How caffeine changes the way you think (and why I quit)

0:00 So, if you're a founder or high performer who drinks coffee every morning to feel sharp, focused, and productive, this video is for you. I've been drinking coffee two cups every morning pretty much my whole life. And recently, I decided to quit and find out what my natural non-caffeinated state of consciousness actually feels like. And the deeper I went into the research, the more interesting it became. So, as you can see from this overview, today we're going to cover how caffeine changes your state of consciousness. What caffeine actually does to your brain and your nervous system and why this matters, especially for founders, how caffeine affects your sleep, and why it doesn't affect everyone the same way. What withdrawal reveals about caffeine dependence and how long it actually takes to recover. What I've experienced since quitting and whether caffeine

0:45 should have any place in your life at all. Now, before we get started, if you're a founder or high performer and you want to work with me one-on-one to improve your energy, health, or performance, you can book a free health strategy call through the link in the description. And if you want to learn how to improve your energy by optimizing your mitochondria, I've also created a 5-day email course. You can sign up through the link in the description. With that said, let's get started. So, why did I decide to quit? Well, it actually was sparked by a conversation I had uh with a friend of mine who is an entrepreneur and we were sitting around and having a dinner and he explained that he recently quit coffee and coffee messed up with his stomach. It also gave him anxiety and I asked him well what

1:31 like how did caffeine impact his work and he said that on caffeine he was kind of locked in but he was also more distracted. So he felt like he was productive but in the reality he wasn't because he was constantly distracted uh by new pings by all the notifications coming up and without caffeine he felt much calmer and more focused and as a result he actually got productive he got more work done and this was the first time I uh I was kind of thinking about it like well everyone thinks that caffeine actually will make you more productive but in fact it might it's probably making you less productive. Um but still you know I was drinking my two cups of coffee every morning. I was not planning on quitting it at all. And then a friend of mine Grant visited me in

2:17 Warso and he had also recently quit caffeine and we had a conversation because Grant told me um he was very much obsessed about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and how they affect everything we do. And uh I I at the same time I read the work of William Reich and William Reich was an Austrian physician and uh biophysicist. um he he did a lot of uh interesting research and uh one of the things uh one of the book I read by him he talked about this um that everything in an organism right every organism um like humans and all the other animals you have those two basic motions expansion and contraction. Um

3:04 for an example right even uh when you want to be like more confident like your posture right you expand you open up your chest you know you are high but if you are uh if you're anxious if you don't want to be seen you're like kind of crawling in right and this is what he means by contraction you can apply to to to so many things even like an erection right an erection you expand and if you have fear right it kind of you know uh you know your uh your genitals kind of shrink in right and it's kind of the Okay. So, uh expansion and contraction and he connects it directly to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Um and then I thought about coffee. Well, coffee, if you really see what caffeine does, it constricts it constricts your blood vessels. It constricts the blood flow to your brain.

3:50 Um it raises uh it raises cortisol. It raises adrenaline, non-adrenaline, as we're going to see. It raises cortisol. So all the stress response right that is responsible for the activation of the sympathetic nervous system fight or flight this is what the caffeine does and I realized that caffeine is ultimately a contraction drug and so then it kind of made sense to me that so many people who deal with anxiety once they quit caffeine the anxiety is gone because anxiety is also like it's like it's part of the contraction in the William Rice framework. Um, so I just connected the dots and I was like, "Wow, like this this uh this makes sense to me." Um, and so I was like, "Okay, well, it makes sense, right, to be in the sympathetic state all the time if you're running from a line, right? But doesn't

4:36 make sense if I'm sitting on my laptop writing something, working with clients." Um, so why would I put myself into the state every single morning? And so, um, my previous routine was pretty simple. you know, I uh I was avoiding actually coffee after afternoon. So, I didn't drink coffee after like 12:30 p.m. So, I started I I really usually had two two cups of coffee. So, once in the morning, let's say 8:00 a.m. and another one maybe around 10:00, and I kind of drank it slowly, just black coffee, and uh finished drinking my second cup like like 12:00, 12:30, and then I had my first meal. Um, and this is what I did for for the majority of the time. And I thought, well, I'm doing anything responsibly, right? Um, how am

5:22 I supposed to do? I'm not drinking any coffee after afternoon, so I'm all right. Um, but what I also noticed, the last two times I quit caffeine, and none of those times were me consciously wanting to drink to to quit caffeine. I just uh those two times I did teeth bleaching. The first time it was in Brazil. Uh, I had a Brazilian dentist and you know, Brazil is very famous for for the uh for the beauty cult. and she told me, "Your teeth are too yellow. We need to do the bleaching." I was like, "All right, fine. Let's do it. Let's try it out." And when I did the bleaching, I had to abstain from anything that would stain my teeth, including caffeine. And this is when what kind of when I kind of quit it. And the one thing I remember from that time is that the first cup of coffee after let's say maybe 3 weeks without caffeine, it felt so euphoric. I

6:08 was like, "Wow." Like, it literally felt like a drug. Uh and then obviously I got used to it again and uh I didn't feel the same thing as I felt after this first cup. The second time I quit was also due to teeth bleaching. It was maybe like four years ago and there I remember quite clearly like what a bad of a headache I had. It was like a migraine. My head was pulsing. I think I almost also got a fever and it went on like this for like 5 days and I only was drinking back then was only just drinking like a one like one mug of coffee uh every morning black coffee that's it uh and still right um but then again like I did the bleaching and then again I uh resumed to drink coffee because I didn't think much about it right um so this time when I quit

