Hot damn I love me some coffee. I like it hot, cold, drip, pour over, espressos, cappaccino, cortado, flat white, gourmet or gas station. Early in the morning, late in the morning, with breakfast, and after lunch. Me and coffee are BFFs.
When I travel to a new place the first thing I want to know-where can I get some coffee? It's not that I can't go without coffee, it's just that I really like it. I love sipping on that warm cup of goodness all day long. Coffee is, as Michaele Weismann put it, "God in a cup".
But when does it go too far? When is it just a shield against how shitty we actually feel? It's so easy to fool ourselves with exogenous sources of energy and good feelings that we lose track of where it is we actually stand in our own raw, unmasked state of being.
As with much of human behavior we put the plane on autopilot and take a nap. While that may be an adaptive quality in some circumstances in the long term it can render us less aware, less skilled, and create habit loops that don't serve us.
Like I said, I love coffee. But I recently realized I wasn't treating it like something I loved - with respect and sacred appreciation. I was taking it for granted. It had become another unconscious thing I was just doing because it's a thing I did.
That's not a behavioral vector I want to encourage in any endeavor so in an effort to reboot my relationship with coffee I decaffeinated my self for one month. In this article I'm going to share what I learned and how I'm going to reintroduce my favorite libation at the end of my fast.
Hiding Fatigue
I made the decision to do this coffee fast during my forty minute Uber ride from the flat I rented in Shoreditch, London to Heathrow airport after a two weeks long trip to Europe for work. Prior to my trip I'd been fighting some fatigue and a bit of high blood pressure. Nothing to sound the air raid sirens about but a reality prior to the trip nonetheless.
While I was in Europe I was doing what I always do-drinking quite a bit of delicious and powerful coffee. Some hotel Nespresso, or instant first thing, then a cappuccino (or two) a couple of hours later, and then another espresso or cappuccino for a little early afternoon bump. This habit of keeping coffee in hand most of the day didn't begin in Europe, however. It was merely the upkeep of a custom I'd brought from home.
Before my wife gave up coffee for medical reasons I delivered her first cup to her in bed every day. We brewed those cups in a family size Bodum French press. In fact, all of the coffee making devices (of which we had a few) were sized for multiple people. Well, when my wife stopped drinking coffee the same amount kept getting made- I just drank it all myself.
This winter I was easily drinking a full family size French press worth of coffee and sometimes-a little more. That's somewhere between four and six cups per day, every day. As I've written about a few times on this Substack recently this winter provided a heavy cognitive workload and I was using coffee as a crutch to propel my efforts.
A few declining performance longevity metrics were trying to let me know I was getting fatigued but kept plugging away. Once I pulled the coffee rug out from under myself it became apparent just how much fatigue I'd been hiding from myself.
Don't get me wrong-I'm not dragging my foot behind me like a mangled zombie or anything. I'm still working out, training jiu jitsu, and doing all my daily activities that I'd normally do. What I noticed, especially the first two weeks without coffee, was that much of my early morning pep was caffeine induced. Furthermore, when I had sleep disruptions, especially multiple nights in a row, I noticed it a lot more.
How long had I been taking coffee for granted? How long had I been using it as a crutch instead of a supplement? I'd been sleep walking through drinking it for so long I didn't even know.
For some, like shift workers, there's a valid argument that coffee gets them through their work schedule. ER nurses, fire fighter and police officers, truck drivers, and military service members all have schedules that for all intents and purposes contort the body's natural rhythm and make it very difficult to rest. The routine starts as a way to stave off acute fatigue and over time becomes a necessity to achieve normal function.
It's not just shift workers either. Here's the thing it's easy to fall into habits of gluttony like this because we live in the greatest time of abundance in human history. We can easily cover up our fatigue because there's a Starbucks, Dunking Donuts, and Tim Horton's on every corner. Every grocery store has fifty brands of coffee and ten ways to make it. Along with the explosion of abundance is an increasingly secular culture devoid of ritual. We have everything we want and then some and few systems in place to regularly audit our own behavior.
Maybe one way for us to fight our tendency towards the abuse of exogenous modifiers is to reintroduce the sacred back into life. To have periods of time or purposeful practices that recalibrate our attitudes and behaviors towards that which gives us more energy and away from that which strips it from us.
