Anecdata: I quit caffeine for the past three months (previously I was drinking 1 cup of coffee in the morning and sometimes an iced tea with lunch). My body reacts to caffeine in an unusual way—very very sensitive, e.g. I’ll get withdrawal headaches if I drink an iced tea with lunch on one day but skip it the next day—so this probably won’t generalize. But FWIW, I don’t notice much change overall, but the one exception is that I used to often get mentally tired in the late morning or early afternoon, whereas now I … still do, but the mental tiredness now happens in conjunction with sleepiness, so I can take a 15-minute power-nap and then I feel better. I think my ability to do intense deep work in the afternoon is somewhat better now overall because of that.
The downsides are that I liked my morning coffee, and still miss it, and also I had withdrawal headaches for the first day or two, and I had cravings for the first week or two, like a surprisingly strong feeling that something was missing in my life that would be solved by drinking a coffee. That part really caught me off-guard, I had never felt that way before. (I’ve never been much of a substance user obviously!)
Anecdata: I quit caffeine for the past three months (previously I was drinking 1 cup of coffee in the morning and sometimes an iced tea with lunch). My body reacts to caffeine in an unusual way—very very sensitive, e.g. I’ll get withdrawal headaches if I drink an iced tea with lunch on one day but skip it the next day—so this probably won’t generalize. But FWIW, I don’t notice much change overall, but the one exception is that I used to often get mentally tired in the late morning or early afternoon, whereas now I … still do, but the mental tiredness now happens in conjunction with sleepiness, so I can take a 15-minute power-nap and then I feel better. I think my ability to do intense deep work in the afternoon is somewhat better now overall because of that.
The downsides are that I liked my morning coffee, and still miss it, and also I had withdrawal headaches for the first day or two, and I had cravings for the first week or two, like a surprisingly strong feeling that something was missing in my life that would be solved by drinking a coffee. That part really caught me off-guard, I had never felt that way before. (I’ve never been much of a substance user obviously!)