I tried to quit caffine last week. It didn’t completely work but I learned a few things.

I drink a lot of tea usually. I’m talking about 10 cups a day. I have since I was about 16 (~13 years). I used to have one right before I went to bed because I’d wake up with a headache if I didn’t. I never realised that caffine withdrawl gives you a headache.. and now so much makes sense.

Whenever I’ve gone on holiday I went without caffine and got headaches for the first couple of days, I never really thought anything of it before but now I realise that was caffine withdrawl too.

When I tried to give it up last week I couldn’t. I don’t think it’s an addiction, I wasn’t thinking “God, I’m dying for a coffee”. I just felt like I couldn’t function properly. I had the headache, paracetamol wouldn’t get rid of it, I was driving to the office and nearly crashed 3 times because I wasn’t concentrating properly. I couldn’t work properly because my brain was too slow, I couldn’t remember what was in my clipboard, I couldn’t remember where in the .h file that function was that I was about to edit etc. All things that came easy before were hard.

So I was looking on the web for reasons why I should give up caffine completely. And it seems like the benefits outweigh anything else. Cures cancer, more alert, speeds up metabolism, tastes nice vs high blood pressure.  I think I can live with it.

I haven’t had a cup of tea since last Saturday though. Now I just have a coffee in the morning. I am finding that I sleep a lot better.. I usually wake up during the night, or when Sarah is getting ready for work – but now I get that deep sleep. My tongue has stopped being yellowy when I wake up too! (Which I had previously put down to liver failure)

The only downside is that since I’ve started drinking water any room I’ve been in has a bunch of half empty bottles everywhere. Yeah this water has existed for millions of years, since the dawn of time, but I’m not gonna drink it if it’s been sitting in the bottle for 3 hours.