Still off caffeine, 13 years later

Greetings from the road.  Over the past two weeks I’ve been at home (northern Virginia), Florida, California, and Florida, then back home for a few days.  The next fortnight sees more travel as well.  So my current posts are cobbled together from multiple sites, transmitted over varying kinds of WiFi.

I have a series of serious posts in the pipeline, stuffed with data and futurist’s analysis, but today I have to share a personal story. The reason is that someone on Hacker News published a link to one of my oldest and most widely read posts, and this kind gesture caused me to reflect.  So today I’ll get personal and write about… health.

tl;dr version – years ago I gave up caffeine, after drinking far more than I should have.  I’m still off the stuff and doing fine.

To explain: during the 1990s and 2000s I consumed epic amounts of caffeine in an ambitious range of forms.  Coffee, Turkish coffee, Mountain Dew, Jolt Cola, chocolate, you name it: I was a fiend.  And not just in the early mornings, but during lunch, afternoons, even late at night.  Quantities were very high. My tolerance was off the charts.  I used to drink Mountain Dew before bed.

Contemporary caffeine delivery mechanisms

(More gory details in this post.) Gradually this started to make me ill, then badly sick. My primary care physician was horrified and ordered me off the stuff.  I complied, went cold turkey, and eventually changed my life.  (More details in this post.). I wrote more about this afterwards, in 2014, 2015, and 2019.

Fourteen years later and… I’m still caffeine free.  I’ve never gone back.  In fact, I’m close to straight edge, as I don’t drink alcohol, never use tobacco or other drugs.  I’ve eaten a 100% vegan diet foe around five years now. Heck, I barely eat any sugar, and that’s mostly in fruit.

Readers might be interested to know that my physical health is fine, according to all medical tests.  I’m closing in on 60 years old and all indicators are good.  It helps that I am very physically active, between walking a lot, biking regularly, and lifting weights every two days. I’m very professionally active, with a big research agenda, teaching classes, traveling to give talks, writing books, making videos, creating newsletters, etc.  The lack of caffeine in my body hasn’t slowed me down a bit.

Mental changes might be more interesting.  For years I’ve felt zero temptation to fall off the wagon, despite having plenty of opportunities.  When grocery shopping for the house I see vast amounts of caffeine, from the coffee and tea aisle in shops to many coffee vendors hawking their wares at farmers’ markets to omnipresent soda, yet I simply pass them by.  It’s a bit like seeing baby products (baby food, diapers, etc), which I mentally process as part of a previous stage of my life (our children are adults now) and therefore not germane to me presently.  Every morning I make coffee for my wife but feel no desire to sip any of it.  Back when I went cold turkey I longed for it, then trained myself to associate caffeine with sickness, which worked.  Nowadays caffeine just not a factor in my thought or feeling.  Thirteen years is a long time.

My days are different. When I was on coffee etc. my daily routine included a major caffeination roller coaster.  I woke up groggy and badly needed the jolt (or Jolt). I would lose energy, badly, at certain times of the day or in certain situations (boring meeting, long plane flight) and craved the chemical boost. I fear that as a result I wasn’t just hyper when caffeine worked in my veins, but also impatient with non-overclocking people.  I think I had a hard time listening and am very sorry for that.  

Now, without those substance-fuelled peaks and valleys, my days are much more steady. I wake up less exhausted, although I still suffer from work-driven lack of sleep. My mind clicks on readily, quickly shifting to issues of my family and house, or research, or the day’s logistics, unless the animals have already made their agenda felt. Afterwards most of the day tends to be clear and my energy steady. I do get mid-afternoon sleepiness around 3-4 pm, but I power through it with mental concentration and some physical activity.  I am fortunate to see my work as fascinating and having some meaning, so that is a reliable source of energy.

At work.

My post-caffeine diet remains pretty much the same as in 2012.  I avoid chocolate and anything which contains caffeine.  I also consume very little spicy food, far less than I used to back in the day, although I do experiment.  I can manage some acidic foods in very small amounts, such as tomatoes or oranges; sometimes they have bad effects, even now.  Almost everything I drink is water these days, preferably sparkling, and I can nerd out about different types.  I sometimes drink hot water when I’m feeling cold, and there’s a faint echo of old coffee and tea rituals there.

So that’s where things stand now.  What do you think?  Any questions?

Many thanks to andsoitis for prompting this look back!

(photo of me by Tom Woodward)