrow domain of doing a task in a scientific experiment, and assume it applies to being productive in general. It does not.
Second, these experiments suffer from the perils of the cohort study6: they take the average outcome of all participants to determine whether the result of the experiment is positive or negative.
But with biological variability, the average answer is almost never the answer for any single person.
This is a fundamental disservice to the individual, which led Nassim Taleb to coin the aphorism "Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep".
A Note To The Naysayers (I know you're lurking)
At this point, many of you might be thinking: Zan, you sneaky weasel. Haven't you just cherry-picked your redditors and scientific publications to fit your narrative?
Yes.
Don't you care? Don't you think it's misleading?
Nah.
I'm not writing a philosophical treatise here. I'm not writing a lawsuit to take all coffee lovers to court. And I'm definitely not writing a scientific review.
What I'm sharing is the minority perspective. A perspective which may benefit more people than the standard narrative of caffeine consumption in our culture allows.
What I'm encouraging is for people to understand that we're all different.
Like me, you might be relying on caffeine on the basis of false assumptions or group effects that don’t apply to you. And that life might, just might, be better for you without it. I sprinkle in some science to show what might be driving this.
And in case you were wondering, turns out I can shit perfectly fine without coffee.
Peace out xx.