What happens when you give up coffee? Photo / Getty Images
From grogginess to bloating, my withdrawal symptoms were awful. But three months on, my physical and mental health have never been better.
Until recently, I had spent my whole life caffeinated. I had my first cup of tea when I was in primary school, my first mug of coffee when I was 12. I was dependent on the stuff throughout university and in my first few years of working life, getting through five or six mugs of strong coffee every day to compensate for the sleep that I avoided.
I never considered this to be a problem. Eighty per cent of Britons drink tea every day, and six in 10 people drink coffee. Coffee is especially good for you: people who drink three to five cups of it a day are up to 15% less likely to develop a cardiovascular disease, and just one or two each morning might be enough to cut your dementia risk by as much as 60%.
So why would I ever give caffeine up? The first call to action came from my bank account. I had been one of the Gen Zers who forks out at least £676 ($1504) on takeaway coffees every year. My daily oat latte habit had mounted up to a shameful £702 ($1562) by the end of September. Looking at the figures, I began to resent the fact that my local coffee shop had a direct line to my bank account.
READ MORE: How to find a New Year’s resolution you’ll stick with
I tried skipping my morning order but found that I was left with a pounding headache, nausea and a total lack of focus, making me massively unproductive. I also missed that familiar part of my day, a small luxury that had become routine, never failing to perk me up. It wouldn’t take long for me to break and head to Pret to get my fix.
Why was it that I was so desperately hooked on caffeine, I wondered – and what could life be like without it? In the last few years, a litany of celebrities have cut caffeine from their diets. Jennifer Lopez reasons that it “really wrecks your skin as you get older”. Fellow actress Julia Fox has quit coffee because “it goes right into the core of my brain, and then I’m wired”. Jim Carey rarely drinks coffee because his mental health improves when he abstains, he says, while Zendaya skips coffee only because “it doesn’t do anything for me”.
A Google deep dive took me to r/Decaf, a Reddit thread where stories about the life-changing impacts of going caffeine-sober are endless: more energy, better sleep, glowing skin and a brighter mood would all await me if I could just stick out a difficult first few weeks, commenters said. According to them, a reliance on caffeine is equally as hard to shift as an addiction to alcohol or cigarettes. I had never thought of myself as an addict before.
So on October 1, I had my first successful caffeine-free day in my adult life. It wasn’t fun. But three months on, I’m still going strong. Here’s what I’ve learnt.
I spent my first few caffeine-free days under a massive cloud of brain fog.
“Like any drug, your body becomes accustomed to caffeine when you take it regularly,” says Peter Rogers, an emeritus professor in the nutrition and behaviour unit of the University of Bristol. “When you take that drug away, you suffer the opposite of the effects that the drug would have when you were naive to it.”
Caffeine’s main work is to boost alertness and energy. After years of caffeine dependence, I was experiencing a cascade of withdrawal effects: aside from brain fog I felt fatigued, nauseous and irritable, with a pounding headache to boot. There were also cravings – I would find myself daydreaming about lattes, cappuccinos and coffee cakes at my desk. It took a full fortnight until I felt myself again and could concentrate as I usually would.
I felt so much duller, mentally. But the idea that a big cup of coffee will improve your mental clarity and sharpness is an illusion, says Prof Rogers, whether you’re a regular caffeine drinker or not.
In 2013, Prof Rogers led an experiment that tested whether coffee-drinkers would perform any better at mental tasks when given a coffee after 16 hours of going without caffeine, compared with another group of caffeine-free people.
“The group of coffee-drinkers were only as alert after drinking coffee as the people in the other group, who were given a placebo,” Prof Rogers says.
“This proved that coffee doesn’t actually do anything to improve your mental clarity. What it does is it has a mild anxiety effect, which widens your attention and makes you more alert to threats in your environment,” he explains.
“When you drink caffeine habitually, you become tolerant to those anxiety effects, and also to the alertness effects. All that happens when you have your first morning coffee is that you’re reversing the effects of having been without caffeine overnight.”
