Comment by jodacola
6 hours ago
Everybody's physiology is different, but I drank a full pot of coffee every day, for about 15 years.
After Getting Older™, I was noticing more and more effects that I didn't like, so I made the decision to (mostly) detox off caffeine using decaf beans. Cold turkey would have destroyed me. I went with the following schedule:
* Week 1: 75% caffeinated/25% decaf beans
* Week 2: 50% caf/50% decaf
* Week 3: 25% caf/75% decaf
* Week 4: 100% decaf
At week 4, I entered a full failure mode I hadn't yet experienced, namely migraines that were untouchable by OTC medications. Only caffeine helped. I tried to get through the week to "be done" with the weening but couldn't. So...
* Week 5: back up to 25% caf/75% decaf!
* Weeks 6-12: decreasing caffeine by half each week (to the point I was measuring beans using my home scale).
After week 12, I was able to go without caffeine, and now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.
My physiological dependence on caffeine was no joke, but I feel a heck of a lot less anxious and jittery after cutting it down to where I'm now at.
Seems like this would have been much easier if you used plain old caffeine pills at the denominations you wanted to work thru, easier to measure (split the tablets) and also removes the other pleasurable aspects like flavor of the coffee and pleasing aromas—those kind of subjective cues that compound the preference and addiction
Isnt what you're doing now basically—what it would be called for almost any other drug—"kindling" or something?
Possible, yeah. I still wanted to drink coffee, though - decaf. I enjoy it. So, went the long route.
> now I drink 1 cup of coffee and, if I'm feeling wild, I'll occasionally get an espresso.
FYI, unless we're talking double espresso, a typical shot of espresso contains less caffeine (up to half) than a typical cup of drip coffee.
Yeah, double (and I realize now my original statement wasn’t clear: that’s an occasional espresso in addition to my daily single cup of coffee in the morning).
For about 8 years now I've been down to one caffeinated coffee per day, first thing in the morning. If I miss it, I have the start of a migraine by about 1pm. It's mad.
Yes completely!
I started drinking one small but dense cup of coffee every work day just after lunch to avoid being sleepy after the meal two years ago, and this year I noticed that I wasn't feeling good during the weekend, then I noticed that if I drank a coffee after lunch I'd be normal. Skip forward a few months, I notice now that if for some reason I forget to drink my coffee after lunch I wake up the next day with a migraine, each time.
I like the ritual of grinding my fresh grains and brewing my cup, but I think I'll move to decaf and a quick nap like I was doing before. The migraine is the proof of an addiction.
Did you try Excedrin? It has some caffeine in it.
It does seem to be especially helpful relative to just Tylenol for me as a migraine sufferer. Specifically for helping to disperse the aura.
That was the only OTC I avoided, specifically because I was trying to tightly control and titrate down the caffeine dose (granted, measuring beans isn't precise dosing, but I didn't want to blow my work out of the water by throwing some Excedrin into the mix).
> disperse the aura.
What’s this mean?
Migraine auras - the additional disturbances that can accompany the pain (or, in some cases be present without the pain) [0].
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22131-migrain...
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