Pollan talks about that—about how “addiction” carries these moral connotations that aren’t helpful when we’re discussing drugs, but euphemisms like “habit” conceal the real chemical dependency we’re talking about.
Now if you’ll pardon me, my macchiato is getting cold.
I stopped drinking coffee the week of my PhD qualifying exams (in math). I was up to around 10 cups/day, I worried I would be too jittery to get through the long exams, and I wasn’t sucessful trying a gradual withdrawal. The week remains a complete hole in my memory to this day.
It sounds like I am lucky. I drink a lot of coffee in the morning. Water filled to the ‘6’ on the carafe (whatever that means), 3 heaping scoops of grounds.
But on the weekends, I can forget to drink coffee with no ill effects. Only thing I have to be careful of is drinking coffee in mid-to-late-afternoon, which risks trouble falling asleep.
I’ve given it up a couple of times over the last decade or so. I didn’t think the withdrawal was that bad–certainly not pleasant, but only 3-4 days of suffering (and I’ve been drinking the stuff for thirty years at this point). It was nice not to get a headache if I didn’t have my coffee, but other than that I didn’t feel it made much of a difference.
You may surmise from the fact that I use a home roaster that I am back on coffee.
So I’m nearly 60, and have was a coffee regular. I tapered down to nothing.
I’ve been off coffee for about 6 months, and now I notice the following:
My resting heart rate is down 10 bpm,
I may not feel as awake, but I can concentrate better,
and I sleep better
I have quit before and had similar results.
In the end though - some stress kicks in and I back at the coffe as a comforter.
Note anecdotes are not data.
I switched from drinking coffee to drinking tea, which is a lot like treating your heroin addiction with cocaine
I am not addicted to coffee, and I only drink one cup of coffee per day.
So coffee has an Erdos Number of one?
guzzling between six and ten cups of coffee per day
Ummm. 
Interesting that part about restricting blood flow. Checked around and apparently you shouldn’t consume more than 6 mg of caffeine per kilo of your weight (3 mg per kilo if pregant). I realized I drink a dozen tea cups a day, and need to get it down to 8-10 depending on the ratio of green to black tea. If you’re in the habit of leaving the bag/strainer in the cup until it’s empty then black tea can release almost as much caffeine as you’d find in a typical coffee cup.
Yorkshire Gold, I hardly knew ye.
I drink one 6-ounce cup of coffee a day as part of my office routine.
Unfortunately, it’s not part of my house routine, so I had to “dose” myself at least once during the weekend to avoid a nasty caffeine headache late Sunday. I was quite annoyed, as according to the articles I found, caffeine addiction only becomes a thing if you are drinking 3-4+ cups a day, but apparently my body was quite happy to become addicted on just the single cup. (On this basis, I’ve decided heroin is right out.)
Preparing for a canoe trip (a week without coffee), meant slowly dropping my consumption to half a cup, then a third of a cup.
If you ever want your coworkers to look at you suspiciously, just try preparing a 1/3 cup of coffee each morning. It’s one of those awkward situations where you know they’re thinking “has he gone mad?” but they’re too polite to say anything, which provides you no opportunity to provide an explanation for your weird behaviour.
Good grief! This is American coffee we are talking about here, not even proper European coffee! Lord knows what would would happen if I give up my moka made coffee. You can’t exaclty stand a spoon up in it but it’s close!
Think I’d best carry on as usual.
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