turns out coffee makes me anxious. groundbreaking!

how i figured out that my 10+ year daily coffee habit was hurting me

this week i wanted to share a recent discovery from my personal life, which i haven’t really talked to anyone but my boyfriend about. if you're dependent on massive amounts of coffee on a daily basis, or if you’re just interested in my personal life, hopefully this can be of some value. if not, i’m still including a track of the week and astrology thingy at the bottom of the newsletter, so you can just scroll down there if caffeine addiction is a boring topic for you.

coffee had been part of my daily life since early in high school. as a chronically tired person who needed the help to keep their grades up and stay alert throughout the day, coffee was a necessity. pretty quickly i became addicted to caffeine, getting a massive headache for days if i missed one day. i’d basically become sluggish, zombie-like, and act like a total dick to everyone around me. as a young teenager. obviously my withdrawal symptoms were really severe from an early time, and all my attempts to quit throughout the years were fruitless. at the very least, i wanted to stop having coffee and start only having tea, something more mellow so i can also be a bit more mellow.

this is at saint cecelia in victoria, BC. it’s very cool, check it out.

university obviously provided very few opportunities to ever explore this, since coffee is everywhere and central to so many things (the daily ritual of getting an iced americano before class, starbucks carafes at work meetings, and student newsrooms run on coffee, red bull, and the sheer drive of curiosity alone.

now that i’m years out of university and jobless, i realized now is one of the few opportunities i have for my body to adjust to less caffeine until i can eliminate my dependency on it completely. if nobody is relying on me to be alert all the time, i can afford to be lethargic and sullen for a few weeks.

but instead of going cold turkey, i opted to taper down then replace coffee with matcha instead. i was having somewhere between 150-300mg of caffeine daily through espresso, and i tapered down to one coffee a day, then one half-caf coffee a day, then matcha instead entirely. i had a few headaches here and there while tapering, but nothing as bad as the headaches that i had before, which felt like taking an icepick to my skull. now my daily caffeine intake is somewhere between 40-100mg, depending on the day.

i have good memories of the macchiato at habit coffee in victoria, BC. i swear this newsletter is not victoria coffee shop promotion, i don’t even live there lol.

but now that i’m a few weeks into this, i’m noticing some major changes. it’s kind of insane how much different i’m feeling.

for one, i’m less tired in the morning. i’m obviously still tired, i haven’t had a restful sleep since i was a child. but i can more easily get out of bed and get ready. the second major change is that my anxiety levels are down a ton. i still have an anxiety disorder, i don’t think anything will change that, but it has less of a hair-trigger these days.

third, my resting heart rate is way lower, at least according to my fitbit. i used to have a resting heart rate somewhere between 72 and 75 bpm, but now that i’m drinking only matcha my resting heart rate is 68 bpm and declining once in a while, but my smart watch also shows that my heart rate when i sleep is going down near 55 bpm at some points of the night, which never would’ve happened before. i think the lowest i ever saw my heart rate get overnight when i was drinking coffee was around 65 bpm.

some more things: my appetite and uncontrollable need to always be snacking has been dampened, my teeth are looking less yellow (it’s insane how much coffee stains your teeth!), i’m happier and more relaxed, and the process of making my little iced matcha every morning makes me feel very happy. i look forward to the process whenever i wake up because it’s fun and relaxing. the biggest con to all of this is that it’s expensive, but not wildly so.

that’s all for now, and i’ll maybe write little updates here and there in future newsletters on how it’s going, if i’ve quit entirely, or if i give up on quitting. i know it might be weird to read about caffeine in the context of addiction and dependency, but it’s the most widely used drug on earth and most of us don’t think of it as a drug (not that there’s anything wrong with drug use, you do you!) if anyone else has any interesting experiences with quitting caffeine or switching to matcha, i’d be interested in hearing them.

track of the week

forgive me for this. i’ve been playing so much stardew valley over the last two weeks. it’s completely overtaken my life. i adore the soundtrack, and it’s insane to me that the creator of the game, Eric Barone, wrote all the music, along with everything else. like genuinely mindblowing. so here’s a song i really liked in the soundtrack. can you tell i married sebastian?

the signs as spring things

aries - hummingbirds hitting my window (non-fatally)

taurus - daffodils popping up

gemini - unpredictable weather patterns

cancer - light rain while it’s sunny, resulting in rainbow

leo - earlier sunrises and later sunsets

virgo - robins singing

libra - early crocuses

scorpio - snow in april

sagittarius - tree buds

capricorn - allergies

aquarius - false spring in february only for it to freeze right after

pisces - groundhog day