🫖 TREE 794: Anxiety 4 – quit caffeine

Here are the four things I know about anxiety. They come from personal experience. I’m not offering medical advice. I don’t know if the things that helped me will help you.

1. Treat anxiety as an illness

2. Get therapy

3. Remove cognitive dissonance

4. Quit caffeine

When I have a lot of caffeine, I get whizzy, my heart beats faster, I my attention bounces around randomly. For me, there’s a lot of overlap between what caffeine feels like and what anxiety feels like.

While I was ill with depression and anxiety I was also chain-smoking cups of tea all day at work.

When I realised what was going on with me, it didn’t take me long to decide that I didn’t want to continue adding the symptoms of caffeine use onto my symptoms of depression and anxiety.

So I quit caffeine.

Caffeine is an addictive substance. Humans become chemically dependent on it to feel good. For the first three days after I quit, I felt genuinely wretched. It was like a nonstop terrible hangover. My head hurt, my emotions were (even more) messed up, my body was weak and achey. I don’t ever want to live those three days again.

And then I was fine.

Quitting caffeine didn’t cure my anxiety, but it stopped adding to it, and that was a help.

There are three ongoing benefits too:

1. It feels good knowing I don’t have an addiction

2. I no longer have a deep energy slump every afternoon

3. When I do have caffeine, pretty much only when I’m on a long drive, it works reeeeeaaaalllly well.

I highly recommend quitting caffeine. If you do it, do it during a week when you’ve got nothing too important going on and maybe go to a remote island so people don’t have to be around you.

Just in time for the weekend: Lava La Rue has released their first full-length album! Make some time to listen to the whole thing.

Happy weekend
Jeff