Coffee Addiction: 5 Lessons Learned
Phasing Out My Favorite Beverage [Free Premium]

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #589xp: Coffee Addiction: 5 Lessons Learned Phasing Out My Favorite Beverage [Free Premium]

Jeff Sanders
Good morning and welcome to The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, Premium Edition. I am Jeff Sanders, and this episode is a very special one.

It's all about coffee and coffee addiction. And more specifically, the five lessons that I have learned recently while phasing out my favorite beverage. And yes, coffee is my favorite beverage and has been for decades.

If you know this, podcast well, you know that I love everything that has to do with energy, whether it's running marathons, waking up early, pursuing projects and goals you're passionate about.

And yes, of course, drinking caffeine essentially all the time.

At least that's how it feels.

And so for the last 10 years or so, caffeine has been a very central component of my energy every day.

Prior to that, in my 20s, I did drink a lot of caffeine, but not as much as I have in recent years.

And in fact, in my late 20s, I took a 30-day break from caffeine just to see how it impacted me.

And it was fine.

I remember thinking back then that I was okay, just kind of bored.

I kind of missed that spike and that real jolt that I got from coffee.

And so I returned to coffee quickly afterwards and rebuilt my tolerance.

And then, you know, 10 years went by and it was just part of my life.

Well, in the last six months or so, my caffeine consumption increased pretty

dramatically.

I decided that espresso is going to be a really awesome part of my day.

And so I began to drink more of that and then more green tea in the afternoon.

And it would just, it kept escalating.

And I found myself drinking more and more.

And it just, it wasn't working.

I still love coffee.

I still love caffeine.

It's still a great way to get some energy.

But there's a cost.

and the cost is fairly extreme in certain cases if you overdo it and if your body has lost that ability to process the caffeine or you just drink far too much.

There's a lot to it.

So on this episode, I want to break down a few of these lessons that I have learned in this phase out process of my new 30 day break from caffeine.

Today is day 15.

And then later on in the podcast, in a couple of weeks, I'm going to share a much more deep.

detail breakdown of the full experience. But since you are a premium member here

on the podcast, I want to give you an early look at the behind the scenes experience

I've had so far on this latest quest of mine to calm down the caffeine,

reassess, figure out where I am, and most importantly, figure out where I will go

in the future. And there's a lot here to discuss. I have gone through a deep dive

of YouTube videos and articles and audiobooks, just everywhere, scouring the

internet for information about coffee and caffeine.

And I love it.

It's fascinating.

There's a lot to learn.

There's a lot to pull from these conversations.

But the most, I'll say it this way, the most amount of knowledge you're going to

gain from any experience is the experience itself.

You can watch YouTube all day long, but you're not going to really get it until

you live it. And that has been the transformation in the last couple of weeks

is living out the experience of tapering down the caffeine, getting to zero,

and then trying to figure out, well, now where am I? And the funny thing in all

these videos you may watch online or these audiobooks I've listened to that are

very intensely focused on the fact that people just love coffee and the fact that

nearly 90% of Americans drink a caffeine source every single day.

That's a lot of people.

That probably includes you.

If that's true, well, we are obsessed with coffee.

We love it and we can't imagine our lives without it.

And if you ask the average person is coffee addicting, they might say yes.

And if you ask them, are you willing to let go of it for a few days, a few weeks, a few months?

The answer is no.

they don't want to do that. And I was in that boat myself of asking the question,

am I willing to give this thing up? And so this brings me to the first of these five

lessons. Coffee is an addiction. And it's actually harder to kick than alcohol.

At least it was for me. So nine months ago, I went totally sober. And when I did so,

I thought it was a reasonably difficult challenge. But honestly,

not that hard. I had been semi-phasing out alcohol for a couple of years.

And so by the time it came around to actually stop it forever, I was okay with that.

It wasn't a really big challenge. But the coffee thing hits in a very different way.

Alcohol is a depressant, and so if you stop taking a depressant, there's a reasonable

opportunity for you to feel better afterwards. Coffee is a stimulant means that when you

stop drinking it, you're likely to feel much lower, much more tired, possibly sad

or depressed.

There could be these withdrawal symptoms that are real and that kick in.

And so when I decided I'm going to phase back coffee, the very first thing I did

was to stop my daily espresso and stop all tea and move to just two regular

coffees per day.

And that was a big switch.

I was around 440 milligrams of caffeine per day, and then I dropped down to about 150.

