The Productivity-Destroying Habit We’ve Normalized
…even while it induces the opposite of its intended effect
The caffeine addiction begins innocently. When you discover caffeine, you’re delighted to feel pleasure and ease doing work you’d otherwise see as tedious and mundane.
Yet a few months or years later, you’re drinking two+ cups per day, but you’re not immune from exhaustion or sluggishness. You also notice sharp peaks and valleys in your energy levels. You feel alert and vaguely agitated 20 minutes after your first cup, but an hour later, you want a nap.
Since you don’t have time to nap, you have another cup, and the pattern repeats. Soon, you’re drinking four to five cups just to feel normal. But the “normal” you’ve habituated to is an agitated and scattered shell of yourself who occasionally enjoys moments of focus. What’s going on here?
The Ubiquity (and the Absurdity) of Caffeine
Coffee has become mainstream culture’s productivity mascot. It’s hard to find media associated with productivity or creativity that doesn’t feature an image of a laptop with a steaming cup of coffee beside it. Cafes are on every street corner, and coffee makers are on every kitchen counter.
Caffeine, at a precise dose, helps improve focus, performance, and endurance. The issue, though, is that almost everyone who uses caffeine consumes it every day.
As a result, their daily cup only brings them to baseline. Then they need increasing amounts to get to that energized, focused state that first made them fall in love with the fear juice.
When I was on the caffeine train, I wanted to believe it was supporting my performance. But I felt regularly agitated, anxious, and scattered. This led me to ask — is caffeine a productivity elixir, or is it just bringing me into a space where focusing requires a lot more effort?
Scaring Yourself into Productivity
People constantly make light of their reliance on caffeine. There are no shortages of mugs, shirts, and coasters with statements like “Don’t talk to me until after I’ve had my coffee.”
Yet this becomes eerie when you think about the effects moderate to high doses of caffeine have on the body. It’s one thing to use it as a performance enhancer, but it’s another to think of it as a necessity for being awake or functional.
Caffeine stimulates the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) nervous system, stimulating hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
In this way, the energy boost you get from caffeine reflects the body’s activation of the stress response. Given the cascade of hormones caffeine ignites, relying on caffeine to wake up is not unlike needing to be chased by lions in order to feel functional!
As noted by self-sabotage expert Jason Christoff, caffeine triggers the limbic (emotional) center of the brain, while inhibiting its higher learning centers.
The limbic system is primitive and focused on survival concerns, like acquiring food, protecting territory, and maximizing personal safety.
Sounds productive, right?
Why Caffeine Became Western Culture’s Productivity Darling
Caffeine induces low-grade euphoria, making mundane tasks feel interesting.
Ethnobotanist and psychedelic pioneer Terence McKenna spoke about why caffeine is western culture’s most socially accepted drug. It gets people excited (or at the very least, willing) to do repetitive, menial, and even soul-crushing work.
Unlike psychedelics, which can promote visionary experiences or self-led creativity, caffeine is the perfect drug for “widget spinning”: it puts you in the mindset to do tasks you’d otherwise rebel against.
Self-sabotage expert Jason Christoff echoes this point: he describes caffeine as a mind-control drug. Thanks to the dramatic reduction in blood flow to the brain, caffeine effectively causes the conscious mind to take a step back, clearing the way for the subconscious to lead the way.
The subconscious is a part of our brains that looks to the herd — those around us, or those we see depicted through the media — for cues about how to fit in with the tribe and live a good, healthy life.
When we see cafes on every corner and coffee makers in every kitchen, we subconsciously infer that caffeine is helpful and normal. Many people drink coffee all day despite being painfully aware of effects like increased anxiety and agitation.
Yet the most insidious issue with caffeine is that it makes you content to do things you wouldn’t have the stomach to do without it.
It sets you on a trajectory away from self-honesty and toward a force-based lifestyle founded upon arm-wrestling yourself into a misaligned way of being.
The Psychological Shift That Helps You Quit Caffeine
Many people go from young adulthood to the grave drinking caffeine any single day. It’s a tough habit to break because not only is it on every corner, but it also allows you to mask the pain of living out of alignment.
When attempting to quit, many people don’t make it beyond the first few days because they get headaches, low motivation, apathy, etc. The truth is that quitting caffeine is only possible if you’re willing to restructure your life so that you’re genuinely fulfilled and authentically motivated.
This might sound simplistic, but so many people are into caffeine because they need to mask the pain of being chronically unfulfilled.
If you want to quit caffeine, take the first and seemingly unrelated step of making play and pleasure a priority. Stop thinking about fun, pleasure, and enjoyment as rewards for when you’ve burned through your to-do list.
Post-caffeine You will only survive if you act like it were your birthright to enjoy your life, not simply punch the clock until you die. See fun, pleasure, and enjoyment as non-negotiable elements of basic hygiene.
Ending Your Caffeine Addiction Physiologically
Before quitting caffeine, I initially focused on giving up my need to drink it as soon as I woke up. This made it much easier to eliminate it. Now, I drink two big glasses of lemon-infused water after getting out of bed. I’m surprised by how quickly I go from groggy to wakeful.
As you wean off early-morning coffee, gradually increase the amount of time between when you wake up and when you drink your first cup. You might start by waiting 15 minutes after getting up, then gradually increase to 120 minutes before your first cup.
Even if you weren’t interested in quitting, this is a strategy for preventing energy crashes. By allowing the supply of the hormone, adenosine, to subside naturally (rather than artificially blocking it with caffeine), you’ll experience more sustained energy throughout the day.
Once you get used to waiting, spend a few days drinking something with less caffeine, such as green tea.
After about a week of incrementally decreasing the amount of caffeine you drink, you can stop using caffeine altogether by making use of the supplement DL-phenylalanine (DLPA), an amino acid found in protein-rich foods.
Many people are using DLPA to eliminate caffeine withdrawal symptoms — it works by resupplying the neurochemicals that get depleted from everyday caffeine use.
When you over-consume caffeine, it depletes the brain’s natural reserves of phenylalanine and tyrosine, contributing to withdrawal symptoms. DLPA is made from L-Dopa, which is made from tyrosine, and DLPA is a precursor to tyrosine.
DLPA effectively replenishes what would otherwise be lost from caffeine’s sudden absence. It helps dissolve brain fog, gloominess, sluggishness, and other physical effects that make caffeine tough to quit.
I found this step-by-step guide for how to quit caffeine in one week using DLPA to be incredibly useful.
If you feel tired during the day, do as little as five minutes of relatively intense exercise. I’ve been sprinting on my treadmill for five minutes when I feel sleepy in the afternoon or mid-morning, and it’s helped raise my mood and promote slow-releasing energy, without requiring a massive commitment.
If you want to give up caffeine but can’t seem to do it, ask yourself, do you really want to risk continuing to live in a way that only feels good because of the chemicals you’re ingesting?
The benefits of knowing that you feel good because your life is good — not because you’re masking the symptoms of unfulfillment, chronic boredom, and nutrient deficiency — are immeasurable.
For more ideas on how to break free from disempowering societal conditioning and self-limiting beliefs, read these articles: