Caffeine Withdrawal, Days Four to Nine

Hmm. Well, I intended to keep these updates daily, but they would have been rather dull if I had. I'll probably make this the last, unless anything surprising emerges later on.

I still don't understand how easy this has been this time round: my previous experiences of giving up coffee (yes, temporarily, obviously) were agonising, and I've been drinking more coffee since R. was born than any previous period in my life (undergraduate termtimes possibly excepted, although a lot of that was going towards counteracting my vastly larger alcohol consumption). I should have had a week of headaches and mood swings and restlessness and lethargy, whereas in fact I've just been feeling a bit tired and snappish for a lot of the time. I suppose I'm just monstrously and undeservedly lucky.

The process of completely eradicating a caffeine addiction supposedly involves eight weeks spent without any source of caffeine (no tea, no cola, no decaff, no chocolate), so I'm not actually finished yet. Still, my experience and all the accounts I've heard suggest that the first three days are the worst, closely followed by the rest of the first two weeks. And, honestly, I've felt worse than this with a mild cold.

I have been combating the tiredness with daily afternoon naps, which has probably been helping (and will be rather difficult -- though perhaps not impossible -- to continue over the next three days when I'm in the office). That's a habit which obviously has to end sometime, although sharing a house with a toddler who currently still needs to do the same makes it both easy and remarkably tempting. Maybe I'll try to manage without one today -- to be honest I think it's the hot weather as much as the lack of caffeine which has been making me wilt after lunch.

My biggest problem has been identifying non-vile hot beverages to make me miss my habitual mug of coffee less. I find mint tea insipid, and fruit teas wildly variable in flavour, although I do find I need to brew them for at least five times as long as the manufacturers suggest to make an impression on my coffee-ravaged palate. Rooibos tea sounds quite desperately unappetising (though I suppose it's only familiarity which makes actual tea sound less so), and when I had a cup this morning I could barely taste it. I'll try a stronger one later.

The best news of all, as far as I'm concerned, is that I'm still able to write, managing two days of 1,500 words each since last Friday. That may not sound like a lot (and it isn't), but it's as much as I was managing before the caffeine supply dried up, and I have hopes I can expand it later on. Given that I hadn't previously managed to write without caffeine since I was about fifteen, it's this that feels like the real achievement.

(All of this does seem terribly self-indulgent, so failing any surprising revelations later on I'll stop here before I start accidentally going into detail about my bowel movements. Twitter has a category tag, #firstworldproblems, for this sort of thing.)

Caffeine Withdrawal, Day Three

Right. Well, yes. Very little to report, really. 77 hours now without a caffeinated beverage, or caffeine from any source. Still no headaches, although I'm getting aggravating muscle twinges in a variety of places, which isn't normal.

At present this feels less like withdrawal than a ludicrously protracted period of getting up in the morning and not having had coffee yet. I'm tired and irritable and can't get my brain to work properly, but that's about it. This was awkward at work, but to be honest I've been in that state for weeks now when at work -- whether because of the caffeine, because the building's so very hot in summer or because of some undiagnosed source of mental collapse I have yet to discover, I couldn't say.

Latest theory to explain the relative lack of withdrawal symptoms: I'm in fact having blackouts, during the course of which I guzzle ProPlus pills. No, I'm not convinced by that one either.

Caffeine Withdrawal, Day Two

I'm actually feeling like a bit of a fraud at the moment. It's... let's see... 50 hours since I last had coffee, so that's genuine enough. What's odd is that the promised withdrawal symptoms -- and in particular the violent chiselling headaches which I remember from previous attempts -- have yet to materialise.

I had some milder headachiness yesterday, which was easily addressed with paracetomol. I haven't needed to take any today. I'm also tired, though not nearly as much as I'd expected, and have exploded with unjustified rage at my beloved wife three times for no reason that would have made sense to anyone with any understanding of logic. My thinking feels muzzy and unfocussed, but no more so than on a warm day after a heavy lunch, say. I've even been able to get a small amount of writing today, with the help of fruit teas and a strategically-timed nap.

My aforementioned beloved wife has two mutually contradictory hypotheses about this. Either: a) I've been drinking so much coffee that my body has stored up caffeine reserves which it's still working its way through (unlikely on biological grounds), or b) I've been drinking so much coffee that my body has stopped experiencing it as a stimulant and has merely been experiencing it as a toxin (also unlikely, though possibly slightly less so).

What seems most probable to me is that the headaches are still to come, but are awaiting the most effective moment to strike -- probably as soon as I get to work tomorrow morning. In my impaired mental state I feel like a dinosaur waiting for an asteroid.

Caffeine Withdrawal, Day One

This is a difficult post to write.

I don't mean it's emotionally charged or brings bad news or anything, just that it's an extraordinary challenging task to actually compose it. My head feels as if it's been inexpertly filled with cavity wall insulation which someone's still trying to hammer in, and attempting to organise anything like a sentence in a form which my fingers can interpret as instructions for muscle-movement is a matter of considerable difficulty.

I'm giving up coffee, you see. This isn't the first time -- if I had to guess I'd say it's probably the fourth -- but it's likely to be the most difficult so far. Since R. was born I've been staving off the sleep deprivation by drinking somewhere in the region of ten cups a day, and the progressive desensitisation which accompanies caffeine addiction has left me all but incapable of writing, working, concentrating or, under certain circumstances and at certain times of day (afternoon meetings in warm rooms being a particular killer here), staying awake, even when I'm actually drinking the stuff.

Needless to say this is all very unsatisfactory, and I've decided I need to finally just give up drinking the demon's bile altogether. I'm very nearly 40, and health problems like this have stopped looking as amusing as they used to.

It's 21 hours since I last had a mug (and that wasn't very nice). Now, apart from the aforementioned inability to concentrate, I'm feeling headachy, irritable, lethargic and resentful of everything. Frustratingly, approximately every two minutes I think "Oh, hang on! I know what will make me feel better! I just need a -- Oh."

[Have you enjoyed reading about Phil's abject misery so far? Come back to this blog over the next few weeks for daily updates!]