Cycling Caffeine

I wanted to share my experiences with caffeine because it might be helpful to someone with a similar problem.

For a while I was a daily coffee drinker. I would have a 16-ounce cup in the morning and another one at lunch. I love the taste of coffee and the mild buzz from a low dose of caffeine. (A high dose is extremely unpleasant.) But this started to cause problems. I was fine for the morning and after lunch, but after my lunchtime coffee I would be miserable. As my caffeine levels dropped, I would get pretty severe withdrawal symptoms. Tension headaches. Fatigue. An all-around miserable feeling. Even an irregular heartbeat, which can be incredibly jarring. I even wore a heart monitor once. My doctor reassured me it was nothing to worry about, but it was still an incredibly unpleasant sensation. I thought there was something really wrong with me.

I knew my heart was healthy enough. I do a pretty extreme martial arts/gymnastics workout every day. I essentially never get physically tired from this. Still, like I said, jarring.

Just over a year ago, I got my own coffee thermos and started brewing my own mix. It would always be some combination of regular grounds plus some decaf grounds. I love the taste of dark coffee but don’t always want all the caffeine. So one day I had only a single cup of low-caffeine coffee in my thermos. That was all I had that day. I got all the symptoms. Fatigue. Headaches. Heart palpitations. It was an “Ah ha!” moment for me. This was what was making me miserable. I suspected that too much caffeine might have caused my occasional irregular heartbeat (and drinking too much coffee definitely sometimes has this effect on me), but I never suspected that caffeine withdrawal was the culprit. I decided I would tough it out. Rather than “cure” myself by drinking some coffee, I decided I’d just take the discomfort. If this fixed my feeling awful every day, it would be worth it. So I went off coffee for a few weeks. (A week into my caffeine withdrawals, Scott Alexander posted this wonderful piece about drug tolerance. Good timing, Scott.)

Like I said, I love coffee. I didn’t want to give it up forever. I made the conscious decision to start drinking coffee again, but this time I’d be careful with it. No more day-long tension headaches and heart palpitations. I decided I’d drink it twice a week. This works well for me. On Saturdays and Wednesdays I’ll mix a strong brew of coffee. Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays I mix a tiny volume of regular coffee with a lot of decaf (which actually does contain small amounts of caffeine, BTW). I’ll have a single caffeinated soda on Mondays and Fridays if I feel like I need it. I tried doing coffee every other day, but my withdrawal symptoms came back. Twice a week at most is apparently all this delicate snowflake can handle without acquiring a real physical dependence. Cycling on and off caffeine has been a lot better than having it every day. I pretty much never have withdrawal symptoms, unless I cheat and drink coffee several days in a row. (I have done this just a couple of times on weeks when I was traveling and out of my normal routine.)

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Yes, I know it's dangerous to draw any conclusions based on anecdotes. Yes, I know the "treatment" and the outcome can be a coincidence.