No Caffeine for 21 Days and This Is What Happened

An inadvertent adventure in self-deprivation

Yes, it’s true. As a person who religiously starts the day with a 16 oz. cup of dark roast, I went without caffeine for three weeks.

This is what happened.

Absolutely. Nothing.

I find it hard to believe, myself. I was out of town, living solo in an apartment for three weeks. On the day I arrived, I purchased a pound of “dark, smoky, complex” New Orleans French Roast Signature Blend at the local Fresh Market. I didn’t notice then, nor did I notice during the course of the ensuing 21 days, the white letters near the top of the packaging that read, “d-e-c-a-f-f-e-i-n-a-t-e-d.”

Only after arriving back home in Maine, when I went to brew coffee for my honey, did I notice with incredulity that the coffee I’d been drinking for the past 3 weeks wasn’t what I had thought it was — and that, in fact, I had inadvertently gone 30,240 minutes without caffeine.

For the record, I will say that, ok, yes, as most people know, decaffeinated coffee does contain caffeine — albeit a minuscule 2 percent as much as a cup of regular. Put another way, a regular cup has 47 times the amount of caffeine as what I was getting. To anyone who thinks I was still getting caffeine, try putting 5 gallons of water in your gas tank and then topping it off with 12 ounces of gas and see how that goes for ya.

If anyone had asked me to go even a day without caffeine, I would have said, “No way!” Headaches, lethargy, and diminished productivity would have been sure to follow. During my three weeks on decaf, I remember standing up from my laptop on one or two mornings and thinking, “Wow, I’ve been sitting too long — I need to get some blood circulating,” but that is typical for me, and other than that I have no side effects to report.

Prior to that, except for a handful of days when I was sick, I hadn’t been a day without a cup of caffeinated coffee in at least fifteen years. If you need evidence of the extent of my addiction, I offer that while on a camping trip last summer, we left our idyllic campsite and drove 30 miles round trip one morning…

Related posts:

Open source projects offer users a way to view and modify the source code of software programs. This allows developers to create their own versions of the software and share these modifications with…

Acuity Scheduling is a popular online appointment scheduling software for businesses of all sizes. Several features include automated scheduling, customizable appointment types, and calendar syncing…

Mex problems refer to the minimum non-negative integer that is not present in an array of positive integers. Here we learn 3 ways to solve this type of algorithm question.