My break-up with what Michael Pollan calls “the most-used drug in the world”

On Easter Sunday, I listened to Michael Pollan’s audiobook Caffeine while I did the dishes from brunch and finished up my morning coffee.

I was inspired to listen to his new audiobook because in the weeks prior, my body had been giving me subtle signals that coffee wasn’t agreeing with me.

I had been suffering from gastrointestinal symptoms I strongly suspected were connected to coffee, and there was also a faint, ethereal whisper coming from somewhere else, saying: “You know that periodically debilitating back pain you’ve had for the last 20 years? The coffee could be connected to that too.”

When the thought of not having my daily coffee entered my mind, it was swiftly pushed out by another voice that forcefully said: Absolutely not.

Feeling a little desperate, I turned to Pollan to find some clarity around whether I should experiment with a coffee fast.

Through the years, I have given up many things in the name of health, research and vanity. I have stopped eating processed foods, with a special emphasis on added sugar, which is surprisingly difficult. I have stopped eating animal products during a couple of year-long stints when I was vegan. I have done many abstentions from alcohol, and there were also times when I stopped eating food all together during very short-term vegetable juice fasts.

Every time I’ve embarked on a challenge or fast, giving up something felt impossible until I did it. And even though I often reintroduced the foods and drinks I avoided at those times, these challenges almost always showed me something new about myself physically, mentally and emotionally.

I know I have it in me to break a cycle and go back to the drawing board.

But I had been drinking coffee everyday since I was an adolescent. When I was a kid, my dad had a ritual of waking around five every morning, and he’d usually be on his second pot of coffee by the time the rest of us woke up.

The smell of coffee formed an aromatic backdrop for my childhood mornings and subsequently every morning of my life for over four decades, because by the time I was able to drive, I was drinking it too, and I never stopped.

I took my daily coffee straight-up and strong, and ordering it black made me feel proud. I wore that like a badge of honor.

Coffee’s inky bitterness was an essential start of each day, but it was not only about an energy boost for me. It was about ritual, and it was deeply nostalgic, because it reminded me of my dad. I was emotionally hooked to two or three mugs a day.

I pondered all of this while I listened to Pollan talk about coffee, caffeine and addiction. I didn’t just love coffee; I was indeed addicted. To prove that to myself, I gave myself this test:

I really love avocados, but what happens if there are none in the house? Do I immediately run to the market so I can have my daily avocado?

No. I love avocados, but I can skip a day. With coffee, that story was much different.

When the shelter in place of COVID-19 happened, the first thing I did was teach my kids how to use the coffee maker, because while sheltering in place was scary and jolting in many ways, I welcomed the newfound time with my family. What excited me most was the opportunity to teach my kids all of life’s essential lessons.

Looking back now, I am sure that interaction with them contributed to an inner-conflict I faced — I might be addicted to something that was causing me adverse effects, and that didn’t exactly sit right.

Shelter in place also seemed like an opportune time to attempt a coffee fast, which I still believed was impossible even under the most ideal circumstances.

I finished listening to Pollan’s book Easter afternoon, and I told my family that I was compelled to try life without coffee. I was scared, but with their support I could give it a go.

My husband agreed to abstain with me, which was a game changer. My kids made me a chart — “Mom’s Coffee Chart” — with 28 blank squares. Each square would be filled in with a smiley face if I accomplished the day without coffee. I knew I needed enough time to go through caffeine withdrawal and feel any significant benefits, and from my work as a nutritionist, I was confident that 28 days was a solid timeframe.

Day 1 was difficult but I was motivated and excited in anticipation of feeling relief in my gut and my back.

Unfortunately, the process got much harder before it got better, and my physical dependence on caffeine was more than I had realized.

By Day 4, I was face down on my bed, with three bags of ice upon me — one at the base of my skull, one at my mid back and one on my tail bone. I couldn’t move, and it hurt to speak. I knew about withdrawal headaches caused by eliminating caffeine after a person has been consuming it regularly, but as someone who doesn’t usually suffer from headaches, I couldn’t have imagined this.

This withdrawal headache was a beast. It gripped me behind my eyes and had my neck and back in a vice, and the unrelenting pain spanned all the way to the back of my knees. As I laid there, I cried and thought: I can’t weather this storm.

But there was also a part of me that knew the only way out was through. A strong cup of coffee in that moment probably wasn’t going to take the pain away either, so forward became the only reasonable direction to go.

As I sit here writing this, it is Day 48. My chart with 28 glorious smiley faces sits here on my desk beside my laptop, and it’s dawning on me in this moment that I have been free of back pain for many weeks. For me, that’s a very big deal.

I still haven’t had a cup of coffee since Easter, and I have learned a few things:

If I did it again, I probably wouldn’t go cold turkey.

I made the decision to cut coffee, and then I went all in. In retrospect, that was too much for my body to handle. Caffeine’s effect on our physiology is significant, and cutting it out suddenly can have dire consequences. While it did work out for me in the end, as my pain slowly got more tolerable after Day 4, I would taper down my usage gradually over at least a week, or possibly over a number of weeks, if I ever do this again.

I’d line up at least one great substitute before giving up my scared cow.

I knew that my coffee ritual was about more than my nostalgia and the caffeine. It was also about having a hot beverage throughout my morning because I tend to run cold. Herbal tea seemed like a worthy substitute, but it turns out that it was missing the depth, darkness and bitterness I also craved. I eventually found all I was looking for in Foursigmatic’s mushroom elixirs, and the chaga variety just happens to look like black coffee and have a similar bitterness and mouthfeel (a weird word that beverage companies use to describe the quality of a drink).

Like anything else, my journey was unique to me.

My back pain and GI discomfort were no doubt exacerbated by my coffee usage. That could be related to my reaction to caffeine, which has wide-reaching effects on our bodies’ tissues and systems but affects us all differently.

It might also be related to molds found in some coffees or by the way coffee can hinder digestion.

“Coffee quickly kills the stomach’s ability to produce sufficient acid and is super dehydrating. This leads to difficulty digesting food, absorbing and activating critical nutrients and vitamins,” says integrative functional medicine physician Payal Bhandari, MD.

When I think about what I eat and drink, few things have more meaning and impact than coffee did for me, but each individual has a different constitution, history and attachments.

Who knows? I may go back to having a cup of coffee now and then, although I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Change is hard, but life is fluid. And when I think of my dad, I’m grateful I can just pick up the phone and give him a call.