Kicking the caffeine habit

I love coffee. Love it. I enjoy drinking it for the flavor, the sensation of a warm liquid, the social aspect, and the caffeine. But what I don't love is being addicted to coffee. When I'm used to a cup or two every day, going without can lead to headaches in the afternoon and evening, early sleepiness, and general malaise. In addition, being addicted means that in the morning I'm often groggy until I've had my cup of joe.

I've thought several times about quitting, especially after reading that going caffeine-free can reduce the overall amount of sleep you need by improving sleep quality. But I've never quite been willing to give it up; the process always seemed like a pain, and I like coffee too much.

The setting

Guatemala produces some of the best coffee in the world, accessible anywhere in the US or Europe. Despite this fact, it is almost impossible to get good coffee within the country. The top four quality grades are all exported! There are a few cafe's in the cities that still serve high quality stuff, but if you're looking to stock a kitchen, forget it! Poor quality beans or instant coffee are your only choices.

This means that during our stay with a family, and at the school, we drank pretty much only NesCafe and mediocre brewed coffee. One afternoon in a cafe I had a tasty espresso drink, but other than that we only drank the bad stuff. Don't get me wrong... it wasn't terrible. I could drink it, it was a warm drink, and it provided some caffeine, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing that made me want to brew a second cup at breakfast.

Combine this with my recent thinking about sleep and dreams, and I was debating kicking the habit, but the memory of caffeine headaches on the first few days was holding me back.

The crisis that got me started

I spent almost the entire day Tuesday in bed with a fever and stomach problems. In fact, from Monday night until Wednesday morning, out of 36 hours I probably spent 34.5 in bed, and the other 1.5 in the restroom. Even when I started feeling much better Wednesday, my stomach still felt extremely delicate and I did not want to put any coffee into it.

Thus I woke up Thursday morning realizing that I had not had any coffee to drink since Monday at breakfast. This was my golden opportunity if I wanted to try it! I could continue going forward with breaking my coffee addiction without having to suffer through the worst of the headaches and drowsiness; those days had passed when I was feeling so lousy for other reasons that I hadn't even noticed.

So far so good

I've now been coffee free for almost a week, which I think means that its almost entirely out of my system. A couple more days and I'll be able to declare myself caffeine free. What have I noticed so far?

Well, its hard to draw too many conclusions, because my body has also been messed up with antibiotics and recovering from illness, but a few things are already evident. First is that I wake up more immediately and without grogginess in the mornings. This is nice, and has led to me getting a fair amount of writing done. Secondly, the urges to drink coffee have also pretty much died down. I'm enjoying drinking both hibiscus and chamomile teas, and the other day when T had espresso with pancakes I had no trouble resisting drinking some. I think I may also be having less of an afternoon lull than I used to, but I'm not sure. I'll need to gather more data.

Sadly, I've so far seen no evidence of any reduction in sleep needs. I'm keeping close track, and still hope to see some, but don't have much confidence in it. Regardless, I'm so far enjoying the feeling of freedom of not needing caffeine for my regular routine, and while I miss the flavor of coffee, I feel I can replace the social and warm beverage aspects with teas. We'll see how it goes!

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Fighting my Internet Addiction

As I talked about yesterday, I recently decided to break a bad habit of spending hours reading political blogs. As this started to reveal to me the incredible amount of time I've been wasting online, I started working on trimming back other sources of unnecessary time.

Email

I've never had good email hygiene. In fact, when I looked at my inbox yesterday morning I had 7153 unread messages. Most of those email messages I had skimmed the title, felt it was not worth my time, and let it drift back into the ether of my inbox, buried by incoming mail, while some smaller but still significant portion I missed completely and have never seen. I'd spent some time a few months ago creating filters to reduce the amount of stuff coming straight to my inbox, and have been mostly keeping up since, but in general it was still a mess.

Today my inbox looks like this:

I declared email bankruptcy. Conceding that I would never go through all of those emails, I glanced through the first page to make sure I didn't have any pending responses, and then archived everything. Luckily, since it's Gmail, they're still all searchable so if I need anything I'll be able to find it. I've also been going through and systematically unsubscribing to email lists that I don't get much value from.

What I didn't realize was how big of a difference having an empty inbox would make in the feel of checking email. It not only makes email seem less frantic and cluttered, but it makes it way easier to check quickly if there is anything new, and then go away again if there isn't. I don't know why, but it also seems to make the act of looking at and processing every incoming email immediately easier as well.

RSS Feeds

I've also been going through and removing some of the RSS feeds that I've gotten behind on. Certainly not all of them; there are feeds that I'm behind on that I love to read, and would by no means stop following. The criterion has become: Does the idea of reading all of these posts excite me or discourage me? If the answer is discourage, I'm getting past my aversion to getting rid of things and stopping following them.

Upshot

Reducing the amount of time I need to keep up with my life online is really important for my trip to Guatemala, because we're not bringing laptops and will be completely dependent on Internet cafes for online access. Since I'm planning on trying to maintain this blog at roughly a post a day throughout that time, any extra time I can trim away is extremely valuable.

