My (Brief) Breakup with Coffee
Beginning the New Year by reflecting on my attachment to caffeine.
TL;DR — I was drinking too much coffee. Then I stopped. And then…
It’s a new year.
And typically in honor of a new year, many people make promises to themselves in the form of resolutions. Some are kept, some are broken the next day, and some never get off the ground. Research suggests that only 9% of Americans follow through on the resolutions they set for themselves at the beginning of the year. Despite bleak data, every year we tell ourselves that we’re going to quit smoking, lose 10 lbs, run a marathon, cut out red meat, learn to play a new instrument, commit to dating better people — essentially become a different person somehow, overnight, starting January 1st.
From a lexicological perspective, there are a lot of different definitions for the word resolution. In a literary sense, a resolution is considered “the point in a literary work at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out.” Physiologically, a resolution is “the subsidence of a pathological state” like inflammation. Politically speaking, a resolution is “a formal expression of opinion, will, or intent voted by an official body or assembled group.” All of these definitions suggest some kind of conclusion, a wrapping up, a determination, the solution to a problem, the moment when the pain subsides, or an issue is all worked out. Whatever the context, a resolution is usually an ending or dissolution of something — of pain, of conflict, of habit, of relationship.
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Not because I don’t believe in making promises to myself. I do. I just don’t believe that the ebb and flow of life is dictated by the Gregorian calendar — and I don’t like setting myself up for failure if I can help it. New Year’s resolutions don’t seem to leave much room for the necessary nuances required for lasting change, for untangling the roots of our most deeply held habits and attachments, for the grief of giving up something that occupies a big place in your life, even if you know you’d be better off without it. Resolutions are, well, resolute. They are grand, romantic gestures to our future, better selves. But in my experience, actual progress is usually small, slow, incremental — and often involves a lot of backsliding.
Like, for example, my relationship with coffee.
My very first palpable memory of coffee was the toasty aroma of Folder’s percolating on the stove at my grandmother’s house. She had an old-school aluminum percolator that she would pack with fresh grinds each morning. When she finally switched to making drip in a Mr. Coffee when I was in my teens, she made herself a full pot when she woke up and drank the whole damn thing, a million little cups of coffee all day long in a porcelain teacup and matching saucer from the pot on the burner (before switching to Lipton lemon tea in the evening). My grandma was the first person that I ever met who coveted coffee on a deep level. A former smoker, I can imagine that before she quit she was having a cigarette with each one of those tiny cups of coffee. The ritual continued after quitting, a sacred practice in the kitchen, a low hum of routine activity and domestic busyness between each sip. She would putter around the house drinking coffee and listening to the radio while she cleaned, cooked, did laundry, and sewed. Her relationship with that coffee pot is a fond memory for me, a ceremony of the every day that would continue until her death.
My first dalliance with coffee was in high school. Brief, infrequent encounters with a skinny vanilla latte at the Starbucks on Route 17 between a Ford dealership and a Container Store. Once in the full throws of undergrad, my relationship with coffee escalated quickly into a non-stop, codependent love affair of the highest order. Coffee got me through midterms, papers, and sleepless nights studying. Coffee was piping hot with endless free refills at the Red Lion Cafe on the College Avenue campus. I would take advantage of that perk to “perk” myself up all day long, listening to M83 on repeat while speed-reading for hours. I had a coffee for every seminar, every lecture, every meal, every assignment. It would be an understatement to say I was totally, utterly hooked on coffee and no one was going to talk me out of drinking it. Coffee kept me awake, kept me buzzed, and kept me focused. I edited films with coffee. Coffee and I co-wrote my senior honors thesis together. College boyfriends came and went, but coffee remained with me. When I graduated college caffè came with me to live abroad in Rome, where I stood at the counter of the local bar every morning before my Italian class sipping a delicate cappuccino or a deep espresso. It was there, nestled in the cobblestone alleyways of La Città Eterna, that I began to appreciate the ritual of slowing down with coffee, the pleasure of making coffee itself the main event.
When I landed back in the States, coffee was with me through my first corporate job in New York City in the form of a standard “cup of joe” in the morning from the bagel cart on the corner, scalding hot with ample milk and sugar — a warm and comforting commuter companion couriered in a crappy paper cup with an even crappier plastic lid. (You know, the kind that spills everywhere, tastes like dishwater, and yet you drink the whole thing anyway.)
She was there with me throughout the day in the break room on the 30th floor of One Liberty Plaza, bubbling and brewing and giving me time away from my tiny, sad cubicle. When I quit that job to pursue acting, coffee came with me to night school in a thermos left right outside the studio door (no coffee allowed in the theatre). Every night after class, she kept me awake on the long train ride home.
Coffee came with me through many moves around town. She was there, sitting in the cupholder of the Uhaul truck, helping me get through the difficulty of fitting that big couch into that tiny studio apartment. She was there when we got bed bugs and had to move down the street without any furniture at all. When I moved across the country by myself during the pandemic she was my passenger seat companion, my rest stop treat, my late-night navigator. And yes, oh yes, coffee was there for me during those early morning film shoots when I would take three trains to Brooklyn to pick up a box truck for the art department at 5:45 a.m.
