One way is to take a week off from coffee every month. That's what Ashley Richmond, the founder of Momentum Habits, does. She recommends taking the first week of the month off so it's easy to remember. If that sounds too harsh, try the slower approach.
If caffeine is a big part of your daily diet, taking it away can have a host of unpleasant effects in the short term. These include headache, tiredness, sleepiness, down moods, trouble concentrating, and crankiness. You'll start to feel symptoms a day or two after you stop. They can last anywhere from 2 to 9 days.
For the former, coffee researcher Joseph Rivera, the founder of Coffee Chemistry, suggests reducing your intake by half for a few days, then halving that for a few more days, and so on. “After about a week you should be pretty much back to how you were without drinking caffeine,” he says.
For healthy adults, the FDA has cited 400 milligrams a day—that's about four or five cups of coffee—as an amount not generally associated with dangerous, negative effects.
“Up to 5 cups of coffee each day can typically be considered safe according to studies and dietary guidelines," said Seth Martin, a cardiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
“For most people, moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy diet.” Hu said that moderate coffee intake—about 2–5 cups a day—is linked to a lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson's disease, and depression.
First alternate between decaf and regular, then slowly change to more decaf and taper off regular coffee. Gradually reducing your caffeine consumption over a period of two to three weeks will help you successfully change your habit without causing withdrawal symptoms.
For most people, caffeine withdrawal symptoms can last two to nine days and you should be feeling fine again no more than two weeks after you stopped using caffeine.
Still limit yourself to 1 cup of coffee per week, but jumble up which day you drink it. This prevents your body getting used to having it on a particular day, and let's you selectively choose which day to utilise your 'special boost' when you really need it.
Healthy adults shouldn't consume more than 400 milligrams (mg) of caffeine per day. That's equal to about four 8-ounce cups of brewed coffee or 10 cans of cola. Teens should limit their caffeine intake to less than 100 mg per day (one 8-ounce cup of coffee or about two cans of cola).
Mild to moderate coffee consumption (even decaf) should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle, say researchers.
The severity of symptoms vary from individual to individual, and most commonly include a headache, fatigue, decreased energy/activeness, decreased alertness, drowsiness, decreased contentedness, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and feeling foggy/not clearheaded.
Teeth that have already been stained with coffee usually do not get whiter on their own without professional teeth whitening treatment. However, your teeth can often stay white if you stop drinking coffee, tea, and other teeth-staining foods and beverages after your teeth have been professionally whitened.
Essentially, cutting back on caffeine for 2+ weeks can let your adenosine receptor levels readjust back to a more normal level, thereby reducing your tolerance and increasing the effect caffeine elicits when you do consume it.
In fact, when you quit coffee, after a few days your body's response will be overwhelmingly positive. One of the most widely reported side effects of quitting coffee is weight loss.
To avoid these undesirable side effects, including the agonizing headaches associated with withdrawal, go slowly and don't expect to give up your caffeine habit overnight. In fact, quitting caffeine cold turkey can actually further your reliance on it.
You could feel sick (but not for long)
Headaches aren't the only painful symptom of caffeine withdrawal. Those who stop consuming coffee have reported side effects like depression, anxiety, dizziness, flu-like symptoms, insomnia, irritability, mood swings, and sluggishness.
Studies have shown that quitting coffee helps you lower anxiety (which can cause stress eating) and even help lower cortisol in the body (which tells your body to store belly fat) and other studies show it can help lower blood pressure several points.
You may want to cut back if you're drinking more than 4 cups of caffeinated coffee a day (or the equivalent) and you have side effects such as: Headache. Insomnia. Nervousness.
What's the better choice, coffee or tea? “Neither is particularly harmful, and both offer an abundance of potential health benefits. Like most things in life, it comes down to portion control and individual preference,” Bollig said. If you aren't sensitive to caffeine, both are considered healthy.
While coffee is generally a remedy to help us wake up, drinking coffee on an empty stomach can impair glucose tolerance, which is your body's ability to control blood sugar levels. If coffee is the first thing you drink in the morning, it can skew your glucose tolerance, affecting your metabolism.
That said, drinking multiple cups of coffee or tea without also drinking water could end in dehydration. "A cup of coffee is not going to dehydrate you that much," integrative medicine doctor Bindiya Gandhi, M.D., says, "but many cups of coffee without water intake will."