i stopped drinking coffee
It’s day 5. I still have migraines.
I spent last three weeks transitioning from taking caffeine daily. The first two weeks I went from 1 cup of 11g coffee a day to 1 cup of 1g, then to 1 cup of green tea, then to no coffee nor tea.
The first time I experienced caffeine withdrawal was back in 2017, when over months I would have terrible headaches every weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday. Oddly enough, it never happened during the week, so I quickly made a conclusion that this was because I would sleep in late when I’m off work.
A few years later I stumbled upon a random story on Reddit of a person who stopped drinking coffee and had had migraines for a month.
Then everything clicked. I had my headaches not because I would sleep in on weekends, but because I would drink 2-3 cups of coffee a day at work and nothing at home. This was back in the days when we didn’t yet have a coffee machine.
I’m on caffeine as long as I can remember myself. Back in Russia, we always drank tea— usually black— many cups a day. In university I had instant coffee. In Canada it varied between Nespresso, cold brew, espresso, Aeropress, and a bunch of milk-based options in local coffee shops. Simply put, I’m obsessed with coffee.
But gastritis changed everything. Not only coffee is too acidic for an irritated stomach, I now became dependant on taking it with food and pills. In other words, it became too difficult too quickly.
That being said, the experiment continues. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.