Your first steps away from coffee — without the headache.
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...