Perhaps replacing complacency with the sacred can help to safeguard us against our own inadequacies?
Sacred Lost
Abundance feels wonderful at times. It's nice to have choices and not to be squeezed by the burden of scarcity. But unchecked abundance can become a prison.
The underlying behavioral programming of the human animal is to shift the commonly done to autopilot as quickly as possible. This allows for us to save bandwidth for more sophisticated decision making and not be burdened with a conscious decision every time we tie our shoes.
The down side of this default is that we can get accustomed to damn near anything. In the case of powerfully effective substances like caffeine we can develop tolerances with chronic use that requires more and more to get the same effect. Regardless of any chemical effect mere habituation can us cause to take habits for granted. Chronically these means we lose track of effects because-that's just how things are.
This has been true of humankind as long as there has been humankind. Interestingly though what emerged were cultural demarcations that let us know when it was time to audit behavior. For example, at the time of this publication it is Lent for the 2025 calendar year for may Christians. During the 40 days of Lent some form of fasting is practiced along with time for prayer and reflection. These sorts of practices are by no means limited to Christianity. Muslims, Jews, and many other religious groups have organized fasting as part of their traditions. This yearly practice may be a spiritual one but practically speaking it acts as an personal audit of sorts.
Maybe the regular practice of an internal systems check on our habits isn't such a bad idea? Even if you're a secular person it's hard to argue against the utility of putting our own behavior in check with some formalized system. Perhaps replacing complacency with the sacred can help to safeguard us against our own inadequacies?
Sacred Found
Maybe this is all a bit "extra" for coffee but in my personal experience it's the build up of these small innocuous habits that come to bite us. To boot, they're usually symptomatic of one's general attitude-at least it has been for me. In an effort to ensure I'm less likely to fall into the same pattern, I've decided to make my coffee sacred.
I purchased a gooseneck kettle and a porcelain pour over cone. Every cup will require me to take my time, pay attention, and appreciate the privilege of having coffee at my beck and call. My plan is to savor the cups instead of chugging them down as part of an unconscious caffeinated gluttony that is just helping me lie to myself about how tired I am.
Additionally, I'll be doing regular audits. Fasting from all sorts of exogenous influences whether they be media, substances, foods, or even educational inputs. Like coffee, I want the things that I supplement to add energy to my life-not just in the short run, in the long run too. These audits will give me a chance to ask myself-is this really adding value or is it just running up the tab?
Reset the Sacred
Is there something you're leaning on to mask fatigue or bypass your true state? Maybe it's coffee. Maybe it's something else entirely. Whatever it is—try letting it go for a bit.
Not as punishment, but as a reset. Step away for a week. Or a month. See what surfaces when the buffer is gone. Then, if you choose to return to it, do so with intention. Make it sacred. Make it yours again—not something that runs you.
You might find you need less than you think. Or that you're more awake than you realized.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
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If you want to drink coffee made by a roaster who treats their product as sacred, check out my good friend Mickey Schuch’s Ignis Lux coffee. Mick sources the beans himself and stands next to the roaster. Good product from a good man.
I count my coffee consumption in Espressi, and it's usually two at work (one at around 9am, one after lunch at 1pm). Interestingly, that shifts in home-office day to 8am, 11am, and then I'm tempted to do third one after lunch - which usually turns out to be one too many.
I've even gone for weeks (Lent 2023) without any caffeine, and boy does that do wonders to the sleep quality. Alas, I like the ritual and taste of coffee too much and have yet to find good decaf beans (and then convince my wife to go decaf at home as well).
For more years than I can count I was a regular 4 cup a day coffee guy, 2-3 in the AM, 1-2 in the PM. The latter was usually at a coffee shop, which was an excuse to get out of the house to go work somewhere else more than anything else. That stopped in spring 2020 due to all the coffee shops closing the sitting areas, and even though I could have made more coffee at home, I decided to use it as an opportunity to reboot my relationship to it. Went manual and single-cup with the Aeropress and now have a 2-cup/10 AM cut-off and it’s been great for, as you write here, making the coffee experience more sacred, but also hard to argue with the more sustained energy levels and improved sleep.