So it was a pretty significant drop, and I felt it.

It was a very obvious drop.

And for two weeks, I held on to just two coffees a day, and then I went to one coffee a day for about three days, and then decided at that point, I'm not going to wait any longer.

Let's just do this, rip the Band-Aid off, and go.

And so after three days of just one coffee a day, I made the call to go to zero,

and I have been there for the last 15 days.

And in this process of phasing out the caffeine, the coffees, the espressoes, the teas, the chocolate.

I still have a little bit of chocolate right now and then, but very little.

The phasing out process was so clear in the fact that I wanted more.

I didn't want to give this thing up.

I like it.

I love it.

It provides value.

Why would I let go of this thing that I love so much?

Well, to answer that question, let's go back to my overconsumption.

I was consuming a lot and I was feeling the effects of it.

I was getting jittery.

I was getting anxious.

I began to have what I'll call like semi-panic attacks.

Literally, my consumption had reached a point and my tolerance level was so high

that I had to have more to feel the impact.

but by the time I had so much more, well, my nervous system was fried.

I had nothing left.

I didn't have the ability to process that much caffeine in my system without my body just freaking out.

And so once those symptoms became so real, I could not ignore them.

That was the time to change.

At that point, there's no more continuing life is normal.

Life has to be different tomorrow morning.

That was the experience I had about.

a month ago. And so I made the switch. In the very next day, I had significantly

less caffeine, and the process began from there. And now here I am, right in the

middle of my 30-day experiment of being caffeine-free for the second time in my adult

life. And this first lesson that coffee is an addiction is just so clear. Coffee is a

drug. Coffee is addicting. Coffee is hard to let go of. I have daily cravings for it.

It's not heroin, right? It's not cocaine. This is not an extreme drug addiction.

And to even call it an addiction the same category as other drugs like those sounds a bit foolish until you live through the experience and go, well, wait a minute, I still have similar experiences.

I still have cravings. I still have a withdrawal experience. I still want more. I feel exhausted every morning. At least I did for the first 10 days.

But that was the experience.

So yes, coffee is an addiction.

It is a drug.

It can be challenging to let go of, but it is also necessary if you want to have

an objective view on your relationship to coffee itself.

Lesson number two, slowly coming off of caffeine is definitely the best idea,

especially if you are a heavy consumer.

So when I moved from my 440-ish milligrams per day down to around 150,

that was actually a significant drop, but I was okay with it.

I still had caffeine every day.

I still felt good about it.

And then dropping from 2 to 1, 2 weeks later, also felt okay.

It was another big drop, but also it didn't feel like I was losing a lot.

I was still functioning, still getting things done, a little less energy, a little less pizzazz,

but I still felt like myself for the most part.

However, the drop from a single coffee a day to zero, I felt that.

I felt it hard.

And when I was, I say that I was tired for about 10 to 12 days, just recently, the last 10 to 12 days when this experience started, I had nothing.

I mean, just unmotivated, fatigued, taking naps nearly every single day.

I couldn't get stuff done.

It's not the Jeff Sanders that I know.

It was hard.

And it's a real experience to go through.

It's something that I knew was possible.

I had watched the videos.

I had done the research.

I was aware this could happen.

But to live through it, to feel that or to not feel, which is actually how

I experienced it, it felt like I was on drugs to make me tired.

It felt as though I had taken a depressant.

because the stimulant was not there.

And so if you're trying to mitigate these experiences to really minimize how you might feel, yes, slowly reducing your caffeine levels is definitely a great idea.

Going cold turkey would be very painful.

But even if you do it slowly, you're still going to have some kind of a withdrawal experience, some kind of a coming down that is exhausting.

At least that's how I experienced it myself.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I can't speak for me.

And that's of all the research that I did and all that I just went through.

Yeah, it's a real thing.

Third lesson, your brain will turn off for weeks, but it will come back.

This is the big news.

This is the one that I didn't know if this was true or not.

So in those first couple of weeks, the first 10 to 12 days when I was just so tired, couldn't think,

not motivated, taking naps, all I could think of was that I don't want to live like

this forever. I don't want to feel this tired forever. I cannot be this guy.

Coffee is going to have to come back. This was my big debate in the first part of

this break was, is this a 30-day break from caffeine? Is that all it is, a temporary

30 days? Or could this be permanent? Could I actually stay off caffeine forever?

That's been the debate. It's still the debate that's the debate that.

that I'm having right now.

