How to Quit Coffee

A comprehensive guide about that, and so much more

I’m no doctor, but I’m comfortable claiming an expertise in addiction—especially when it comes to tapering off substances. I’ve successfully quit almost every hard drug known to humankind, as well as a few of the other “drugs” that run our culture: be it porn, apps, processed food, shopping, or work itself.

When I was about a year into my recovery, I embarked upon a healing process that included daily meditation, yoga, prayer, and a rigorous introductory course into the psychedelic wisdom of the Amazon jungle. It was at this time that my nervous system became extremely sensitive to coffee’s effects, despite my lifelong love for the bean juice.

The impact was palpable. In work meetings, my hands convulsed and jittered; I felt a familiar rave-y grinding in my teeth and clenching of my jaw. My speech took on the stutter of the insecure. Worst of all, and this part could not be more crucial: I couldn’t sleep.

Contrary to popular belief, coffee does not provide energy—rather, it blocks the brain’s capacity to experience tiredness (which is not the same thing). Coffee, and most caffeine sources, inhibit the receptor for a neuromodulator called adenosine, which helps us sleep each night. Over the course of the day, adenosine levels in the brain gradually build, creating “sleep pressure,” or the natural drive for relaxation and sleepiness. We may be tired and need sleep, but if we ingest coffee, we effectively siesta-block our adenosine, and our brain never gets the message.

Okay then, due to a sleep schedule akin to spiritual insomnia, much to my dismay, I knew it was time to quit the java. Given my experience in this domain, I wanted to take my coffee taper slow and steady—the most responsible way to ween off any substance for long-term success. I talked to several people who’d kicked the habit, did some online research, and crafted a plan.

When I began my coffee detox, tapering from regular to decaf, I was straight-up shocked by how difficult it was.

I mean, it wasn’t as hard as the opiates and benzos, but it was honestly about as hard as coming off amphetamines—in my experience, at least. I had headaches, low energy, irritability, and all the brutal, sweaty hallmark signs of withdrawal.

As in every other case, quitting this vice proved worth it.

Since I went coffee-less, I’ve slept better than I ever have in my entire life. My presence is more attuned to its environment (and those in it), and there’s a newfound trust in my body’s natural rhythms. Interestingly, I never need to take naps because I feel possessed of an uplifting energy throughout my days. Though naps are tight.

Now, I can take-or-leave caffeine in the morning—and occasionally I do treat myself to a pour-over. When I do, the effects are pronounced. Like, I’m lit. And it’s a nice change of pace, to be sure. But it only reinforces how unnecessary the morning boost is—once you’ve successfully ceased to need it!

Also, perhaps most significantly, after about sixteen months of no caffeine whatsoever, I discovered the life-changing world of gong fu cha—pu’erh tea—along with many other coffee alternatives that I personally feel are far superior to coffee in terms of balanced, sustained energy, not to mention subtler spiritual qualities typically only found in tea.

(Important caveat here: these alternatives are only superior once your system is properly cleansed.)

I can proudly say that I have helped more than a handful of friends and clients kick their coffee habit. Again, coffee isn’t crack, but it’s still not bad to live free of its yolk. I even developed a protocol, and I provide it for those interested below.

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First, some disclaimers

I am a former coffee snob in the truest sense of the word. I helped launch a coffee startup as the COO—King’s Row Coffee—which makes excellent cold brews. I spent considerable leisure time seeking out the best cups of joe in San Francisco. If you put me behind the bar at your local coffee shop, I could pour you a delicious latte, with foam art to boot. At one point, I reckon I drank 2-5 cups per day, and then an espresso at night post-meal, Euro-style. I felt very sophisticated.

All of this is to say, I fucking love coffee! It’s delicious! When its caffeinated particles hit your cellular membranes, it’s a pleasant and potent drug.

If you love coffee and it is not a problem for you—meaning that, you feel sustained, grounded energy throughout the day, have no trouble sleeping come evening, and can take-it-or-leave it in the mornings—this guide is not for you.

When I’ve discussed this in the past, people inevitably misunderstand or come at me with aggressive replies about how I am trying to steal or stamp out joy, like the Grinch on Christmas. For those new to my work, I may kind of be the “addiction guy” but I’m also the “psychedelics guy,” meaning that I believe all humans deserve the right and freedom to expand and enhance their consciousness with whatever tools they deem useful and beneficial. If coffee works for you, do you, my friend.

Despite how futile I know it is to ask of such a thing on the interweb:

Please do not come at me with a veritable “fuck you, no way am I quitting coffee.”