Longer term, I think that this sort of adjustment will be tremendously beneficial for my personal productivity and wellbeing. This morning, when I got up, I took 10 minutes to check my email and all of my RSS feeds. That process (when including the political blogs that I'm in the process of kicking entirely) used to take between 30 minutes and an hour! Since I do this roughly twice a day, and adding in all of the small time savings when checking email, no longer flipping to political blogs, etc, I'm saving somewhere between 2 and 3 hours of time a day!

This morning, this was actually a little uncomfortable! I had a moment of feeling something like "That's it? What do I do now?", but after a few minutes of unease I realized that this was now almost an entire hour extra that I could use for writing, thinking, meditating, or exercising at the beginning of my day. In other words, things that are actually productive rather than passive intakes of information. As my friend Brad recently wrote: Consume Less, Learn More, Create Most.

I'm not confident in my ability to stick to this reduced-information-consumption diet; as I mentioned, it's actually a pretty uncomfortable adjustment. Hopefully the shock therapy of having 3 months in Guatemala without an at-home internet connection will help me form the habit, and the increased productivity and free time will give me plenty of motivation to learn to adjust.

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Nine Ideas for Breaking Bad Habits

Do you have any bad habits you'd like to break? You know the ones, where you know you really shouldn't be doing it, but it feels good so you do it anyway. Or it doesn't even feel good, but you don't notice you're doing it until your fingernails are down to nubs, or you've just spent the last 5 hours watching YouTube clips.

I realized when reading a blog post about productivity-killing habits that one of my biggest unproductive time sucks is reading political blogs. With a lot of the blogs I read, I feel like I'm learning something useful, but while that may have been true once with political blogs, it no longer is. I read them now purely as a spectator sport, and it wastes a lot of time. I've decided to break the habit.

Breaking habits is hard! And like dealing with procrastination, it's less a matter of brute force than of figuring out the right tricks. Here are nine ideas I've come up with for trying to break bad habits.

1. Notice and acknowledge that you have a bad habit.
This is an important first step. Until I'd realized how much time I was spending reading things that add essentially no value to my life, I didn't even know there was something I'd want to stop.
2. Don't blame yourself.
If you blame yourself for your habit, failing to break it becomes a personal failure. This can be demoralizing, and lead to giving up after the first sign of a problem. Instead, give yourself permission to start where you are. Its okay to have bad habits; everyone does. Like everything else about being human, working with them is a gradual process replete with setbacks. That's okay.
3. Start noticing when you're engaging in your habit.
Trying to stop doing something is impossible if you don't even notice when you're doing it. Make a goal just to notice every time you're engaging in your habit. You don't have to try to stop yet, just noticing will be a big step forward. In my case, I already knew I read political blogs on my train rides, but what I've started to notice is how I flip to them all the time (similar to checking email), and how that shuts down my thinking.
4. Quantify the short and long term consequences.
Understanding both the positive and negative impacts the habit has can make it clearer both why you do it and why you want to stop. Biting nails is a great example of this. Short term, it feels satisfying and can reduce stress. However, longer term it makes you more likely to get sick, your hands look bad, and there's a lot of things you can't open.
5. Change contexts.
For many habits, there are external environmental cues that trigger them and can be removed or reduced to great effect. If you always read political blogs while sitting on the couch, go to a different room when you're working from home. Or if you always eat too much junk food when you watch football with your buddies, try inviting them to go hiking instead.
6. Raise the barriers.
Its a lot easier to exert will power to reduce your habit when you're energized and thinking about it than later when the urge strikes. If you have a bad habit of eating whole bags of potato chips, you can go a long way towards curing it by getting rid of potato chips in your household and not buying more. Then when you have the urge to munch, the barrier of having to go to the store will reduce your likelihood of giving in.
7. Find alternatives.
This is one of the classic ways of fighting a habit. Instead of eating chips, chew some gum. Instead of biting your nails, buy a toy to fiddle with. Yes, you need to be careful not to create a new bad habit in place of the old, but substituting in less problematic things for your habit is a good stepping point. For me, I'm trying to substitute for some of my blog reading with writing, and also reading a wider range of blogs that I find 'useful' instead of hopping over to the political sphere.
8. Celebrate small victories.
If you've been biting your nails for years, you shouldn't expect to be able to stop cold turkey. Instead, celebrate holding off an extra five minutes before lighting up, or reducing your daily quota each week. A great place to look for small victories is in some of the other ideas on this list. Still biting your fingers to nubs, but starting to notice more when you're doing it? Celebrate that! Don't wait for improvements in the habit itself, just paying attention and being motivated to work on it is a victory.
9. Recruit friends and family.
You don't have to go it alone. Especially in the early stages of habit-breaking when you don't even notice when you're doing it, having friends to help point it out can be extremely helpful. Later, when your energy starts to flag, they can encourage you and remind you why you're breaking the habit. The best thing is that they can help celebrate the victories; the more the merrier!

We'll see how it goes breaking my political blogs habit. I've been trying for the last three days or so, and while have been doing pretty well at avoiding them, I gave in a little yesterday morning. Do you have any other tricks I might try? Write them down in the comments!

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