Caffeine: My own Experience with the Risks vs. Rewards

This follows up my previous post “How I got dermatitis, and recovered!”. Here I’ll go deeper into the specifics of what caffeine has done for, and sometimes I strongly suspect against, me over the years.

How I acquired a taste for coffee

As a child I sometimes imitated adults, trying to fit in and identify with them. The adults drank coffee whenever someone stopped by to visit at home. My dad was also the principal of the same small, rural school that I attended for a few of elementary school years, which meant that I rode to school with him and then waited for school to start. While waiting with my dad, the bus drivers and other employees, we drank coffee. So I developed quite a taste for coffee by at least the 5th grade (around 10 years old).

My study companion

My last two years of high school were at a ‘magnet’ school, which accepted children from all over the state and demanded far more studying than any of my previous schooling. There I found it useful to drink more coffee while staying up late studying. Sometimes I didn’t feel great of course, when I was up late without having had enough sleep the night before. I also remember having some moderately upset stomach at times. However, I don’t recall making the connection to coffee at that time. My college experience was still much more demanding (at Caltech), which meant many more late night (and all night) study sessions, and more caffeine. At that time I also developed a taste for tea, which was another convenient and tasty caffeine delivery vehicle.

Certainly it helped me to stay away and get things done when needed, both then and in my adult years. But towards the end of my undergrad time and early in graduate school I began to have serious stomach pain. A doctor said it was likely an ulcer, and it sure felt like one. For a while I was prescribed medication to suppress stomach acid, which didn’t seem to help much. I suspect it was from lack of sleep and other forms of stress. However, the stomach problem went away after about a few months (as best I remember).

My Old Habit Died Hard

Of course the habit stayed with me. Sometime in my late thirties to early forties I found it harder to concentrate at work after a few cups of coffee. So I cut back on coffee some, and then I hit on the idea of mixing my own blend of decaf + regular coffee. In the mornings I’d make it mostly regular, and in the afternoons I’d switch to a ratio of mostly decaf. That really helped keep me calm and let me focus on my work, and it served me well until early this year.

First, I broke with my usual routine by drinking a lot more regular coffee during the frequent business trips abroad, over a period of several months. I would sometimes have decaf or herbal teas, but when I had jet lag I’d usually chose regular coffee at breakfast. At hotels that often meant a carafe of coffee to myself, which I knew was too much. But, it felt good to wake up with a strong dose of caffeine in the mornings, even if I often noticed not so nice effects on my digestion afterwards.

After several months of too much caffeine and far too little rest, the dermatitis was so bad that I had to stop and do something about it. Then I started looking into what causes it. There’s such a variety of opinions including gluten intolerance, ‘leaky gut’, meat, certain vegetables (nightshades), ‘adrenal fatigue’, and more. One pretty common recommendation was to get plenty of rest, and some people (particularly those who believe that leaky gut or adrenal fatigue is the root cause) strongly recommended cutting out all caffeine. My doctor said caffeine should be fine, but that resting and reducing stress were very important. I felt that I’d only be able to accomplish the latter two by cutting back severely on my caffeine intake.

What I learned

So, I cut out nearly all caffeine from my daily routine, except for a little green tea and the rare cup of coffee, as a test. I enjoyed doing that experiment on myself, which helped to compensate for my coffee craving. I hardly had any caffeine headaches, but I did crave coffee, more than alcohol, which I gave up at the same time.

After a month or two of low caffeine living, I could clearly tell that my body was more sensitive to caffeine. One regular-size cup of regular coffee in the afternoon and I’d be super alert —not quite ‘wired’, though, so I could really concentrate. At that point I enjoyed having one cup much more than I did when I was drinking many cups a day. But I didn’t indulge that craving more than about once a week while I was recovering.

Now I love the fact that I feel quite energetic in the mornings with just a cup of herbal tea and some decaf (only 3% caffeine). I will sometimes have a cup of coffee in the afternoon at work, particularly if I really need to get something done, but only about once a week.

I suspect that coffee was not the root cause of my skin problem, but that it ‘enabled’ my bad habit of pushing myself too hard for too long. While I was in my 20s and 30s I could tolerate more of that, but now that I’m 45 I have found one of my limits. I’m glad that I found it with only minimal damage to my system, at least as far as I know.

So, all you coffee (and tea, and matte) lovers out there, just please be careful not to put too much stress on your body, especially as you get older. For this it may be helpful to remember that habits formed early in life sometimes die hard.

I’ll leave you with this tune that I like:

S. Lan Smith

Kamakura, Japan

August 24, 2016