Your first steps away from coffee — without the headache.
Five days after the piece correcting my café assumptions went up, Deniz Aydin left a comment from Izmir that I’ve been thinking about since. His point was si...
Five weeks ago I wrote a sentence I was confident about: “a café almost certainly cannot give you a coffee-shaped drink without coffee in it.” A reader in Tu...
Five days ago I published a piece arguing that avoiding coffee is the right move early and the wrong move forever, and that the failure mode nobody counts is...
Last week I published a piece about going caffeine-free next to someone who still drinks coffee, and the advice at the centre of it was this: don’t remove th...
I’ve written about most of the places caffeine ambushes you. The office pot and the 3pm coffee run. The airport at 6am. The kitchen ten feet from your desk w...
Every guide to quitting caffeine — including some I’ve written — quietly assumes one thing: that you’re the one in charge of your sleep. Go to bed a little e...
A reader named Priyanka left a comment on my piece about staying caffeine-free at the office that I couldn’t stop thinking about. She said the office version...
For a long time I thought quitting caffeine was a morning problem. You get past the first cup, you’re home free. Then I went back to a desk job, and I found ...
I can tell you the exact place my caffeine-free streak has come closest to ending, more than once. It isn’t a bad day at work or a rough night’s sleep. It’s ...
I want to be honest about how this happened, because the internet version of quitting caffeine is a clean line — you stop, it’s hard for a week, and then you...
I used to think my afternoon was just like that. A good morning, a productive run until about 1pm, and then a wall — that heavy, can’t-focus, why-is-everythi...
The first time I quit caffeine, I braced for the headache. Everybody warns you about the headache. Three days of feeling like someone parked a car on my fore...
I am not a shift worker, but I’ve spent a strange amount of my life trying to sleep when the sun was up. Red-eye recovery. The summer I worked a 4am bakery p...
A couple of weeks ago a reader named Marco left a comment on my piece about waking up without coffee. He’s a rotating shift worker — nights and days, on what...
A few weeks ago I wrote a day-by-day log of my first two weeks off caffeine. I ended it on day 16, said the trade was worth it, and promised — mostly to myse...
The first morning I quit coffee, I sat at my kitchen counter at 6:40 a.m. waiting for the version of myself that opens the laptop and starts doing things, an...
This is the second time I’ve done fourteen days off caffeine. The first time was eighteen months ago and lasted nine months. This one started two Mondays bac...
I drank coffee every morning for nineteen years. Then for about eighteen months I didn’t. Then I started again. Then I cut back. Along the way I tried, in ro...
On day 2 of my first real attempt at quitting coffee, I poured myself a glass of water with lemon and stared at it like it had personally insulted me. The pr...
I have quit caffeine four times. The first time was cold turkey, a Monday morning, and by Tuesday evening I had a headache so bad I thought I was getting the...