And one thing I can say is in that experience of being so tired, so down,

of course I wanted to come back.

Of course, that was the plan because there's no way I'm going to continue to be that tired.

But then just a few days ago, my energy came back, not fully, but in a small dose.

And the next day a little better, next day a little better.

Now, here I am today.

The energy is even better than before.

Now, I'm still not where I was at 100% very hyped up stimulated Jeff Sanders because I'm not taking a stimulus.

So I can't be that high as I was.

But I can think again.

I can podcast again.

I can do work again.

I can have sales calls again.

I haven't gone to the gym the whole time, but I can actually use my brain.

So one of the key things about this experience has been that I've been able to do things that are fairly mindless.

I can do the laundry.

I can go to the gym and work out.

I can take my kids to school.

I've been able to function in the very basic sense of getting things done,

similarly to how it feels when you have an illness, right?

A functioning illness, not the flu where you're in bed,

but more so like a science infection or something where you're functioning.

You technically are still alive and doing things,

but you just feel bad while you do it.

That was my experience.

I was just very tired and unmotivated.

but still able to conjure up enough energy to function.

Until the last few days, and now my brain is alive again.

I'm doing things again, and I'm excited to see how this progresses in the next 15 days for me to feel even better.

Now, there's a lot to go into to explain exactly what I've been doing for my nutrition and supplements and daily habits.

I'm not going to discuss those just yet because I'm still testing a lot of those to see how they impact how I feel.

So later on the podcast, I will do a full breakdown of what has worked and what has not when it comes to the transition and specifically the supplements and the nutrition and meditation and sleep and napping and exercise and all of these healthy habits that can help this process be a lot more sustainable and a lot less painful and allow you to get through it in a way that doesn't just destroy you, which is how it's felt for me quite a bit.

And speaking of napping, the fourth lesson that I have learned, I miss naps.

I have not taken a good nap in decades.

And I am not kidding.

I don't nap.

It is not been a thing about me.

I've never been a napper.

Middle of the afternoon, I still want to get stuff done.

So what do I do?

Historically, I just drink a green tea.

I will do an activity that's physically invigorating.

I will get myself moving.

But the last thing I would do is take a nap.

Well, in the last couple of weeks, I've had more naps than I have had in 20 years.

And I'm not joking.

It has been a phenomenal thing.

And I love them.

They're great.

When you're tired and you sleep, you feel better.

It's a wonderful, simple, and obvious solution.

And yet, in our modern world, what do we want to do?

We want to push through all the time, seven days a week with narrow break to speak of.

If we just pushing is the norm when you're a goal achieving, high achieving,

you know, go, go kind of person.

And caffeine is part of your lifestyle.

And you've got big goals to accomplish.

So you're not going to slow down because if you do those things won't get done.

You know the speech here.

We know what it's like to just push and push and push.

But what's it like to slow down?

For real slow down.

To actually stop.

The fascinating thing here is that removing the caffeine stopped me,

like literally felt like someone put on the brakes and put the car in park.

And I haven't felt like that at all in my adult life.

Zero experiences until the last couple of weeks.

And it's so eye-opening.

It's such a phenomenal thing to be able to just not do anything.

and just be and rest and sleep.

It's fascinating.

It really is fascinating.

And there's no other way to get there besides choosing to do so.

One thing I got lucky on is the timing of this whole thing seasonally.

So I just so happened to take a lot of caffeine and increase it a lot in the spring months.

And so by the time that the anxiety began to show up, it was in the early summer months.

And so I decided to cut caffeine and July 9th was actually my very first day to go caffeine free.

And from that date, I'm now 15 days into it.

And it just so happens in the middle of the summer.

People don't do anything.

They're on vacation.

In my line of work and my business, nothing happens in the summer.

It's a very slow season.

And so I'm essentially just in waiting for the fall when things really pick back up, lots of activity, a lot of

lot of things begin to happen again. But before the fall season is here, the summer

months are just very low key. So for me to happen to choose this time period for a

break from caffeine and to do nothing, worked out beautifully because nobody is expecting

me to do much. And so that part was amazing. And so if you can time a break for yourself

from caffeine in a season of your life where you don't have to do anything, that is ideal.

That is fantastic.

You can take the guilt away and just let yourself be.

Oh, that's, that's very, very nice.

All right.

The fifth and final lesson this week here on the podcast is, I think, the most important one,

which is that I don't want an addiction.

I don't.

I don't want to be addicted to anything.

