We Should All Take a Break From Coffee
The importance of taking regular breaks from caffeine.
I love coffee. I’ve never met someone who loves coffee more than I do. But for the first week of each month, I entirely cut all caffeine out of my life. Caffeine is everywhere; it’s in tea and coffee, certain soft drinks, energy drinks, pre-workouts, and even chocolate. We consume so much caffeine, and it’s time we took a break.
Importance
To understand why we need to take a regular break from caffeine, we must first understand how caffeine affects the brain.
Caffeine mimics adenosine, the neurotransmitter in the brain that makes us feel tired. Caffeine binds to the adenosine receptors, therefore blocking the adenosine from binding to the receptors, which is how caffeine works to make us feel awake.
However, continued caffeine use causes our brain to create more of these receptors, which is why it takes more and more caffeine to achieve the same buzz.
This also means that when we don’t have caffeine, or when the caffeine runs its course, there are a lot of receptors for the fatigue-inducing adenosine to bind to and we experience a huge crash in energy.
Fortunately, taking a regular 7–10 day break allows the adenosine receptors to reset, and return to their normal numbers.
If you want to learn more about coffee, check out these articles:
Implementation
- Find yourself a good quality decaf coffee, and use this instead of your usual beans.
- Identify other food and drinks you regularly have that contain caffeine. For example black, white, and green teas, chocolate (especially dark), and soft drinks.
- Eliminate all caffeine from your diet for at least 7 days.
Note: You may need to wean yourself off the caffeine. Generally, I experience headaches for 1–2 days, but you can mitigate this by slowing easing off. Switch to cups of tea instead of coffee, or find a half-caf blend.
Caffeine is great — it provides so many benefits and coffee is one of the healthiest drinks in existence. We don’t need to completely cut caffeine out of our lives, but we need to be smart with it. Give your body a much-needed break.
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