A New Kind of Coffee Break

I measure out my life in coffee spoons.

-TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Preface:

Every month*, I am diving into a health-related lifestyle or diet goal. [Diet used to refer to the overarching trend in what I eat and drink throughout my life rather than a temporary restriction with the goal to change something about my body.] At the beginning of the month, I will post about the experiment I am undertaking, why I have selected this experiment, any research I have done on the subject, and my expectations of the process. Throughout the month, a number of my posts will relate back to this subject for anyone interested in how this is represented in my everyday life. At the end of the month, I will post a recap of the experiment. How I felt throughout the process. The pros and cons of the experiment, and if relevant, if I am interested in adopting this as a long-term change in my diet or lifestyle.

*Since this month is over halfway over and because I started two distinct, important experiments at the beginning of November, I will post about two of these experiments:

A short-term experiment, introduced today with a recap post on November 30.
A long-term experiment, introduced tomorrow with a recap post on December 31.

I am doing this for several reasons. The first experiment, giving up coffee, is something that cannot be done, then undone, then redone (spoiler alert, I am keeping this one). And the second one, regarding introducing herbs into my diet, requires long-term buildup to see any notable differences.

Like many people, I am not a morning person. I wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, go through the physical motions to get from where I start to where I should be within a reasonable amount of time, but I am not operational until I have had my first, sometimes second, cup of coffee.

Living (possibly) with ADD

I was diagnosed with ADD at age twenty-two during a fifteen-minute conversation with a psychiatrist who gave me a 30-question questionnaire after I interrupted him a half a dozen times. BAM. Diagnosis, an Adderall prescription, and a healthy dose of uncertainty as to whether or not I actually had ADD or simply lived in a college town where passing out amphetamine prescriptions was the norm.

The pills did help me focus, but it was a tradeoff:

They suppressed my appetite: I was too concentrated on whatever the pills had me focusing on that I no longer experienced hunger in the same way.
I had problems sleeping: I rarely had problems falling asleep, but I was not getting quality, restful sleep throughout the night and often woke up exhausted.
Improved concentration: The pills allowed me to focus wholly on one task, but I did not always get to choose the task I wanted to focus on.
I was becoming dependent: My brain function when I wasn’t taking the pills was worse than what I experienced before taking them.

I made a habit of not taking the pills over the weekend. They are amphetamines, after all, and I have a history of addiction in my family. There was also no need to take them over the weekend. But even with two days a week off, I could feel my brain becoming less and less familiar and functional as time went on. I became more forgetful, more easily distracted, colors felt duller, the world moved slower, etc. when I wasn’t on them.

In the end, it was not the right medication for me. Sleep, food, and brain function are much too important to me to sacrifice so I quickly swapped my prescription for a cup or three of coffee a day because I had heard it could be used as a less addictive and less controversial way to treat ADD/ADHD.

Appreciation for Coffee

Throughout my twenties, I have developed a deep appreciation for coffee. Starting from the sugary Starbucks drinks in college to drinking boutique roasted, independently and ethically grown beans, to drinking espresso during my year in Milan, I have discovered multiple ways of brewing, drinking, and enjoying coffee.

For me, coffee consumption is a very social activity. There is a sense of connectedness when you enter a coffee shop, take a seat at a table, and have a coffee and share stories with people you care about. I have built many friendships over cups of coffee. I drove across America–San Diego to Massachusetts–in seventy-two hours with my father, stopping to refuel the car with gas and our bodies with caffeine for the drive. Memories are formed around cups of coffee.

I have attended coffee events with Counter Culture Coffee, where I learned about the process for growing and cleaning coffee in an ethical way, I have learned about how industrially farmed coffee, like other crops, sacrifices quality for quantity and the environment for profit, I learned the different methods for brewing and serving coffee. Coffee, for me, became a lifestyle as well as a responsibility.

Breaking the Habit

There is nothing I dislike more than feeling a lack of control. Over the past decade, I have managed to curb a number of those tendencies but feeling a lack of control over my own body is something I simply refuse to surrender on. It is an ongoing struggle in the face of unexplained medical issues—which will be explored in future posts, and therefore, I look for every opportunity I can to maintain what control I can over my own body.

I have often experienced signs of coffee dependency. They are eerily similar to the symptoms I experienced on Adderall: My brain function decreases when I am off it, everything around me feels unfamiliar, and I feel focus less than I was able to before starting consuming coffee on a regular basis. When my brain lets me know it is time for coffee, I need a coffee, I did not have enough coffee today, it is always my cue to cut coffee from my diet.

In order to break my coffee habit, I needed to identify where and why I drink coffee in the first place. If I could put a name to my “triggers,” it would be easier for me to avoid them or to develop a strategy to prevent me from reaching for the coffee button on our coffee machines at work.

Reasons I drink Coffee

Mornings are the WORST

As I mentioned, I am not a morning person. I am also not a pleasant person when I am tired. I am grumpy, my brain isn’t working, and I seem more like a zombie than anything.

If I wake up early enough in the morning and have time, or on the weekends, I make a double espresso with our Italian coffee we brought with us as an “essential” item from Milan.