6:56 coffee it was kind of the same so I would say like the first 24 to 48 hours are the worst so um I would say around uh the the the first symptoms I noticed literally like 24 hours after my last cup. So let's say my last cup was around 12:30 on Friday and then Saturday was the first day when I quit caffeine and then the first symptoms I noticed around like 12:30 uh on Saturday and it was kind of pulsing headache brain fog. I was unable to concentrate. I uh started to yawning all the time. I was yawning and yawning and yawning and I was just sleep sleepy all the time and uh I couldn't focus on work. I went to the couch and uh you know kind of took a nap. Um and this went on like this for

7:43 like two days. You know the next day on Sunday I felt the same. My training I I worked out in the morning. I felt weak. Maybe did like half of the reps I would normally do. I I couldn't even like focus on talking to people. Um and I went home and just tried to read and like fell asleep. And this is how it went. Like I slept maybe every night for like I don't know like 10 11 hours. It was a lot. Um and then I would say you know on the third day it kind of got better but still um if you read all the research on caffeine you know on caffeine withdrawal. Um if you ask Grock it's going to tell you well it's 2 to9 days right? So after 7 days after 9 days you should be fine. But what I realized even on day like six and seven, I still felt like I was slower in conversations.

8:29 I was less witty. My reaction times were slower. Like someone would say something to me and I, you know, before that I would be immediately like be able to reply and say say something witty, you know, make a joke. But this time I just couldn't. And I felt I felt a little bit depressed. Um and what I realized also that I was craving a lot of dopamine during this time. So I was constantly like clicking on different things, you know, I was clicking on different YouTube videos. I was craving sugar which you know I was not craving before. Uh and uh I as a present I got a full pack of Belgian chocolate and in just one go I would just eat it. You know I I wanted to eat some sort of cake or like sweet stuff. Um and uh yeah and and it went on like

9:16 even like after 7 days and I I was like wow like you know I should be free of caffeine already. So if this is what my caffeine-free state feels like I really don't want it. So maybe on day like eight or nine I was like h maybe I should drink caffeine again because I don't like the self. I'm not myself right? I'm not as sharp as I used to be. So why would I even consider? Um and this is exactly what happens. I think a lot of people they quit caffeine for 7 days uh feel terrible conclude that caffeine makes them sharper and they just you know keep keep drinking caffeine whereas they're just comparing the caffeinated state to withdrawal right because they're still on withdrawal and I dug deep into the research uh I read some of the books I'm going to cover later and I decided to

10:03 keep going um and one of the things when it comes down to consciousness uh that I noticed is And the times the last time I quit caffeine um I felt like my awareness got wider. So um on caffeine I felt like I was in this tunnel vision and without caffeine I would just see more things around me and I would notice the facial expressions more like those subtle changes. Um and I also felt like my meditation got deeper. And I remember last time I did it, I also talked to a guy in the gym who was taking a lot of pre-workouts and he was also like a caffeine junkie drinking a lot of caffeine and he quit as well. And I told him, well, one thing I noticed is this perception thing, right? You like just perceive more things around you. Like, have you had the same experience? I

10:48 never heard anyone talk about it, nor have I read anyone like like any any science on it. And he told me, yeah, this is exactly what he experienced. I was like, hm, interesting. So it's not just you know your sleep, your energy, it's also how it contra how it affects your perception of the world. Uh and one of the books I read uh is the book by Michael Pollen. This is your mind on plants and he wrote a whole chapter on caffeine. H and Michael Poland he quit caffeine for 3 months to write this book to really experience uh what caffeine actually is. And uh what he describes in this book there are like two types of consciousness, right? You have the spotlight consciousness. This is this narrow analytical attention on one thing. Exactly what you kind of have in the coffee in this tunnel vision. And

11:34 then you have the latent consciousness. This is kind of the wider field of awareness and you notice more of the periphery. Uh and this is exactly when I read it. I was like this is exactly what I experienced like thanks Michael Poland for bringing this up and caffeine really pushes you toward the spotlight consciousness. Um, and yes, it might have been good for like industrial revolution if you worked like in a factory. Yes, it totally makes sense, right? That you would just want to be focused on one task. But in this day and age, you know, when um AI can do a lot of things for us, right? like do we still need this, you know, narrow focus or is it maybe better when we have this latent consciousness where um I even I like one of the reasons I really stopped

12:19 drinking caffeine because I felt like um that it made my intuition worse. So um I meditate and I rely a lot on my intuition and I I felt like when I was drinking caffeine I was rushing all the time and I didn't have this connection to the universe as I had when I was not drinking caffeine and this was one of the main reasons. Um and yeah so caffeine doesn't doesn't just change like how much energy you have it changes your mode of awareness uh in which you operate every single day. And so let's look at how caffeine actually works. And what I was surprised to finding out is caffeine is actually a pesticide. And if you hear caffeine is a pesticide, what how is it possible? Well, but actually it's a pesticide.

