
This isn’t a normal blog post for Wizard News. In a few days, it will be 1 year since I stopped drinking caffeine. Why am I sharing this? In the course of talking to other Admins and Devs, going to user groups and Dreamforce, one thing became very clear. The grand majority of drink a ton of caffeine.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking some caffeine. It can be very helpful during a stressful day when the kids kept you up late or you simply had to play “one more turn” of your favorite game.
In my situation, I was drinking a LOT of caffeine. I discovered that I was drinking it for a variety of reasons, but one of them was to address stress. I had a job I was very frustrated at. It also had free coffee. I was drinking six to eight 16 ounces of coffee a day, by noon.
Needless to say that this had some major impacts on my health. I was getting jittery at work. I became less patient. I also was having more and more trouble with sleep. This all started to snowball. The less sleep I got, the more irritable I became. The more irritable I was, the more stressed I began to feel. The more stress I feel, the more coffee I started to drink.
Ultimately, I hit a point where I contracted a heck of a illness that prevented me from drinking anything other than water for about a week. I was caffeine free for a week.
When I got healthier, I decided I might as well continue. I decided I might as well purge caffeine from my body for a month. A month became a quarter, and then I decided I might as well make it a full year.
It hasn’t been easy. It’s amazing how many drinks of caffeine in it. Going out to eat really limited yourself. There’s only a few soda/pops that are commonly served in restaurants that are caffeine free. I caught myself drinking a lot of water and lemonade.
The up-side to all this is I feel pretty darn good. I’m sleeping better overall and I even managed to lose a little weight from nearly removing soda from my diet completely.
Will I stay caffeine free forever? Probably not. I love a good cup of coffee. For me, this year has been an exercise in will power and life style change. It’s something I hope to carry over to other things I want to change. Reduce my weight, get more certifications, learn a new skill. These all take will power.
My recommendation for you my readers is to consider doing a purge of caffeine. Pick a length of time and try it. I would suggest starting with a week. That’s the shortest period of time to not have caffeine and have your body start to adjust. See how you feel. We may all be better without caffeine in the long run, but I still plan on having that good cup of a coffee occasionally.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for a more “normal” Wizard News post next week.