I am certain that every early morning call time in the history of cinema has been sponsored by this most magnificent bean.
It would be an understatement to say that coffee has been one of the most consistent relationships in my life. Besides my immediate family, she is my oldest, longest-lasting attachment. A constant presence, a familiar companion. Unlike actual people in my life, she has never let me down. And, on some level, deep down, I fear that I don’t know who I would be without her. So it’s hard to admit that I have a problem with coffee, that I need a break — maybe a permanent one — and that she might not be good for me at all.
The truth is, as much as coffee has been there for me, my relationship with coffee has also harmed me. When I was a junior in college I was easily drinking over 60 oz of coffee a day (well above the recommended 24-40 oz). I was studying all day and partying all night — highly caffeinated and seriously dehydrated. In all of my copious consumption of java beans, I wasn’t drinking a single ounce of water to match it. One night, after a long day of classes and many, many drip refills at the local cafe, I went to a bar off campus with some friends for a drink. One minute, I was standing around in the courtyard chatting with friends, the next I was opening my eyes flat on my back on the concrete.
“What happened?” I asked, dazed and confused. I hadn't even had any alcohol.
“You passed out,” someone said. “You hit your head.”
The hospital was right around the block, but they took me in the ambulance strapped to a backboard. At the time I didn’t really understand what was happening, but now I get it: it was the coffee. Coffee was dehydrating me, overwhelming my nervous system, rotting my gut. I would pass out a couple more times in college in inconvenient places: standing up from sitting on a couch while watching a movie and down an entire flight of stairs at a house party.
Nowhere in my mind did I think, maybe I should cut back on the coffee.
As much as coffee was helping me survive the drudgeries of daily life, it was coffee that contributed to my physical ailments, compounded my anxiety, and made it hard for me to fall asleep at night. I was concerned about coffee everywhere I went. If I went on a road trip, the very first thing I would need to know is where I was going to get my next coffee. If I woke up in the morning and went to work without my coffee…well, I wouldn’t. I once had a dream where I answered the door to my apartment and saw two plainclothes detectives standing on the porch, looking to ask me questions about a missing person who had disappeared the day before.
“Ma’am,” said one of the dream officers. “There was a report of a missing person on this block.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I lied, eyeing the trashbags piled right outside my door.
In the dream, I knew exactly where the body in question had been dumped — on the curb right outside my apartment — but I wasn’t willing to divulge the information because I was afraid that the dream detectives would search my apartment and confiscate the coffee beans in my kitchen cabinet. Crazy, right? For years, in the back of my mind at all times, even in my dreams, was the question: where am I going to get my next coffee?
Laying it all out like this makes it sound like I have an addiction. And I kind of do. Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. It is a stimulant (a drug that speeds up messaging between the brain and the body) that activates the same part of the brain as cocaine (the pre-frontal cortex) and while technically caffeine is not considered to be addictive, medical and scientific communities do recognize that it has the potential to become a dependency.
Recently I decided that, for the first time in my adult life, I would go a whole month completely caffeine-free. At the time I was drinking a full 34 oz French press and then going to work and having another three cups of coffee (34 + 8 +8 + 8 = 54 oz). Not surprisingly, I felt exhausted. At some point imperceptible to me, I had gone from being sufficiently stimulated into some type of energy depletion loop.
So, on August 1st, 2023, I stopped drinking coffee.
Before this experiment began, my whole morning routine was designed around my French Press. I would grind my beans fresh (whole bean Caffè Umbria or Mukilteo Coffee Roasters, a local fav), drop two heaping scoops into the double-paned glass press, and pour hot water from my electric kettle. The grounds would start dancing, instantly activated by the heat, and a nice, fluffy oil crema would form at the top of the vessel. Once the press was fully steeped, I would sit down at my computer and write and/or scroll through Facebook while sipping on my freshly made coffee and listening to the news.
Without that morning coffee, my whole routine was disrupted.
It felt so unreal to me, much like leaving an actual relationship with a human being. Up until this point, I had envisioned my entire life with coffee. I envisioned future camping trips with coffee. I envisioned my wedding day with coffee. Sitting on the porch an old woman rocking in a chair — with a cup of coffee. I just didn't consider that my life would continue without coffee. I wasn’t having physical withdrawal symptoms, but there was a big, coffee-shaped hole in my life. What I noticed pretty immediately was that coffee had been masking a deeper grief, a level of existential sadness that I can’t access when I feel numbed out by caffeine. Coffee and alcohol do this— they numb me just enough so that I’m not acutely aware of how I’m feeling deep down. Usually, it’s some form of sadness or heartbreak. Without the buffer, I had to confront myself.
