I love me a good cup of coffee. ☕️
But I still take occasional breaks from coffee for weeks or months at a time.
In preparation for a mindfulness retreat I am hosting, I’ve cut coffee from this week and will continue until May.
And replace it with what, you might ask?
Lemon juice, salt and water. Drank from a cup with a picture of my face inside of a banana. 🍌😄
What coffee can’t give you
I’m not anti-coffee.
Coffee is great for productivity, energy and focus. Or making it through the day when you’ve been up all night with a crying baby.
It’s very action-oriented. You rarely drink coffee and say, “I’m going to do nothing and just relax.”
But what kind of things are you getting done?
Your mind locks on to something because coffee increases dopamine. It doesn’t care what the task in question is, it just sucks you in.
It all feels rather rewarding and productive.
But what coffee rarely gives you is a strong sense of presence and awareness.
Like, wait, why I am doing this…?
These qualities of presence and awareness are ones you might want in certain situations like:
Listening to a friend in need
Self-reflective journaling
Conflict resolution
Making important decisions
Any emotional fluctuation that requires some finesse and calm…
These situations require you to slow down, not speed up. They require a “let me rest in this and mull it over,” rather than, “Yeah, yeah, I got the answer! Let’s go!”
Speeding through emotions
Coffee creates some restlessness in the body-mind (however apparent or subtle), and this can blunt emotional affect.
If I’m trying to get to the bottom of a feeling like “why do I feel stuck?” I need to feel into what’s going on in order to release it.
But it’s really distracting to have that extra energy coursing through the body. Buzzing like a fly.
One study looked at how caffeine affects how people process emotions. They found that when people had caffeine, their brain's response to emotional pictures was stronger, especially for pleasant and unpleasant ones.
This suggests that caffeine can change how our brains respond to emotions, making us more reactive to both good and bad feelings. Not the best idea if you are trying to do any deep emotional work or understand where a feeling is coming from.
From my own experience, coffee is also a good way to ride over emotions. You feel bad, so you drink coffee and you feel good. What could go wrong?
Like any addiction, it can be used as a way to avoid your emotions. Any sense that “I don’t feel okay,” and you suddenly find yourself guzzling a triple latte at Blue Bottle.
That’s part of the reason for my burnout years ago. I was over-stimulating with coffee to cover-up the feeling of guilt and uncertainty and my overall unhappiness.
Of course, it all came tumbling down eventually.
Over-producing thoughts
Coffee also creates an inflow of thoughts, 99% of which are probably useless.
Maybe a few thoughts are good ideas, somehow helpful for your creative work.
But a lot of the time, you end up rushing through, pushing through, or skipping over something.
Mindfulness takes the back seat. Speed becomes a priority. Get things done.
The times when I have used coffee in tandem with self-reflective or gratitude journaling, I ended up spending wayyy too much time just journaling.
I could have just written 3 sentences. But no, that wasn’t enough.
Journaling became procrastination. Coffee made everything feel good and important.
What I was really doing was over-producing thoughts and not moving on to the bigger tasks of the day.
Moving slow to move fast
"There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mahatma Gandhi
It’s true, I do move slower thanks to cutting stimulants like coffee. But slow is fast.
Without the rush of coffee, I am more likely to pause and ask, “is this where I want to put my attention?”
Coffee can be like putting a turbocharger on a car that is headed straight for the end of a cliff. It’s only speeding up the eventual crash.
Instead of blindly chasing the next thing (and spending a bunch of time doing that), I course-correct and choose a different action. My time is spent more wisely and thus productively.
And when I want to recharge and wake up, I take a cold shower and take 10 slow in-breaths. This wakes me right up. :)
My relationship to coffee? I am an addict, a slave with no hope of freedom :(
Can definitely heavily related to what you've written, especially as I have gone off coffee on and off in my life, and currently not taking it as well (except for here and there).
I mainly used it to speed myself up (until it doesn't work) and to mask my depression, loneliness, sad feelings, haha.