Chai's Blog

I start­ed drink­ing cof­fee in August. I had a cof­fee every­day except Tues­days.

It took a lot of men­tal ener­gy to con­tin­ue not drink­ing cof­fee. I missed the rou­tine more than caf­feine. And I could­n’t find a sub­sti­tute rou­tine. I tried very hard. I wast­ed more than fair share of my day’s cog­ni­tive bud­get on just decid­ing whether to have cof­fee. How sil­ly is that! So I told myself this strug­gle is not worth it. I am now back to sip­ping cof­fee every work­day except Tues­day — I fast till evening on Tues­days. How­ev­er, this is not the only rea­son I took the U‑turn.

I did not go look­ing, but all the fol­low­ing posts came my way. Two of them appeared on my twit­ter feed. The oth­er two were writ­ten by the peo­ple I admire.

Mod­er­ate dos­es of caf­feine is exact­ly what I drink, as men­tioned in Reach­ing Peak Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Is Easy (5 Sim­ple Strate­gies) :

Our mind and our bod­ies are inter­twined and Davis encour­ages us to focus as much on our phys­i­cal health as our men­tal health. He rec­om­mends the usu­al: stay hydrat­ed, eat small­er meals more often, mod­er­ate dos­es of caf­feine and mod­er­ate exer­cise.

“Do keep drink­ing cof­fee”, sug­gests this post titled 11 Morn­ing Habits That Will Change Your Life (And Make You More Cre­ative), among oth­er use­ful tips. It elab­o­rates:

Caf­feine makes us more alert, yes, but per­haps more impor­tant­ly, it also increas­es our brain’s pro­duc­tion of dopamine, which gives us a feel­ing of reward and moti­va­tion when we start hav­ing good ideas. Mak­ing it a habit to grab a morn­ing lat­te in the morn­ing adds struc­ture to a morn­ing and helps cre­ate the afore­men­tioned win­dows of cre­ativ­i­ty.

Struc­ture is what my cof­fee break adds to my morn­ing.

Jeff Fin­ley, who coached me on how to wake up ear­ly, wrote a great post on why he start­ed drink­ing cof­fee. I can relate to some of the thoughts he shared.

Last­ly, Jere­my DuVall advis­es on CNN:

Don’t for­get caf­feine. Cof­fee lovers rejoice! It turns out that cup of java may give you more than just an ener­gy boost mid­day. When researchers gave sub­jects cof­fee and then mea­sured their caloric burn, they found that the caf­feinat­ed indi­vid­u­als burned more calo­ries than their decaf-order­ing coun­ter­parts.

I am sure there will be heaps of mate­r­i­al on the inter­net explain­ing at great length on why cof­fee is bad. But the above infor­ma­tion is from the peo­ple I admire and sources I trust. So it is valu­able to me. I expe­ri­enced some of it first hand.

That’s the end of my cof­fee chron­i­cles. I cer­tain­ly learned a lot from this expe­ri­ence. Not hes­i­tat­ing to retract from opin­ions, being the fore­most les­son.