A Word Against Caffeine

Giving up caffeine isn't for everyone. I wouldn't have chosen to do it myself, but I felt I needed to. Here is my story…

I gave up caffeine in November 2008. I had tried, halfheartedly, to cut down the caffeine consumption now and again, but it always crept back up to too many cans of soda a day. When I started drinking chai, too, though, I found that caffeine was really bad on my blood pressure. I actually had a medical professional say "That can't be… I'm going to take your blood pressure again," and then get nearly the same reading. Ouch. Since I'm hoping to live forever, or as close to forever as I can arrange, I decided that I didn't want to continue hurting my internal systems and so I quit drinking anything with caffeine. (Even decaffeinated tea, it turns out, has caffeine… just less of it). So now I drink herbal teas and caffeine-free soda. Carbonation keeps me alert, though. Marvelous stuff.

Interestingly, once I suffered through a couple weeks of withdrawal (the headaches, etc.) and then another couple weeks of feeling slow and stupid, I found that I returned to normal. Or as normal as I'm ever likely to be called.

So now I have a theory about caffeine. I'm basing this solely on my own experience and clever, though unproven, analogy, so I'm sure medical scientists will soon by stopping by my house to ask me questions on many other topics and I'll be glad to think about things for them. Maybe I'll even perform experiments on myself, because I am totally generous when it comes to the good of all humanity and my own fame. Anyway, about caffeine. I'm thinking that caffeine doesn't actually produce energy. Instead, it allows you to push your body harder without noticing the effects right away. Your body and mind only have so much energy to give… that's mostly unchanged no matter how much you coax. So, in a way, caffeine hands you energy only by taking it from elsewhere: from your tomorrow self. It's like energy on credit. Ka-ching! You still have to pay for it later, just not right now. That debt of energy is part of what makes giving caffeine up so maddeningly difficult. Once I broke the cycle of using tomorrow's energy, though, (or the energy from the days and weeks after that) I ended up nearly as alert without the caffeine.

Unless it's all a perception bias. I suppose I could have simply gotten used to the new slower, stupider me. If that is actually the case, and it's noticeable, I probably won't thank you for informing me of that, because I am enjoying this potentially delusional idea, as well as my healthy, frequently even athletic, blood pressure.

There's one other thing I keep telling myself. I believe that I used to be buying energy on credit by drinking caffeine. Well, I read that caffeine gives you a bigger boost if there's less in your system, so you can save up for those times you really need it. Now I have a system that's free of caffeine, so I am sitting on quite a wealth of energy here. I could pop open a soda and cash in that energy sometime when I really really need it. I'll be practically superhuman the day I do, and knowing that makes me smugly happy at times like right now, when I'm lusting for a nap.