13:04 It's not debated. It's a it's a mainstream fact. So caffeine is found in 60 plants and in plants. Um it acts as a chemical defense, right? So like caffeine like tea, right? The like the cacao uh or like guana or yerba mate. uh all those plants they use caffeine as a chemical defense against insects and also they use it to suppress competing seedlings, right? So they kind of use it above the ground against the insects and also below the plant to kind of uh yeah weed out the competing seedlings and it affects the nervous system. It kind of disrupts the nervous system of the insects um and in some instances can even kill them depending on the dosage.

13:49 Um and this is mainstream science published in science 1984 caffeine inhibited insect feeding at concentration present in plants. Uh and then one of the experiments that's been repeated uh by Peter Wit in 1948 um he gave spiders caffeine and at 10 micrograms of caffeine uh the web became smaller with uneven radi and at 100 micrograms the geometry broke down entirely and the NASA repeated this experiment in 1995 and researcher compared marijuana benzadrine which is amphetamine uh caffeine and chloral hydrate. Chloral hydrate is a is a sleeping aid. Um and the caffeine web as

14:34 you can see on the image uh it looked kind of the worst like like chloral hydrated the worst but caffeine is the second worst. Um and once you understand that even like you know most people treat caffeine as a productivity tool but in fact in plants plants use it as a weapon and like but okay we are not spiders right? So what does caffeine actually does in humans? So uh one of the main mechanism of action is that caffeine is an adenosine antagonist and adenosine helps you to build sleep pressure and it also slows the neural activity right so if you don't drink caffeine then you know from the time you wake up the adenosine kind of builds up you know the sleep pressure builds up and this is one

15:20 of the signals that makes you sleepy and tired and when you drink caffeine so what caffeine does it kind of binds into the same site where adenosine goes um and then it blocks the receptor without doing the adenosine job. Right? So your body thinks that you know you're not tired and what happens then is that your the neural firing keeps getting keep the neurals keep firing and firing and firing because adenosine also slow the neural activity down. And when I realized this that you know you kind of if you even think about the car if the car is powered and is working all the time without rest like is it a good thing like is it a good thing to just artificially for your neurons to

16:05 artificially fire and fire and fire like would that not be aging you faster just if you apply common sense like common biological loss? This already made me skeptical. Um and so what caffeine does it kind of occupies the lock so adenosin can't be delivered. Um and so you feel less tired uh and uh you kind of mask it, right? But the second surprising response is that caffeine and a lot of people don't know about it. Caffeine actually um activates the the stress response. So uh in in one study, New England Journal of Medicine, nine non-habitual consumers, we also have to say like non-habitual, this means uh they usually wouldn't drink caffeine. uh when they drank when they

16:52 took 250 milligs of caffeine which is equivalent to a little bit less than you know the standard like the standard mugs you get in any coffee shop in the world uh like one mug of those would have maybe probably around like I would say like 120 maybe on the depending on the brew like 150 milligs of caffeine. So two of those mugs would be around like 300 milligrams. This is I think what I was consuming when I was drinking those two mugs of coffee every day in a coffee shop. So this was kind of around equivalent uh you know to the dosage I was drinking obviously they got it on this you know during like all at once not like through like you know multiple hours but anyways adrenaline rose by 207%. No adrenaline rose but 75% and blood pressure increased um 14 to 10

17:38 right so you know high blood pressure is a big is a big issue for a lot of people a lot of people have a chronic hypertension and uh caffeine increased that right another study 47 healthy men uh you know got caffeine around two to three cups um and act rose by 33% this is the hormone that signals your adrenals to release cortisol and cortisol rose by 30%. Um, and participants just rested, right? Just by resting, drinking coffee, the cortisol response increased. And you might be thinking, well, probably it was just like for, you know, the time being when they were drinking coffee. But actually, the cortisol remained significantly elevated

18:24 for from one to two hours after ingestion. And I tried to look up like how much longer the cortisol remained elevated and I think the the the the the maximum was like the 3 hours because they also stopped measuring at 3 hours. So it doesn't mean that cortisol like went back down to the basin after 3 hours. It just means that they kind of stopped measuring it. And the same study was done very similar study was done on people who were susceptible uh to panic attacks or like anxiety susceptible people. And 71 of the 71% of participants reported that like effects of caffeine felt similar to panic attacks. So it just makes sense why a lot of people who have anxiety try caffeine. The anxiety is often times gone. And so what does caffeine actually does to your brain? Um caffeine

19:11 repeatedly vasoc constricts meaning it narrows the blood vessels to your brain. So, one study 250 milligrams of caffeine reduced wholeb brain blood flow by 30%. Um, another like all the experiments you're going to find it's like kind of this 20 to 30% range, right? And what I found even more interesting that some studies reported that the rapid blood flow changes, they especially affect the prefrontal cortex and especially the areas of prefrontal cortex that are responsible for attention switching, working memory and inhibition response. Right? Can you like exactly what happened to me when I stopped caffeine like I wanted you know to to click on all those things like my inhibition was gone and this is kind of the same that my friend uh uh mentioned my