After a brief period of mourning the loss of my daily ritual, I began to imagine my life differently. I started exercising in the morning. I was like, okay, what can this routine look like? I would go outside with my Bluetooth speaker and listen to Lizzo or Beyonce and jump rope. And even though I couldn't jump rope for very long, it felt good. I also started doing yoga every morning through an app that I found that I liked. Just 10 minutes. It was a little ritual, a time commitment that was equivalent to one cup of coffee — one that made me feel really good in my body. I also ended up going to work half an hour earlier than normal because I wasn’t spending time lounging around in my pajamas finishing the last dregs of my French press.
For the first couple of days of my abstinence, I drank Earl Gray black tea in the morning because I was concerned that I might experience much-dreaded caffeine withdrawal. Curiously, despite the insane volume of coffee I was used to consuming daily, I didn't have any caffeine withdrawals whatsoever. I felt fine. I didn't get headaches. I didn't feel tired. I didn’t feel irritable. I had more energy pretty much immediately. After a couple of weeks of this new routine, it was clear. I was — despite the narrative I had been telling myself my entire adult life — totally fine without coffee. Happier, even.
Then on September 1st, after 31 days sans coffee, I had my first cup since my grand experiment began. I settled on making myself a single-origin pour-over in one of my favorite mugs — a blue and white porcelain cup with a large handle and pomegranates dancing all around the rim. As anticipated, the smell of the beans marinating in hot water was just as heavenly as I remembered it. The first sip was rich and satisfying. I drank the cup slowly, deliberately, and questioningly. Should I be doing this? What is this going to feel like? Having that first cup of coffee after abstaining for 31 days felt a little bit like having sex with an ex after a breakup. It was both pleasurable, everything I remembered it being, and somehow felt…different. I could feel my stomach fluttering, and after the second sip I began sweating. The single cup sent my entire nervous system buzzing in a way that no longer felt familiar or welcome to my body. After that first cup, I didn’t have a cup of coffee for another 15 days. For a brief moment, I thought, maybe this is it. Maybe I’ve entered a new phase of life without coffee. After getting over the initial hurdle of creating new morning rituals, it seemed so easy to just not drink it at all. I wondered if this new lifestyle change would stick.
It didn’t.
The backslide into my coffee habit happened during a particularly difficult work week in mid-September. It was such a small, almost imperceptible moment. I wasn’t sleeping well and I was having to do a lot more socializing than normal. Faced with a neverending schedule of obligations, I needed a little pick me up. So I went where I have always gone in moments like this — directly to the coffee pot in the kitchen at the office. It wasn’t an unconscious decision. I knew what I was doing when I picked up the pot. I observed myself pouring myself a cup. I observed myself taking a sip and then pouring myself another cup.
Once the relationship was re-established, coffee quickly slid back to its familiar place in my life and routines. So I guess you could say, after a brief separation, coffee and I are back together. For now, anyway.
Curiously, “reconciliation” or “new beginnings” are not among the antonyms for resolution. Instead, the thesaurus provides less hopeful terminology like “weakness, indecision, stalemate.” And I guess it would be fair to say I have a weakness when it comes to this substance, that I am undecided about my course of action, that we have arrived at a stalemate in our relationship. Another antonym for the word resolution that sticks out for me is uncertainty. At this moment, my relationship with coffee feels uncertain. I’m not sure where we’re going, if we’re going to last, or if I will eventually get fed up with the limitations of the relationship and walk away for good. From a literary standpoint, this story has no turning point where the chief dramatic complication with coffee is worked out. Not really. There are takeaways. I learned some new things about myself without coffee and formed new rituals, some of which I’ve kept. And my narrative around coffee has shifted a bit. I may want it, but I don’t need it. I drink less of it. I have alternative beverages I can turn to. I now know that if I decide to, I can choose not to have it at all.
But…no revolutionary transformation happened. Unremarkably, my attachment to coffee, like all of my attachments, needs to be managed consistently and re-evaluated regularly. There is no stark line in the sand of my life “before” and “after” coffee as we see so often in Youtube and Instagram ads.
So, this New Year I find myself right back where I started — sitting at my desk drinking a full French press. From the outside, not much has changed. But there have been shifts beneath the surface. I’m drinking more water with my coffee, making sure I eat breakfast with my coffee and mindfully monitoring how I feel before I pour myself another cup. My progress is microscopic, barely perceptible to the naked eye, but it is happening.
It may not be as narratively satisfying as a resolution…but it is more real.
Some Coffee Alternatives I Like
Dandy Blend - Easy, instant herbal caffeine-free alternative with a Dandelion and Chicory Root base. Yummy if you like a deep, earthy flavor but watch out..it’s a diuretic!
Teeccino - Good for a French press, multiple herbal flavor options, completely caffeine-free with a rich, chocolatey taste.
Rasa (Dirty) - This fairtrade coffee has 1/3 of the caffeine of a regular cup of coffee + adaptogens and is my current morning ritual.
The Yoga App I Like
Asana Rebel - This app is not free, but it is low-cost ($35 for the year). I liked how they began with the fundamentals in short, ten-minute classes.
The Album I Listened To On Repeat While Hopped Up On Caffeine In College