1. I’m not telling you to. Just offering.

2. I say this because it’s happened. Many times. And it’s almost starting to hurt my feelings.

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So, why quit coffee?

Ultimately, by this point, you probably already know whether you should quit coffee or not. Something will have already gripped you, and you should trust that tug. But here’s a list of reasons nevertheless:

• Better sleep at night

• Improved energy throughout the day

• Reduced anxiety and jitteriness

• You might be physically dependent, which creates negative physical consequences

• You are curious about practicing mindfulness and developing a skill of stopping substances whenever you feel called to do so

• You are curious about what existence might be like with your natural energy levels

• Coffee, as an industry, works tirelessly to make you believe it’s an indispensable part of your life, but you radically stand against any corporate addictions

• There are better alternative sources of caffeine/energy. There just are.

When people start paying closer attention to their holistic health or embark on a contemplative path incorporating meditation and psychedelics, it’s extremely common for the body to start rejecting coffee (in the way that one on this type of path often rejects alcohol).

This is not a value statement, rather anecdotal evidence: the more sensitive and in touch with your body you become, the less necessary coffee seems to be. The less necessary, the less helpful, and indeed, the less desired. Eventually, quitting coffee is easy—once you’ve quit. The desire, the pull, the yearning simply ceases.

I will say this, as a value statement: it’s good to take breaks from anything that you do daily and unthinkingly; it’s always good to cultivate the body’s natural movement toward equilibrium. As someone who has a lot of experience in the domain of changing behaviors, practicing with coffee is a relatively low-risk endeavor. You are not going to die or be a depressed ignoramus without a morning brew, despite the thoughts that may tell you so.

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Common fears about quitting coffee

• I won’t have energy in the morning

• I won’t have energy in the afternoon

• I’ll be tired and cranky

• Don’t you dare take this away from me, you asshole

• I have a pressure-cooker job and need energy

• I have young children and need the energy

• Energy!

Now, it’s worth noting all of these fears can be a form of “cope,” a rationalization that keeps us stuck perpetuating harmful patterns.

My working definition of addiction: Continued use despite adverse consequences. Both the use and the consequences exist on a spectrum—one cup of joe a day is very different than four. Same for the consequences—a bit of jitteriness is very different than a twenty-minute buzz … followed by an intense crash, experienced four times a day, only concluding when it’s time for insomnia to take the stage.

Here, you’ll have to determine for yourself where you fall on the addiction spectrum, and whether coffee creates negative consequences in your life that outweigh the fears (which, again, are sometimes false rationalizations, and a conflation of reward and consequence).

Keep in mind: Westerners, for millennia, had to work and raise kids without recourse to coffee or tea. If you’re tired at 9 a.m. and noon, every day, there’s something wrong! Whether it’s diet, sleep hygiene, unbalanced Qi (chi), or the stress of living on a heating planet in a dying culture—the natural state of being is not one of unending torpor, and it shouldn’t be considered so! Coffee cannot always be the answer.

But before we proceed, let’s be honest about how hard this can be.

Common coffee withdrawal/detox symptoms include:

• Tiredness (yes, in some cases, extreme lethargy)

• Irritability

• Depressive ruminations

• Emotional volatility

• Recurrent thoughts that I, Alex Olshonsky, am an asshole for suggesting you quit coffee

I know I just lost some of you. It’s a daunting list, to be sure. But if you’re anything like me, rather than a reason to not stop, those are preciously the reasons to quit. Coffee is a crutch; the broken leg is the issue.

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HOW TO QUIT COFFEE: My simple protocol

Everyone is different, so choose your own pace. In my opinion, as so often is the case, slow and steady wins the race. The slower you go on the taper, the more you give your nervous system time to stabilize.

If you proceed patiently and methodically, you can make this transition pretty easy—I swear! I’ve seen people have no problems at all implementing this protocol. This is also great to do with an accountability partner, lover, spiritual friend—or use the comments here and I will do my best to follow along and support your journey.

How to Quit Coffee

1. Self-inquiry: take stock of how many cups of coffee you are drinking per day, and when.

2. Begin to reduce your regular coffee intake by a half-cup at a time.

3. Stabilize for 2-7 days on your new dosage until you get to 1 cup per day.

4. Once you have stabilized at 1 cup, begin drinking half-decaf, half-regular.

5. Stabilize here for 7 days.

6. Then, at your own pace, begin to reduce the proportions such that you are drinking more decaf (say, 2/3 decaf, one-third regular). Stabilize here.

7. Eventually, you get to just one cup of decaf per day. Decaf still has ~15 mg of caffeine. The longer you stabilize here, the better. I recommend at least 7 days.