19:58 entrepreneur friend mentioned to me when he quit caffeine like this same kind of experience he had where before he was distracted on caffeine without caffeine he could focus way more um and Daniel Ammon he's a psychiatrist um says that caffeine prematurely ages the brain And you will think what caffeine prematurely ages the brain like aren't there all those beneficial longevity studies about caffeine? Well, if you if you understand his argument that caffeine reduces blood flow by 30%. Um if you ask any doctor like does reducing blood flow to an organ is a good thing or a bad thing? Everyone would say it's a bad thing, right? You don't want to reduce like consistently reduce blood flow to an organ. Um, this is what caffeine does. And uh, like Daniel Almond has his

20:46 clinics and he's probably like the person in the world with the most speced scans uh, blood flow scans to the brain uh, in the world. He did like like his clinics did like over 200,000 uh, scans and he says that like it's a major concern. Um and uh he gives an example of a pilot uh his name is Jeff and uh Jeff was drinking around 600 mg of caffeine per day. Uh and uh Daniel Almond said that his brain looked terrible and uh afterwards he told him to stop drinking caffeine and he kind of tapered. Um he didn't go cold turkey but he did like drink less caffeine 5% daily and after he stopped he texted Daniel

21:32 Ammon and said like wow I have unbelievable energy unbelievable clarity. Um, and so if you look at the research, if you look at the studies, yes, like there are benefits to caffeine, like you're you're more alert, you're more vigilant, and I mean it makes sense. If you look at the stress response, it just makes sense. Like your mood increases, your reaction time increases. This is also probably explains why I felt like so slow, like I couldn't reply, you know, as fast as I could before. Um, and also some type of performance, right? Like endurance uh can can improve also like caffeine is used in some painkillers, right? So it just makes sense that it kind of um makes you more you know you feel kind of less pain and uh yeah you you feel switched on you attack the task in front of you uh but does it mean that your

22:19 thinking like does it mean your thinking has improved uh or not and this is what I find very interesting and if you look at memory studies um so does caffeine improve or worsen your memory so like studies show that like in one study 100 milligrams increased arousal and false recall recognition without improving true memory. Um, another study showed that 100 milligrams uh of caffeine, you know, the participants could recall fewer words. And another 2013 study showed that it found detrimental effects on higher working memory loads. Uh, and the fourth study showed that caffeinated gum reduced creativity fluency and also reduced originality and obberation.

23:05 Uh so this means that you kind of become better at doing while worse at thinking. Um and this week also on X I I found there was a viral post got like a 1 million views by uh it was like a re a Reddit repost from a software engineer who quit caffeine and he said that quitting caffeine saved his career and so before he was drinking coffee and you know and it kind of helped him to code to write the to write the code line by line. But once he needed to manage like seven AI agents and have this bigger picture in uh in mind uh then caffeine felt detrimental. He could he was not able to do it. And once he quit caffeine he got way more productive at work and he could get a lot of more things done because of it. And this is exactly what uh I mean

23:52 when I talk about perception because with caffeine it seems like you cannot see the forest because of the trees right you see the trees but you don't see the forest um and why this is specifically important for founders right I mean this is exactly why uh where like the founder angle comes in and then I was starting researching the founders so the first video that really helped me to to go through my withdrawal was the video by Alex Becker, the founder of the marketing platform Hyris. And he did this video like 30 days without caffeine. And he said that he associated like entrepreneurship like with crazy hours and just repeated coffee hits, right? So he would just, you know, wake up, get some coffee, get work done. When

24:37 he slowed down, he would drink more coffee. And so caffeine, caffeine was always like coffee and caffeine was always associated with works for him. And uh but also it kind of you know his work was kind of frantic. It gave him anxiety, scattered thoughts. But he also said that on caffeine he would all always like chase like distraction projects like everything would feel exa exciting like and it makes sense because caffeine also raises your dopamine and um yeah but but then but then uh what I also found interesting that he would wake up very early, drink coffee and cram all the work in those four deep work hours in the morning when he was caffeinated and then after lunch he was not able to even answer like even like answering

25:23 like customer support tickets like felt like uh uh felt very hard and um when I look back at how I worked on caffeine I would say uh I I understood exactly what he meant right because I what also packed like everything in those four hours in the morning and then in the afternoon I would not say that my energy was low I didn't have any afternoon crashes but I would say that my focus was kind of all over the place you know I was very easily distracted, right? So, if I would see some things, some person asks, I would like just click immediately on it without even thinking, right? So, I was more distracted. Um, and on C without caffeine, like one of the things is that um you can work, it doesn't matter what time of a day it is, if it's afternoon, if it's the evening, you kind of can work with the same

26:10 intensity. So, you don't have this huge peak as you have in caffeine, but it's kind of evened out. And this is what also Alex Becca talked about that instead of like having this super crazy like waking up hours like 3:00 a.m. he would start working he would wake up later start working around 8:00 a.m. And then he would work in 90 minute intervals, right? And he estimated that his productivity actually got like 1.5x to 2x better. Um and then I dict another founder. So like who are the other founders like other famous people who don't drink coffee? Like Nicola Tesla for example was one of them. He was against coffee. But also Mark Zucker Zuckerberg um he says that you know his caven in tech is actually zero. and he uh says that occasionally recreationally

26:57 he would drink it on vacation. Uh and in one podcast like a year ago on theop font he said I just had anything that messes with my uh and then he said I don't like any kind of chemicals or anything like that. And when he said like I don't I don't I had anything that messes with my I was like what did he want to say? Did he want to say with my mind um my consciousness? Uh I don't know. Um, also Pavl Durov, uh, the founder of Telegram, he, uh, like he was one of the people who avoided caffeine the longest. And on Telegram, uh, when he turned 33, he said that there are like some things he's avoiding. And one of them is coffee, but also black and green tea because they also have caffeine in them, energy drinks, and he drinks herbal teas instead.

