My bad friend.
I hereby announce that I am nearly two weeks into Decaf 2008, the latest in a series of attempts to reduce or eliminate my caffeine intake.
It had become clear to me that I have grown to depend on coffee’s (sometimes uncontrollable) capacity to power my brain. Ever since I started drinking coffee (my freshman year at Rice), it has been a perennial companion. We even threw a couple of parties—under the moniker “Devil Mug Café”—in honor of its awesome and terrible power:
Coffee giveth, but coffee taketh away. It has exacerbated my predisposition to anxiety and panic. It makes Erin not want to kiss me. And when I try to give it up, it fights back. I’m unsettled by the degree to which I appear not to function without it.
For more than ten years, coffee has been by turns my friend (making me the best version of myself) and my enemy (making me the worst version of myself). Its companionship is mercurial and destructive. Erin has therefore dubbed coffee my bad friend. (I tend think of it more as a seductress, but I can see how she might not share that characterization.)
On a related note, I am now officially looking for other, less-harmful habits to pick up. Ideally: something that will give me the feeling of inner warmth and cerebral industriousness without the unpleasant side-effects of 200 mg of caffeine. Tea is perhaps an option, but it must be reasonably decaffeinated (as anyone who was present at Pei Wei two weeks ago will attest—stupid iced green tea!).
My (non-bad) friend Jeremy has proposed “weekend coffee” as a way to enjoy its effects on occasion without developing a mind-bending tolerance for them, but I fear I would find my bad friend on the couch long after the weekend is over. Recidivism is a potent risk with such a strategy.
However, as the father of a three-month-old, Jeremy also offered a word of warning: once our baby arrives, I may need my bad friend more than ever. Coffee, it is said, is the third parent.
9 Responses to “My bad friend.”
Good luck!
Also, it’s a good thing we shipped TapeDeck 1.0 _before_ you decided to quit the liquid ambition… ;)
comment posted at 12:51 pm on 28 May 2008
Lie still, little bottle and shake my shaky hand. Coffee’s not enough for me–I need a better friend.
comment posted at 1:02 pm on 29 May 2008
What coffee are you drinking that has 200mg of caffeine? That seems a lot higher than usual for a cup of brewed coffee.
Have you conducted experiments to see if it is the caffeine or the coffee? Lots of things have more or less caffeine. Do you experience withdrawal and lethargy with other sources of caffeine? If it’s the coffee, does decaf coffee not act as a placebo?
I do think the tea is a good idea, if it is good tea. You could step down the caffeine level from black(40mg) to oolong(30mg) to green(20mg) to white(15mg) to herbal(0mg).
PS I disagree about baby=coffee. I had twins and didn’t drink any coffee or tea or extra soda.
PPS I still have my Devil Mug Cafe shirt.
comment posted at 10:38 am on 02 Jun 2008
200mg of caffeine is pretty typical for a 12oz cup of decent drip coffee. That’s a Starbucks “tall,” the smallest size they advertise.
Also be careful: despite the hype, the caffeine (and other stimulants like theophylline) content of tea is essentially unrelated to its color. The most jittery-making beverage my older brother ever encountered was a plain green tea. Most so-called “herbal tea” has no stimulant effect just because it isn’t made with Camellia sinensis… although chicory, yerba mate, and other beverage “herbs” do have stimulant components.
comment posted at 3:33 pm on 02 Jun 2008
Did I say chicory? I meant guarana. Silly me.
comment posted at 3:35 pm on 02 Jun 2008
I’ve had to cut quit my (fierce) coffee habit three times, once for each pregnancy. This last time was by far the worst, living where I do. The kids know Starbucks by sight, and Ella knows my espresso drink order of choice. This is not a point of pride, I promise you! All I can say is go cold turkey and prepare for two weeks of pain. But iit’s so nice to be free. I have to agree with d2k, too–I waited several months after each baby before going off the wagon. And only because I loves me some mocha!
I still have my shirt, too :)
comment posted at 8:52 pm on 03 Jun 2008
Here you go. Drink the coffee as normal, and then have a chaser of Drank to counteract the jitters. :)
comment posted at 10:31 am on 05 Jun 2008
I’ve had decent luck with Adrafanil.
comment posted at 3:28 pm on 20 Aug 2008
@aaronsw—Huh, interesting. However I’m not (yet) prepared to import psychoactive pharma from France.
This also gets into the very gray area of “cognitive enhancers”—there was a pretty good Economist article a couple months back about the ethics of off-label use of cognitive drugs like Provigil and Ritalin.
As I continue to struggle with coffee (having briefly departed the wagon shortly after Nathan was born, and currently struggling to clamber back on), I wonder where the line should be drawn between something that simply helps you operate at your own highest “natural” level of performance and something that may confer an unfair advantage over others. I imagine coffee to fall on the “natural” side, and Adrafinil/Provigil on the “unfair” side, of this dichotomy. [Note: The metabolite of Adrafinil is modafinil, aka Provigil, so they ought to have the same cognitive effects, if over a different time span.]
But what’s fair? A true Objectivist [my awesome sister-in-law has been reading Atlas Shrugged recently] would argue that each Reasonable person is not merely allowed, but expected, to take any advantage available to him. After all, your competitors, opponents, and enemies will certainly do so, and only a fool would bring a knife, so to speak, to a mental gunfight. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Erin would argue that your “natural best” is one achieved without medication of any kind (loath as she is to take medicine, even when prescribed). It’s the only truly fair way to play.
comment posted at 1:42 pm on 21 Aug 2008