When I've read about people quitting caffeine, it seems like half of people see no difference and half of them feel like their lives have improved.

I'm kind of thinking of stopping, only because it bothers me if I go on a trip or something and have to get caffeine to avoid headaches. Also, part of me wonders how caffeine is influencing me overall, if it's doing things I'm not aware of.

To be honest, the reason why I'm reluctant to try it is because I tea and coffee occupy this place that I can't quite find a replacement for, which is something interesting, low-calorie, and not a depressant. By "interesting" I might mean "artisanal" or "varietal", but I'm not even sure I mean anything that specific: I just mean, there's interesting variety, differences in products to try. Coffee and/or tea also are pretty low calorie if taken black (like I do), and unlike things like wine or beer, which are also artisanal in nature, don't act as depressants per se.

If there was something like coffee or tea, with lots of variety and skill involved, that kept me from consuming calories from other sources, and didn't have any kind of psychopharmacological effects, I could go to that. But I am not aware of anything like that.

Maybe I just need to rethink my perspective on it and what I could do to address those issues in other ways, but there are a lot of benefits to caffeinated beverages aside from the caffeine.

Since the water’s hot for my partner’s coffee, when I’m practicing going without caffeine I add a little lemon juice and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) powder to a cup of hot water, per Gandhi advice from a book he wrote in his 20s (?). It’s too hot and acidic to quaff, and while I still miss coffee with whole milk, this is a workable substitute that allows me to have wonderfully engaging dreams as part of a full-night’s sleep.

Herbal teas? I'm sure there's a subculture of artisinal herbal teas. You can even grow your own.

Even black teas have far less caffeine than coffee and quite a bit of variety. If I were to quit coffee I'd start there.

I'm trying to get into japanese green teas. They are plenty artisanal for me, at least the good stuff is. Temperature and time control when brewing is close to coffee pour over brewing, maybe not quite there. Water quality matters just as much - I'm adding minerals to osmotic filtered water, just as I did with coffee. When done properly they taste wonderful, although this is subjective of course. Caffeine content is much lower than coffee, unless you go into matcha tea, which is even more artisanal and expensive (per gram). And if you love spending money, making it can be even more expensive than coffee (per gram, not per cup) - it's not really difficult to spend over $30 for a 50 gram bag. And some even say it's healthy.

tl;dr: try japanese green coffee.

I highly recommend genmaicha if you haven't had it yet. By far my favorite green tea.

I've quit drinking coffee and any caffeine-containing product for a couple of months, but I ultimately ended up with drinking one cup in the morning, a single teaspoon of instant coffee. I can sip from it for an hour, it's ok if it has become cold.

Before quitting I was drinking around 5 or 6 cups of coffee a day with around 2 teaspoons each. Any decrease in caffeine intake would give me a migraine, which lowered my desire to drink coffee, leading to migraines of 3 days in duration. A detox. And I was always on the edge, felt super restless without actually being able to eliminate this feeling.

Removing refined sugar from my diet is now priority #1, including chocolate and whatever contains it to enhance taste. Afterwards I may try fully quitting drinking coffee again, which shouldn't be that hard. It's just that it's a nice thing to be doing, like playing with a cigarette between the fingers and smoking it. You loose something if you remove this from the life, and what you gain isn't always that obvious. Well, the benefits of quitting smoking are easy to recognize, but it's harder with coffee.

Exactly. Coffee is fine in moderation, 1 maybe 2 cups a day. Most people who talk about quitting are drinking 3-6 cups.

I quit and I just felt worse. I'm not a morning person and only caffeine lets me function.

My trade off was no caffeine on the weekends. It lowered my tolerance a lot since I had over 48 hours off it.

I don't have any mental health issues, so I can't speak to that trade off. But in the past, when I've had some anxiety, caffeine makes it worse.

I quit over a year ago. Mostly for sleep reasons. I have cheated on my "caffeine fast" quite a bit though. I agree about the duller part, but that should go away eventually. One thing that helped, I used chicory root as a coffee substitute and I found replacing the routine helped fill the void a bit.

Also, I was originally hoping I could go back to 1 or 2 cups per week, on an "as needed" basis (i.e. when I needed a productivity boost) without developing a tolerance. The first cup of coffee after a few months off was absolutely magical. But I found that even at 1-2 per week, my tolerance would quickly shoot up. Like you, I used to drink a ton of coffee so I suspect I would need to take a full year or more off with no cheating to really reset the system.

A final note, I found that decaf and chocolate both have enough caffeine in them to "muddy" the waters so to speak. To get to a good "baseline" I had to cut both of those out as well.

Everything being duller is what I recall the last time I tried quitting. My theory is that it takes quite a while until you achieve a new baseline. I was much calmer which is a good tradeoff I think. I cut my caffeine down to one cup of coffee in the morning and think I get the best of both worlds but maybe I should try quitting again and see if that holds.

Do you sleep better now, is that the explanation? I quit coffee for a few years, to fix my sleep, and it really did (now I'm back on caffeine and managing ok-ish).

I would suggest to anyone curious to try. And if you quit coffee make it two weeks or so to really see the difference.

I quit drinking coffee in the evening, and that helped with sleep. But sleep is also a matter of habit. If its broken, you need to fix it by breaking the current habit of sleeping schedule.

I dream more, but I didn't ever really have a problem sleeping.

Maybe you sleep better without sleeping longer. I'm no expert, but I've read that caffeine and alcohol can affect sleep quality in that way. Either way, great that it has a good effect.

After reading you, I wish I drink coffee so I can quit and experience the same feeling you experienced.