27:42 uh and he said that at certain point in life he realized that these things decrease productivity and clarity of thought again this topic of clarity of thought right uh so been living without them for many years now and in general have been feeling great and healthy uh so yeah if you see if you look at it like different founders different personalities different philosophies but they all kind of have the same conclusion uh they don't want something messing with their mind just so they can work Well, what about sleep, right? We have to talk about caffeine and sleep. So, Matthew Walker, you know, one of the most famous sleeping advocates uh and and researchers uh said that caffeine has an average halfife of 5 to 6 hours and a quarter life of around 12 hours. So, what does it mean? It doesn't mean

28:28 that I who drank caffeine at noon um so quarter of that what I was drinking at noon can still be uh in my system while I sleep. So, it kind of, you know, I I was drinking this cup at, let's say, at 12:00 and the quarter of this cup would, it's like me drinking quarter of this cup before I go to bed. Um, and once you uh once you hear this, a lot of people will say, "Well, um, I can't sleep. I'm unaffected. You know, I can fall asleep just fine. Look at the Portuguese. Look at the Italians. They drink espresso after after dinner. No problem." And it's true. You will not have a problem falling asleep. But if you really track your sleep um you will see that uh there is an effect and uh there is a repeatable effect actually when it comes down to your deep sleep. So Matthew Walker says that if you have caffeine in

29:15 your system in those experiments he's done the deep sleep is reduced by 15 to 20%. But I would say that from my experience tracking sleep um I also saw an increase in REM sleep when I stopped drinking caffeine. The second time I did it, I was I'm not tracking sleep anymore. I stopped wearing sleep trackers. But back when I did, I I I realized that my REM sleep increased as well. There are many such anecdotal cases that the deep sleep goes up, the RAM sleep goes up. Um and also like the duration of sleep kind of goes up and the sleep efficiency like how fast you fall asleep also goes up and also the likelihood of you waking up during the night decreases. Um, and what I also found in another book I read by uh, uh, Michael Chernish, I think his name, if I

30:01 pronounce it correctly, uh, he wrote this book back in the 90s and it's called the caffeine blues. And I would say like everyone who wants to quit caffeine, I would recommend you reading this book. Like this is like the ultimate anti-affeine book. And in this book what he talked about there's like was one experiment in Zurich and um on a I think it was the it was uh one of the research facilities uh at at the at the university or at the clinic and there were nine men who received 200 milligs of caffeine at 7:10 a.m. And again their caffeine levels were measured around 11 p.m. and 82% of caffeine was gone, but 18% of the caffeine from the morning were still in the system at 11:00 p.m. And then they

30:46 went to sleep. And then they did like EG measurements and measured like the sleep waves, the sleep efficiency, the total sleep time, the deep sleep. And yeah, on caffeine, the sleep efficiency, the total sleep time and the deep sleep were reduced, right? So before that, I was thinking like, well, maybe when I drink caffeine around noon, it's not a good thing. But then I realized that well even if you drink it like at 7:00 a.m. it's still in your system, right? So it's like kind of this vicious cycle. So uh you wake up tired, you drink caffeine to not feeling tired anymore. Uh but sometimes actually you drinking caffeine, it's kind of you suppressing the withdrawal symptoms to feel good again. And so yes, you get the stimulation now, but then you pay later with the in like and the interest is the quantity and the quality of the sleep.

31:31 And this is kind of this never- ending cycle. So your sleep is worse, you drink caffeine. This again affects your sleep. Your sleep is worse. Again, you're tired, you need caffeine. And this is this vicious cycle. But what about uh you know the individual susceptibility? Uh a lot of people would say like yeah like are you a fast metabolizer? Are you a slow metabolizer? Um and this has to do with this gene like uh CYP1 A2. Uh it's an important enzyme in caffeine metabolism. Um and uh there's a genetic variation like you know some sometimes in the past um I uh when I was work with clients I had two clients where caffeine even like one cup in the morning just one cup in the morning affected them a lot like giving them anxiety and worse sleep and I could

32:18 never really understand it. I was like like what? Like how is it possible? Like I drink two cups and doesn't affect me that much. But for them even like at like the cup of coffee at 8:00 a.m. and then don't drink any other coffee anymore kind of affects them that much. And there's like this individual susceptibility, right? Fast metabolizers, slow metabolizers. But what I found interesting is that a lot of people think like, yeah, maybe it's like just a niche thing, right? But if you look at statistics actually 50 to 55% of people are actually slow metabolizers. Um and uh one study in JAMA right uh showed that those slow metabizers that two to three cups a day were associated with greater non-fatal heart attack risk. What does it mean non fatal heart attack risk right? Well non-fatal like has nothing to do with

