Coffee might not be the magic drink I thought it was..

Created on October 23, 2020

This is my first blog post ever, so bear with me. If anyone is ever going to read this feel free to leave feedback!

I usually drink two cups of coffee a day, and I've been noticing that if I was getting more and more fatigued in the evenings and I didn't really sleep as fast as I used to. I was getting more irritable and needed that was grumpy the entire morning until I had my cup of coffee. Now I don't know for a fact if this is due to my caffeine intake.

I decided to do some research as I usually do. I only recently started taking two cups of coffee a day and thought I should maybe question if this is such a good idea. I found an article titled COFFEE IS SECRETLY SABOTAGING YOUR ENERGY LEVELS. Kinda clickbaity if you ask me. But it is secret in the sense that A LOT of people don't know about this.

I thought I knew everything about caffeine and did a very small lookup session before I even really started drinking coffee. I mostly read things about the health benefits and that there are no known bad prominent side effects. Although the health benefits are very much real! They only really count for someone who isn't a regular caffeine user. Even when you drink coffee once a day (about 100mg of caffeine) you can already get a physical dependency.

What this means is that you build up tolerance for caffeine. And slowly your baseline energy drop the longer and more intense your intake is. Now you need caffeine to even feel normal. So yes you will feel energetic and have an increased mood when you drink coffee but for the times that it is worn off you will feel worse than you would have without coffee.

Now the benefits for taking in caffeine are pretty good:

  • Lower risk of cardiovascular disease
  • Lower risk of diabetes
  • Protects the liver
  • Promotes longevity
  • Decreases cancer risk
  • Protects the skin
  • Neurodegenerative diseases
  • Reduces the risk of Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
  • Prevents gout
  • Supports gut health

I would love to have these benefits and be focused at the same time, but I don't want my baseline energy to be lower by default. You can do this by first quieting caffeine altogether for a couple of weeks and then drinking in on/off cycles. You shouldn't quit immediately as this can cause some mild drawbacks, like headaches and bad mood. After you've done this you could for example drink in one week and not in the other. You should not drink more than 4/5 cups max! And you shouldn't have to, because you won't have any tolerance and should get the full energy blast as you got when you first started drinking coffee.

Hope this was useful to someone! It was useful for me at least...