Not alcohol, not caffeine, not sugar, not any stimulant, not any chemical, not any

additive, I don't want any addictions. I just want to be myself. And letting go of my vices one by one over these last

a couple of years, basically, has been a very liberating process. And it's something you

cannot actually feel and know in your gut without going through it. You can listen to this

podcast all day. I can talk to you for hours about my experience, but it means nothing until you

live it out yourself. And then you'll be able to hear what I'm saying and go,

oh yeah, I know what that feels like. And then you can relate to it. And you can

learn from it. You can grow from it. And then decide for yourself what is the best

case scenario long term. And one of the challenges with coffee specifically is that

it's not as obvious as something like alcohol or other drugs. If you talk about

alcohol is a good example. It's a poison. And so if you're looking for a reason to let go

a poison, well, it's not hard because it's harming your body with every single

drop. But coffee is not that obvious. Coffee has health benefits. Coffee can be really

good for you. I have seen so many videos and listened to so much content online

that is making it so clear that giving up coffee is not an easy decision. There are

so many potential upsides to coffee that to juxtapose that with the downsides makes

it a toss up. It means you have to decide for yourself what your personal experience

is like, whether or not you can adhere to moderation when it comes to your

consumption. It is your call to make. And it's a complicated one, potentially,

especially if you're in my boat where you feel this pull to drink it every day

because you feel like it's your best self, but you also have a tendency to overdo

things which might lead to anxiety or panic attacks or gut problems or you name it,

all the things that coffee could do that could harm you. Because once again,

coffee is a drug and it's addicting. It's not all positive. The yen,

the yang is real. There's two sides of this coin. And so where I sit today,

15 days being caffeine free, I am leaning towards returning to coffee, but with extreme

boundaries. This is the big kind of as I sit today. I personally believe that I will go back

to caffeine, but I will never allow myself to get back to where I was before.

And if I do, it's my fault.

It's my choice.

And so I'm trying to figure out exactly what that will be.

And later on the podcast, I'll break down where I got to in the future when I get there.

But I don't know yet.

I'm still testing a lot.

I'm still towing these ideas.

I know people personally, my mother, spent four years without caffeine many years ago because

of a possible health.

issue. My wife has been caffeine-free for years for various reasons.

My cousin is caffeine-free. It has been for a long time.

People in my family have made very intentional decisions to let go of caffeine.

So it's not as if I don't have a support group or other people who would cheer me on here.

It really is just a me thing. I, for me, have to decide what I want to do with this.

Societally, coffee is joyful. It's welcomed everywhere. It is expected.

in so many circles. Coffee is just a given. Why would you not drink it?

So societally speaking, if I choose not to consume caffeine long term, that will be kind of a bucking of the system decision.

But personally, I don't really care. I'll do whatever's best for me. And that's the take-home message here is that as you think about your own habits, your own possible addictions, your own decisions on what you consume and how that impacts your life,

you have to decide for yourself what is real and what is not and what is best for you and what is not.

I'll give one more short example here.

When I let go of caffeine 10 years ago in my late 20s, I knew that it had impacted my gut health and that I felt better, digestively speaking, without the coffee.

But I wanted to go back to it anyway.

Well, then this time around, you know, more than 10 years later, trying it again,

it's so clear to me that coffee has a very distinctly negative impact on my digestion

and on my gut.

And if I had any reason to give up coffee forever, aside from the potential for anxiety

if I over consume it, that's a pretty obvious one there, but even normal consumption

of coffee can lead to gut problems.

So if you had to ask me right now to give up coffee forever, that would be my reason.

it's not the anxiety parts because that generally is just overconsuming.

The gut health thing is huge.

And as a guy who loves to be healthy and I want to have energy and feel fantastic,

I'm not going to knowingly do something that's harming me unless I have a very good reason to do so.

And so that's the toss-up.

That's the Yen and Yang.

That's where I'm at.

I will stop talking.

This has gone on long enough.

But I would love to hear your feedback on this topic.

Email me, Jeff at Jeff Sanders.

com, especially before I produce my next episode where I break down all of this in more detail, I would like to include some listener stories.

And I would like to include your story if you have something to share with this, your own personal experience, whether you drink coffee or you do not, why you do, why you don't.

If you did a break before, how did it go for you?

I would love to hear those stories.

Like really, truly would love to hear them.

So once again, email me, jeff at jeffsanders.com.

Let's talk coffee. It's a lot of fun.

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