33:04 caffeine. Non fatal means that they didn't die from a heart attack. Probably they were safe in the hospital. Um but uh but still they they got a heart attack and the association was even stronger with four cups. And if you understand like the the heart attacks like one um one of the mechanism how a heart attack can happen is that uh like uh like one of the like immediate you all know the saying right? Oh you know you you almost you scared me so I almost got a heart attack right? So, so this kind of you know spike in the stress hormones this incre like this sudden spike in stress hormones uh is is is very dangerous. So when I read it uh I was like I was not surprised right with all the effects we saw with the sympathetic nervous system the stress hormones um yeah and so how

33:52 the body metabolizes caffeine actually matters. And what about the withdrawal, right? What about the withdrawal? We kind of talked about the withdrawal, right? The headache, the fatigue, the poor concentration, irritability, decreased motivation, decrease in confidence as well. Low mood, the depression symptoms. Um, what happens like yeah, I mean the the it makes sense why you get a headache. You get a headache because when you drink coffee, you have the vasela constriction going on. And if you stop drinking coffee, the blood vessels dilate again. And this is exactly what causes the headache. And one of the things I I I found interesting like uh Roland Griffith uh he he was uh one of the leading researchers on caffeine from John Hopkins School of Medicine. And in one interview he was asked like like is it

34:38 true that you know actually the like this good feeling of us feeling good after drinking coffee? Is it just us suppressing the withdrawal symptoms that we have because of coffee? And he said yes. And I found it very interesting. Um so part of the benefit is actually the relief from the defendants caffeine created in the first place. So if you were if you would not drink the caffeine you would not have this withdrawal system symptoms that you would need the coffee for. Um and so uh one thing I think it's interesting right so you might be thinking okay well uh I would like to to to quit caffeine and to you know to try it out. Uh one thing you really need to be aware of is the timeline. So 7 days definitely not enough. And all the

35:25 when I read the book by Steven Chernishka, he really kind of confirmed this for me. U because he said you you need at least 3 weeks before assessing any benefits like well before before really being kind of caffeine caffeine free and like 60 days uh for access the full benefits of being caffeine free. Um and Alex Becker talked about the same experience. He said like the third three weeks were kind of the blur. He called it the blur. And I would agree with it. So I would say like the first 21 days is where you kind of feel a little bit depressed and you're not as sharp. You're slower and uh yeah like those three weeks are the worst. And I think this is where a lot of people give up.

36:11 But if you understand how the biological system works, they work in weeks and months and not days. So that's why a lot of a lot of those experience they run at least for like three months uh because it takes time for your biology to adjust and like like what do you want like you've been drinking caffeine for 15 years your body adjusted to it everything adjusted to it and now in 7 days you you switch and you think it going to change instantly like that. So biological systems don't work like that. Um so and that this is also brings brought me to a very interesting realization that a lot of the caffeine research if you look like who are they comparing right the people who drink c like in those studies like people drinking caffeine and then people not drinking caffeine but people who don't

36:56 drink caffeine they actually stopped drinking caffeine 10 to 14 hours before testing. So those participants in placebo they're actually maybe experienced withdrawal. That's that's why actually you know this would exaggerate the benefits of giving c like of those caffeinated people because the other people who don't have caffeine they're just in withdrawal right so you really if you really need to do a proper study you need to take people who haven't drank caffeine for 30 days maybe even longer 60 days and then compare those people to the people drinking caffeine and then compare but this is not how how a lot of studies are run and so what happens at uh at day 30 so now as I'm recording this video I'm on Day 30 officially of no caffeine. Um, so what I would say I would say that my

37:42 sleep actually got worse in the first uh 10 days. It got worse. So it was very light. I would wake up multiple times during the night. So I would say the first two nights I slept a lot like 10 11 hours and it was like a deep sleep. I was just gone. And then afterwards uh after the caffeine cleared uh it was a very light sleep. I would wake up multiple times during the night. I think it probably also had to do with cortisol and the stress hormones because my body regulated them again. I needed to adjust and after two weeks I began that I began feeling that my sleep got deeper. I started dreaming. I had very vivid dreams. Um and I would even I would even say that now I sleep a little bit like less maybe because I get more more REM

38:29 sleep, more deep sleep. I sleep less. So, my total sleep time, I would say decreased a little bit. So, you know, right now I'm going to bed around like 9:30 p.m. and I would wake like before 6:00 a.m. sometimes like 5:45 or something. And so, I just wake up before my alarm and and this is it, right? You just wake up uh go on with your day. Uh you don't drink coffee. Uh and what about training, right? So, initially like the first week I felt weaker. All the lifts felt weaker. Uh, and then one day, I think it was the week two or or three, I went to the gym and there's always on uh Wednesday, I do weighted pistol squats and I just I was like, I have to do weighted pistol squats again. I have to beat my PR. I don't want to do this kind of my nervous system, right?

