A Crucial Practice for All Coffee Drinkers: A simple but important strategy to ensure a healthy relationship with caffeine.
Coffee is incredibly healthy.
Most people don’t think this is true, but it is. It’s full of antioxidants, cancer-preventing substances, and it can improve performance in every single aspect of our lives. But we need to be smart with our coffee.
Here is a simple but important practice that will ensure you are in control of your caffeine intake and to make coffee work for you.
The Practice
On a regular basis, ideally once per month, you need to take at least one week off coffee and all other sources of caffeine.
Coffee is great, but long-term coffee use has a few problems.
Let me first explain how caffeine actually works:
We have a neurotransmitter in our brain called adenosine. Adenosine causes us to feel sleepy and builds up over the course of the day. We also have some residual adenosine in our brains when we wake up in the morning.
Caffeine blocks the receptors in the brain that adenosine binds to. This means the adenosine can’t bind, and therefore leads to us feeling awake. We only feel tired when the adenosine is able to bind to the receptors.
However, when caffeine binds to these receptors and doesn’t allow the adenosine to bind, our brains will start to produce more receptors. This means it will take more and more caffeine to achieve the same effect. This is why your first cup of coffee after some time off always hits the hardest, but when you’re having coffee every day you can have 3 espresso shots and not feel a thing.
Another consideration with having a lot of adenosine receptors is that once the caffeine wears off (caffeine has a half-life of 6 hours), the adenosine receptors become unblocked — and because we have so many receptors, a lot of adenosine can bind at once, and we experience a crash.
Fortunately, taking 7 days off each month can essentially reset these receptors and get them back to a more normal level, thus preventing these consequences.
What You Can Do
Each month (or at least regularly) take at least 7 days completely off coffee.
I like to do it the first 7 days of each month so I always remember.
If you’re like most people, you’re going to experience withdrawal. So I will explain an effective method to hopefully mitigate if not completely prevent withdrawal symptoms.
- Day 1: Drink one cup of coffee only (skip this day if you usually only have one cup)
- Day 2: Have a cup of caffeinated tea — e.g. black or green, but no other caffeine
- Day 3–7: No caffeine at all
I have found this slow ease off to be effective in managing withdrawal.
Coffee is great.
But we need to be smart with it. Having high amounts of caffeine every single day is not ideal. We need to let the neurotransmitters in our brain reset.
But fortunately, by simply taking a week off each month, we can mitigate any detrimental consequences and can enjoy our coffee and all its health benefits, without any concerns.