When my focus returned weeks later, I felt more able to concentrate than I had before giving caffeine up, even in the post-lunch afternoon slump when I would usually reach for my third or fourth coffee of the day. Without the hourly ebb and flow of caffeine-induced anxiety, I am now actually more productive.
“The molecular effects of caffeine are all to do with blocking the effects of adenosine,” Prof Rogers explains – adenosine being the chemical in your bloodstream that signals tiredness to your brain. “When you block the effects of adenosine, you don’t become tired.”
On average, it takes four to five hours for caffeine to make its way out of your system completely (though it can take as little as 90 minutes in some people, and as long as 12 hours in others). That’s why drinking caffeine late in the afternoon can keep you up at night, with those adenosine-blockers still working in your system.
When you take caffeine away from someone who’s a regular coffee drinker, “they become more sensitive to their own body’s adenosine”, says Prof Rogers. In my first fortnight without tea and coffee, my mornings were groggier than they had ever been before. Finding the energy to get out of bed became a real struggle.
Three months on, however, with my adenosine sensitivity reset, getting up in the morning has never been so easy. I wake up feeling better rested and less tired, even when I’ve been out late the night before.
Drinking coffee in the daytime reduces the amount of restorative slow-wave sleep you get throughout the night, and makes you more easy to wake. According to my fitness tracker, my average “sleep efficiency”, or how much time I actually spend asleep at night, rose from 80% in October to 84% in December – in line with research suggesting that caffeine can reduce sleep efficiency by up to 7%. No wonder that I now wake up feeling refreshed.
Now that I’m caffeine-free, I need much more rest to remain alert by the end of the day, even though I’m sleeping better. The effects of this were strongest in my first few weeks without coffee: I would find myself reaching for sugary snacks and (caffeine-free) fizzy drinks to boost my energy while I felt completely deflated, crashing into bed at 9pm.
Three months in, my energy levels are more stable, but they’re still not what they were. I often fall asleep on the sofa on a Friday night and I’m usually the first to leave a party, which isn’t a good look when you’re 24.
I’ve found some workarounds: making sure that I exercise in the morning rather than the evening leaves me feeling more energised throughout the day and means that I’m recovering more fully at night. A big breakfast helps to power me through the morning, too.
I’ll admit that not having tea or coffee to top up my energy can be majorly inconvenient. Yet in the long term, this could be a huge health benefit.
With no option but to get a full night’s sleep, I’m protecting myself from sleep deprivation, the long-term effects of which include worsened mental health, higher dementia risk, obesity and raised blood pressure. The extra exercise can’t hurt, either.
As Prof Tim Spector of Kings’ College, London, points out, “coffee is a major source of fibre intake for many people”. One cup of coffee could contain up to 1.5g of fibre.
But those are benefits that you can still get by drinking decaffeinated coffee.
“We focus too much on the effects of caffeine when we talk about the effects of coffee,” says Prof Spector. “There are dozens of other compounds that are also doing the heavy lifting when it comes to why coffee is so good for your health. You’ll still get the vast majority of the benefits that come with drinking coffee if you switch to decaf.”
I was also ravenously hungry in my first few days without caffeine. As a stimulant, caffeine is also an appetite suppressant, and I was used to skipping breakfast and drinking a coffee first thing in the day. I’ve likely gained a pound or two in the last few months.
I am a naturally anxious person – or so I had assumed.
The biggest thing I learnt from giving up caffeine was that I might not be quite so nervous as I had always thought myself to be. Even in my first few caffeine-free days, I felt calmer and less stressed. I’ve also felt happier most days since I gave up caffeine, as a result.
One morning in November I ordered a coffee rather than my usual herbal tea substitute without thinking, and felt too guilty (and tempted by the frothy-white contents) to tip it down the sink. By the time I got to the bottom of the cup, my heart rate was up, and into the afternoon I was having the sort of spiralling, anxious thoughts I hadn’t experienced in weeks.