39:15 And uh this time I went I did them, I did other exercises. So, I felt like um it was not even about energy. It was about ner my nervous system. My nervous system just felt lighter. I like I could carry more load because I would say like all the exercise you do in the gym, especially the compound movement, they're very heavy on your nervous system, right? And so when your nervous system is already uh is already fired up by the coffee you drink in the morning and then you go to the gym in the evening, it just not uh it's just too much for a nervous system to handle. So I just felt more calmer and I just would go through the exercises, no problem, no internal resistance, just do it. Uh what about work? same thing I would say like uh yes I I maybe I miss a little bit this this kind of kick you get in the morning I

40:01 don't have this kick anymore um and actually one of the I would say one of the d like one of the cons of of uh not drinking caffeine is that I do intermittent fasting so the first time I would eat is around like 12:30 and now without caffeine I uh I feeling I'm feeling the hunger because caffeine also suppresses the hunger and without the caffeine I feel the hunger and so it's kind of harder to intermittent fast, I would say. Um, but I still I still like sometimes I would push my breakfast when before it was around 12:30, I maybe would push it around 12. Maybe sometimes I would push it around the 11. I'm still experimenting with it. Um, I would say like 12:00 12:30 is probably what I would stick with still. But now you kind of feel this hunger feeling. But otherwise than that, like the

40:47 afternoons, uh, I'm less distracted definitely. and the afternoons I just get the same amount of work done as in the morning and even in the evenings I'm still kind of dialed in. I don't have this this uh frenzy mind like trying to you know uh go after the next the next thing and this thing and that thing. Um more like a bird's eyee view I would say. What about conversations? Well um before on caffeine I felt this is was also one of the reasons why I stopped. I felt like I was uh impatient like people would say something to me, I would not listen. I was just thinking about what I going to say say next. So I was just I was just like go go go go go go. And now I feel like in the conversation you get like an extra half a second. So if someone tells you

41:34 something, you you look them in the face and you take your time and you just see more facial expressions. you see how they feel and before I felt like I wouldn't I wouldn't notice it that much. Um so it's kind of this wider coma awareness. Um and this is exactly what actually motivated me to start this experiment in the first place. And then let's go even wider, right? So what does it mean for the society as a whole, right? If you have a drug, 90% of the adult population consuming it increasingly also young adults, right? I mean it's they they put it everywhere. Caffeine is almost everywhere. It's not just coffee. It's like in teas and

42:19 energy drinks. They put it in food, right? Um it's in a lot of things. And 90% of people consume it daily. So 90% of people have this shift in their consciousness. Um, and if you look at the history, right? So, a lot of people know about like the industrial revolution and coffee and and everything that um I think the official story is that during the industrial revolution, I'm not sure if it was in England. I think it was in England and Michael Polland writes about it in his book that um they noticed that the on caffeine the factory workers uh were more productive more efficient and uh that's why they included the coffee breaks because coffee breaks were uh

43:05 yeah like coffee breaks made those people more productive and I would agree that you know if if you look at at the research then uh kind of yeah if if you work in the factory, you need to be focused in on like one task that is not requiring your thinking, that is not requiring to you hold things in the memory, seeing the wider picture, then yes, like caffeine is definitely good at that. But you know, in today's world when AI can do a lot of things for us, I think what is missing is judgment. You constantly need to make decisions. Do I do this? Do I do that? And hold a lot of information in your head. And uh I would say caffeine is counterproductive to it. And um a lot of a lot of people uh you know he Michael Pollen also says that you know

43:51 kind of caffeine moved us away maybe from this kind of mystical kind of thinking uh that was maybe there because before the caffeine and what I also found interesting uh I mean there's like no studies on it or anything but that some people who are in the spiritual space like in the medium space the people they say that when they drink too much caffeine it makes for them harder to do like the channeling or all those all those things like connecting to the you know to the universe to the accashic records um which I found interesting because this is was also one of my hypothesis why I stopped because also of the intention and if you look how normalized it is like it's a psychoactive drug right it's a drug and don't a lot of people don't even perceive it as a drug a lot of

44:37 people don't even know what we talked about today about all those things that caffeine does they don't know about the mechanism they just get uh fat. Those observational studies that tell you like oh yeah people who drink caffeine is correlated with this and that. But if you look at those studies a lot of the benefits actually for instance decaf shows similar associations with low all cost mality and type two diabetes risk. So what does it suggest? It suggests that the benefits have nothing to do with caffeine but have to do with other things that are in coffee. For instance like polyphenols, right? But you can get the same thing by just eating berries or drinking uh herbal herbal teas. Um so so it's not caffeine. Um and it's very cheap to produce. Uh and there's a lot

45:25 of coffee shops everywhere. They sell it like here in Warso like a cup of coffee would cost like 18 zlott which is like five bucks, right? Like one black cup of coffee five bucks. It's it's a great business, right? It's a great business. There are a lot of coffee chains and uh they all say sell coffee and it's it's perfect, right? The customers are addicted. Uh they buy it every day and uh it's you know cheap to cheap cheap to produce, frequently purchased and very profitable, right? And the customers feel it like the need every day. Like this is perfect marketing. You don't even need marketing. Like just people just buy it. Um and so what I found even more interesting, right? Um if you look at like just a hypothetical

46:11 experiment, right? If you would create a drug that kept the population productive and complied, like how would you design it? You would maybe design it so it puts you in a chronic stress response, right? So you're constantly worried, constantly in the state of anxiety. Oh, I need to survive the survival mode, right? Then probably it would interfere with your pre prefrontal cortex. You know what differentiates us like, you know, us the higher animals from other animals. the prefrontal cortex, you know, the newer brain that gives us this rationality, right? And caffeine actually reduces the blood flow to certain areas of prefrontal cortex then also narrows your attention and keeps people doing producing and reacting instead of seeing the bigger picture and people are daily dependent. Um so you kind of become if you design a drug like that like