8. Now, begin to reduce to half a cup of decaf. Stabilize.

9. Pick a day, cement your intention, and simply stop drinking coffee.

For most regular coffee drinkers, this process will take 3-5 weeks. Others can do it much faster. Symptoms of withdrawal will vary depending on the severity, but in my experience, most people who follow this protocol will see full relief after two weeks of no decaf.

Congrats!

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Some universal tips on how to quit *any* substance

Throughout your taper, you will practice mindful awareness, tracking how you feel, and observing your thoughts and emotions from the vantage point of the observing witness.

When you notice an intense sensation of lethargy, often followed by the thought “I could make this all go away with a quick jaunt to Starbucks,” you can follow these steps:

1. Become aware of the thought/feeling and label it (e.g., “craving”).

2. ~Pause~

3. Take a deep breath through the nose, feel your feet on the ground, and expand your vision to include all your surroundings.

4. Accept that the thought/feeling is here, right now.

5. After this, remember your intention and imagine new healthy scenarios for how you can behave (e.g., if you’re tired—rest! Or a light, revivifying walk around the block if you need to stay awake).

6. Over time, at your own pace, increase the length of your pauses. You will become ever-better at doing so.

7. Practice implementing healthy new strategies (Step #5) for behavior change.

8. Rinse and repeat (until enlightenment ; )

A journal can be helpful, a few adjectives a day are sufficient to track internal progress. But journal or not, I cannot stress how important the mindful awareness component is. While my orientation skews Buddhist/Dharmic, it’s a simple fact that if you are feeling tired and sad, you should embrace (or at least permit) those feelings rather than fighting them. The grain of wheat bends in the wind and spreads its seeds; the stubborn oak meanwhile is snapped in half.

And if it helps, at the deepest level, remember: all emotions and thoughts are projections of weighty nothingness emanating from the void. They are all as real and important as a rainbow—and just as ephemeral, just as intangible, just as illusory and concocted. It owns the sky, while it’s there, but the best cowboy on earth couldn’t lasso a rainbow’s neck. So, too, one’s thoughts and feelings.

This truth can help you quit coffee, handle your crush saying “No” to a date, or bombing your presentation at work, etcetera.

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Okay, a less hardcore option

I would recommend the complete abeyance of coffee and all caffeine for at least a period to give your nervous system time to reset and for you to experience the full benefits of this journey in mindful awareness.

Yet some feel they simply need some source of caffeine during their taper, which is completely fine.

If you feel you require an energy source, especially once you get down to one cup of decaf per day, that is okay. Many people successfully follow the protocol I outlined above while introducing either pu’erh, matcha, green tea, or cacao—once their decaf dose is low enough. Again, though, keep in mind: if you are used to 1-4 cups of coffee per day, these alternative sources typically don’t hit the same until you’ve given your bodymind a chance for a full reset.

When I quit coffee, I went about 16 months raw dogging it and it was glorious. Then, I met some of my teachers in the gongfu cha lineage of pur’erh tea and slowly introduced this new source of caffeine (which is quite low comparatively to coffee). I was sensitive as hell at first. Literally half a cup of tea would invigorate me with chi, an element that many teas offer that coffee doesn’t seem to (at least, in the same way). Today I’m quite pleased to have tea as an ally—it’s become one of the greatest joys in my life.

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Things that might help during your taper

Here we can, again, draw from universally helpful practices and supplements in terms of substance tapers:

• Rest, rest, rest

• Frequent hydration with alkaline water/electrolytes

• Drinking herbal tea during the normal times in which you previously drank coffee to help with the oral fixation (this is real)

• Regular exercise, especially cardio

• Sauna/steam room/heat therapy

• Sweat, sweat, sweat

• Magnesium glycinate + l-theanine for the jitters and sleep

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Potentially better coffee alternatives

I am extremely biased, but my favorite is pu’erh tea due to its subtle qualities, delicious taste, and invigorating chi—not to mention communing with ancient trees from the forest. If you’re curious, I’ve made a Google doc for my clients that I’m happy to privately share with you explaining gong fu cha, or “the art of making tea well.”

But here are some other great options for you to explore, all of which deserve their own essay:

• Pu’erh tea (my favorite local shop to support)

• Matcha (but not necessarily matcha lattes which are loaded with sugar/Oat milk scams)

• Green and oolong teas

• High-quality black teas

• High-quality cacao (*be sure to get “cacao” and not “cacoa,” aka sugar).

• MudWtr and other coffee alternatives with medicinal mushrooms

• Morning sex.