It started to look like caffeine had been making me more anxious for years, without notice – because I had been drinking it for my whole life. “That might have a lot to do with the anxiety effect of caffeine,” Prof Rogers confirms: the coffee bean’s whole job is to make us mildly panic.
Yet the effects of caffeine on mood are complicated, and mysterious. Some research indicates that people with depression and anxiety are actually more sensitive to caffeine in the first place.
“People have quite significant individual differences when it comes to how big their anxiety response to caffeine can be,” says Prof Rogers.
Some people aren’t affected much by it, others respond strongly – and while some people do become immune to the anxiety that coffee causes over time, other people like me seem never to fully get there.
“The cool, nerdy thing is that it’s linked to differences in our genes, possibly to several of them,” Prof Rogers adds. “That anxiety susceptibility also seems to be related to enzymes that the body uses to metabolise caffeine” which differ slightly in all of us, too.
My own newfound calm might be the result of my own unique metabolism, my genes, “or of the placebo effect of giving caffeine up”. In all likelihood, it’s a mix of all three.
Jennifer Lopez was right: giving up caffeine makes your skin healthier. At least that’s true in my experience. Since October I’ve been less spotty, my under eye bags have lightened slightly, and I haven’t had the usual winter dryness that comes across my face at this time of year.
Caffeine leaves many people feeling dehydrated, which has knock-on effects on our skin, causing redness, dullness, dryness and an increased number of fine lines. In my case, my skin is softer and more hydrated after a few months off of it.
Then again, some large studies have found that being a coffee drinker actually decelerates the ageing process: one study of 16,000 people in Europe found that coffee consumption was linked to slower facial ageing, likely because of all of those gut-friendly polyphenols and antioxidants which protect your cells from damage.
So maybe I’m just lucky – I’ll have to wait 20 years to know the truth.
A week into December, I started to drink decaf coffee most days. The miniscule amount of caffeine left over in coffee after the decaffeination process isn’t enough to make me anxious, and the enormous benefits of the drink for my gut health and my brain, even in its caffeine-free form, make it so worth the pretentious cafe order – and the £702 price tag, too.
But I don’t think I’ll ever go back to drinking caffeine regularly, keeping it for “emergencies” instead. It’s good to know that, when it really matters, I have caffeine “in my arsenal of things to boost my energy”, as Prof Rogers puts it. On a long drive or before a big event, being totally fresh to the effects of coffee could be a real life-saver.
My oat lattes have become decaf white americanos because “too much milk in your drink can reduce many of the benefits that come with coffee, because the beneficial chemicals won’t work in your system as well”, Prof Spector says. “A latte really isn’t very good for your health, but a drop of milk, like in a macchiato, is perfectly fine.”
As both experts told me, people react to caffeine in ways that are wildly different. It’s worth giving it up for a few months to see how doing so might boost your health. It certainly improved mine – and I never want to deal with two weeks of withdrawal again.
Will switching to decaf coffee lower my cholesterol?
No. But your cholesterol levels will likely be lower if you drink either decaf or caffeinated coffee compared with not drinking any at all.
Aren’t the chemicals used to decaffeinate coffee dangerous?
Not that I’m aware, but it’s unclear whether any of those chemicals are left over in the coffee you’re drinking. Makers say that they’re fully washed out, but they’re very guarded about it.
Is decaf coffee an ultra-processed food?
I would say that decaf coffee is mildly ultra-processed. There will be a big difference in the amount of processing in instant versus ground coffee.
Do I need to drink ground decaf coffee or is instant coffee fine?
Instant coffee is also very good for you and not something to be sniffed at. It likely accounts for a lot of the health benefits of coffee that we see in large-scale population studies.
Having done more research, I’m not as concerned about the processing in instant coffee as I would have been before. In essence it’s freeze-dried, so the processes involved are much the same.
Will switching to decaf stop my migraines and headaches?
Potentially. Only a proportion of migraines and headaches are caused by caffeine and there are a number of theories about what causes that, such as changes in dilation of the blood vessels in your skull.
Is it possible to have a tidy divorce? Leading barrister Sharon Chandra explains how.