46:58 caffeine would be the perfect candidate, right? And so at the end of the day you become highly efficient at executing someone else's playbook, right? the factory work and completely disconnected from your own. Um, so caffeine does not just keep people awake. It changes the state from which they perceive the world. And this I find very interesting. So what about caffeine? Will I uh use caffeine ever again? So I uh like the saying never say never. Uh so I don't know but not anytime soon. I definitely going to go 60 days without caffeine. I'm on day 30 right now. Probably even 120 days. Um and then I will reassess. And Michael Poland did three months experiment. And then after he started drinking coffee again, he decided that he going to drink coffee only on

47:43 Saturday. So one cup of coffee recreationally on Saturday. But on the same Saturday when he drank this one cup of coffee, he quickly felt the need for another cup of coffee again. And he told himself, well, I mean it's still Saturday. I can't drink the second cup. Right? But this is exactly the thing. I think this is was like everything right if you think yeah everything in moderation like this moderation can very quickly spiral and a little bit can uh get to a lot so I don't know uh I might go like the full purest mode like palurov like no coffee in 20 years no caffeine um nothing that contains caffeine and just drink herbal teas instead I might go like once a month recreationally so I I would like to compare Uh I don't drink alcohol. I stopped

48:30 drinking alcohol. I don't smoke. Uh one of the things I do though is uh and started recently did it like maybe like two three times is smoking cigars with my friends in a in a cigar lounge. And I like to compare caffeine with cigars. Like if you go to cigar like there's like some people they always there. They smoke cigars every single day and it's not good. But for us friends having dinner and then going for a cigar like once or twice a month just enjoying it because of the social aspect. Great. It feels great. Um, and this is how I see caffeine now because it's a drug just like cigars, just like nicotine. So, if you were to drink it, like treat it as such as well, like maybe once a month, maybe twice, twice a month, and this is it. But again, you have to be careful because then it can very quickly spiral and you can become

49:16 dependent on it daily. But just having caffeine to get work done daily makes no sense to me. What about, you know, the decaf? A lot of people I think it's important to call decaf because a lot of people think well well yeah when I stop drinking coffee I would go for black or green or white tea. Well all of them have caffeine. But even decaf even decaf like a 12 ounce cup of decaf can have 10 milligrams of caffeine. So decaf doesn't mean caffeine free and you say well 10 milligrams doesn't matter right but what Roland Griffin showed he's like the foremost researcher on caffeine from John Hopkins. He reported that people notice behavioral effects and psychiatric effects below 20 milligrams and even below 10

50:03 milligrams for caffeine. Right? So if you really want obviously you know just having like let's say like uh you know 20 milligs with caffeine probably would not mess that much with your sleep but what it would do probably is it would still change your behavior. Right? So if you really want to run the experiment how it affects your perception and your consciousness, I would say go caffeine-free as I did. Uh I even stopped uh eating uh dark chocolate or like rock a cacao. I would do that because still contains caffeine and I wanted to experience how my caffeine free self is. So this is what I currently do. And so what I would usually drink I uh I started drinking Roy Boost tea instead like just generally like fruity herbal teas that are naturally caffeine-free. um also go for the organic versions. And so this is

50:50 what I do. So what is the bottom line of all that? Caffeine is not just coffee. It's in black tea, green tea, energy drinks, and many other products. It's a psychopactic draft that changes energy, attention, stress response, sleep, and perception of the world. And when you use it every morning for years, that chemically altered state becomes your baseline. At some point, you stop knowing what your natural state feels like. That was the part I wanted to find out for myself. Not whether I could survive without coffee, but who am I at without it. And Steven Tishka, the author of the book uh the caffeine blues, frames it that way. The challenge is of course to discover just how addicted you are to caffeine and how that addiction affects the quality of your life. I suggest that you try kicking the habit for 60 days, the minimum amount of time you'll need to

51:35 evaluate the benefits of caffeine-free body and mind. So the 60 days is an important window. Assure yourself that if you don't feel significantly better, you can always go back to caffeine, but at least you'll know that you've explored the option and are not simply a slave to the coffee pot. So, I like this idea, right? You don't need to. It's just an experiment. Like, you don't have to decide I will give up caffeine forever, but if you're convinced, just give it a try 60 days in your adult life and at least you will know what your non-caffeinated self feels like. So, I really believe that everyone owns this to themselves to find out what their non-caffeinated adult self is like. Um, and the only way to know is to go 60 days without caffeine. And the good thing is if you hate it, you can always

52:20 go back to drinking coffee again for the rest of your life. No problem. But you at least will never have to regret spending your entire life in a caffeinated state only to find out that your non-caffeinated life was better all along. Thanks for watching. Caffeine is borrowed energy. Real energy is mitochondrial. If you want stable all the energy that's actually yours, I built a 5-day email course called Limitless Energy on how to increase your energy by improving your mitochondrial function. You can sign up through the link in the description below. And if you're a founder or high performer who wants to work with me one-on-one, you can book a free health strategy call also through the link in the description. Thanks.