During the week, however, I am rushing to get to work as early as possible and do not have time to make a delicious, intense espresso at home and drink it casually while reading the news. Instead, I have to drink the (awful, yet free) coffee at work. The kind of coffee that is great when you are drinking multiple cups a day out of need rather than appreciation.

Sitting all day is boring

Like many people, I work an office job where my job description requires sitting for about 97% of my work day. As a new employee in this company, I am still being trained on many of the internal procedures; therefore, I am not given a full workload yet. With my light workload, I often finish my work quickly and spend most of my time working on work assigned for a future date leaving me with zero pressure to finish anything by a particular deadline, meaning a lot of time for breaks.

Also, some of the programs we use on our computers take a while to run through everything they are supposed to, which serves as a natural stopping point, allowing the mind to look for something to fill that time with. As the newest member of our team, I am often given the more tedious, mindless tasks no one else wants to (or has time to) work on, meaning that ADD kicks in, and I need a mental break from what I am doing for something more appealing or stimulating.

Drink Coffee: it’s what you do

Meeting for coffee is one of my favorite ways to casually meet up with friends, potential friends, and colleagues/peers. It is a casual environment with a semi-fixed end to the conversation. It is a great opportunity to get to know someone, catch up with someone, or discuss a business opportunity.

As editors, my coworkers and I spend most of our days sitting together, asking each other questions, and working on our own documents. We aren’t in a lot of meetings compared to our other colleagues who sometimes spend all day in one meeting. We are bonded and have a semi-set routine of getting up for coffee together to talk about some of the work we are doing or our lives outside of work.

That Italian Coffee Though

As the spouse of a proud Italian who maintains a significant number of traditional rules around Italian food, coffee at set times of day has been an important part of my life for the past year and a half.

With breakfast, we have a coffee.
After lunch, we have a coffee.
At 5 pm, we have a coffee.
After dinner, we have a coffee.

Coffee Trieste

Strategies:

I tried giving up coffee when I started this new job back in September, but I went in on my first day and was exhausted and my brain was no longer used to the 9-5 lifestyle. So on my first day of work, I caved to make sure I made it through the day.

This time, I started when we had Thursday, November 1, off for a Belgian holiday and just about the entire city took the Friday off for a long weekend out of Brussels. I knew I would have limited work I needed to do and only a handful of colleagues around to notice my agitated state on the Friday before the two full days of weekend where I could sleep and suffer through my withdrawals in peace. Heading back to work, however, I knew I would need to put some strategies in place if I wanted to stick with it.

Mornings, I knew, would be my greatest challenge. If I could find a way to make it through the mornings without a coffee, I knew it would be much easier to get through the rest of the day. In the morning, I am tired, my brain isn’t working, I lack willpower. It is when I am most vulnerable. But if I addressed the reasons I drink coffee in the mornings, being tired and my brain not working, I would stand a much better chance. I started going to bed earlier and, therefore, waking up earlier which gave me additional time to orient myself to being alive for the rest of the day. I could exercise with the dog, eat a healthy breakfast, and have some (herbal) tea and engage in a mentally stimulating activity before having to head into the office.
My next main obstacle was boredom. I am sitting at my desk all day, reading through highly technical documents, taking frequent breaks from the handful of documents I have to work on throughout the week while I am being trained. I have since started asking colleagues working on some of the more challenging tasks if I can help or watch them go through what they are doing so I can learn something new to give my brain something else to do.
Getting up to get coffee either on my own or with my coworkers is a socially acceptable reason for taking a break. Since I am also experimenting by adding more herbs into my diet at this time, drinking tea seemed like an appropriate alternative to picking up a coffee with my colleagues. I picked out a couple of herbal teas from the local store and bring them with me during our breaks.
As for home life, I got lucky that my husband randomly stopped drinking coffee as often when I started my new job before he did. With neither of us offering to make a coffee or asking if the other one wanted to get one, it was easy not to fall back into the habit of making them.

Anticipated challenges:

Because I have gone through a couple of coffee detoxes in my day, I know what to expect. I expect the fatigue, I expect the headaches and the brain fog. I know I will consider the “quick fix” of having a cup of coffee and accepting my fate as a coffee addict. I have been there. But I have got through these cycles of occasional coffee, steady increase in coffee consumption, signs of dependency, detox, repeat. This time, I want it to stick. I want to be able to maintain my ability to only drink coffee on an occasion so I do not reach a point of dependency in the future, which is not something I have succeeded at yet.

Expectations:

Throughout this process, I expect to be tired, I expect the withdrawals, but I expect these to be short-term obstacles while my body establishes a new state of equilibrium where my natural energy return and my brain is able to function with or without coffee. My ultimate goal is to be able to stop needing coffee to live my everyday life but to be able to enjoy it as an occasional indulgence. But the point will be to enjoy it. The flavor I have come to love over these past few years. Enjoy what it represents to me, consumption of a delicious, well-made, ethical product, ideally having a great conversation, or sitting in silence, with people I care about.