Living without stimulants for 6 weeks Pt. 2
In my last article about living without stimulants, I was about halfway through the challenge and chose to extend it from 2 to 6 weeks. Here is how the rest of it went.
How did it go?
TBH, I started craving coffee and tea after week 4 and allowed myself to reintroduce it slowly during the last two weeks of the challenge.
Tea has significantly lower levels (about 1/3 of coffee) and also contains L-Theanine which helps with mood regulation.
Doing that acted like a control for all the other stimulants in my life, and I was able to feel the effect of even moderate doses of caffeine. Which was very subconscious to be honest 😅 I had no palpable experience from the low caffeine dosages I was ingesting. Usually I drink about 600ml of tea each day, 200ml of water over 6g of tea, brewed multiple times. I even made a tea brewing tracker, you can get that for free 👉 here.
Getting this little ritual back of making yourself a tea was nice, though, and incentivized me to get up from my desk more often.
In terms of physical performance, I did not feel a great difference, even after reintroducing the occasional drink after the 6 weeks. I’d say I already have a pretty healthy lifestyle and diet, so 1–2 drinks a week don’t make a difference. Even if it was a drink a day, I doubt that would change anything (I don’t like that, though). I will say that I made good progress physically during this time, but I would attribute that more towards consistency and overall healthy diet than anything else.
It sure was nice to be able to go back to having culinary complete meals with wine or a beer. I am a fiend for a juicy fermented grape or anything else that has an interesting taste 😄
I believe that’s also the reason why I overall didn’t like cutting out all these things. They just taste too good when prepared well, and I love me a complex taste to exercise the taste buds.
Last time I also mentioned nicotine (lozenges, don’t smoke guys), but I am hard-pressed to even include it this time, b/c I didn’t think about it once.
Conclusion
After starting to drink coffee and tea again, I feel like I had a little bit better sleep without it.
However, when I stop consuming caffeine around 12pm, I feel no adverse effects at night / the next morning.
Having the occasional drink doesn’t affect my recovery noticeably.
Will I do it again?
Yes.
Even though I didn’t like missing my liquid energizers, I will reset my system whenever I feel that I have had a little too much in the past few weeks. I.e. when I feel that I am constantly tired, making little progress physically, or am just struck in a rut, I will press the reset button to have a break in the daily rhythm and reassess.
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Bonus
I did not cut out sugar, but I did try to limit it and follow the advice of the Glucose Goddess (check her out on IG). She says, eat your veggies / fibers first, then protein, then carbs. I must say that is excellent advice, which stabilized my blood sugar spikes even more. Fully recommend you check out her content.
