Giving Up Coffee for Good | My Journey to a Caffeine-Free Life
Why I Wanted to Quit Coffee
It took me a long time to give up coffee. Caffeine addiction is so widespread and ingrained in modern working cultures, few people ever actually admit they’re addicted to it.
I wanted to give up coffee because I had read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker back in 2022.
The book that completely changed how I viewed caffeine.
He was the only person to ever explain what coffee is, the role of caffeine, how it functions in the body and on the mind when we drink coffee, and its long-term impacts, both negative and positive. It was eye-opening, to say the least.
But I wasn’t ready to give up coffee just yet.
To give up coffee is to confront one’s addiction. And addiction is much more than a physical or psychological habit.
It reaches the spiritual realm too. And in 2022, I certainly wasn’t ready or self-aware enough to have a look in the mirror and see who I was.
Fast forward two years later on my raw vegan journey, and it was high time to give up coffee.
My First Attempts
2022
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Learning
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2024
First attempt
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2025
Many more attempts
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2026
Coffee-free
There’s a lot of inner work, healing and personal growth that happens on a raw vegan diet. You know this to be true if you’ve already embarked on your journey.
All the raw vegans I knew and respected the most at the time were from YouTube, and they had all given up coffee prior to starting or during their raw vegan transformations.
So simply through osmosis and tuning into them almost every day, I knew it was high time to make that shift to a totally caffeine-free life.
I officially gave up in April 2024, but that only lasted two months. I tried to help myself by switching over to caffeine-free alternatives like barley and other root drinks.
It was kind of working, but not really. Because I would still wake up tired and feel the urge to make myself a cup of coffee. I resisted that urge for about two months, but by the summer of that year, I was back on coffee again.
Overtime, I indulged in a few variations: soy americano, oat flat white, dirty chai
Now, I’ve never been a heavy coffee drinker. Typically, it was one black Americano a day, or perhaps one every couple of days in the morning, to kickstart my productivity and make me feel focused for the workload ahead.
When Coffee Became a Habit
I started on the coffee wave very late because I always thought it tasted foul. It was so bitter and burnt, I couldn’t stand it when I first had a sip after I entered the world of work in my teens.
But in my early twenties, I met loads of people my age, at work, in uni and whilst travelling, who started their days with a cup of coffee.
I remember when I was in Greece on holiday in 2017. I was 22 and not yet a coffee drinker, but for some reason I ordered a black coffee in the afternoon with my meal at 4 pm. I’m on holiday, I thought, so why not?
I spent that whole night tossing and turning in bed, wondering why I couldn’t get to sleep. I didn’t fall asleep until sunrise. That was how unfamiliar caffeine was in my system, but I didn’t realise it was the coffee that had kept me awake until a year later.
The Productivity Trap
During my final year of drama school between 2018 and 2019, that’s when I really got into drinking coffee regularly. My sister got a French press at home, so when I visited during school breaks, I used it a lot. It was a cool-looking device, and the coffee made me feel more awake.
And often, at that age especially, students are up at all hours of the day. So it made sense that coffee became my crutch to stay awake and feel focused for the work before me. I bought a French press for my own flat back in drama school and used it every day.
Drinking coffee was paying dividends when I wanted to lose some weight. A friend recommended I try intermittent fasting and have just black coffee in the morning to help suppress my hunger. At the time, that made total sense.
Coffee + appetite suppression + strict fasting hours = weight loss
Now, if anyone invited me to take something in order to suppress any part of me, I would firmly decline and kindly tell them to leave me alone. To suppress oneself is to abandon oneself, and I gave up that thinking a long time ago.
Coming back to giving up coffee, I relapsed a few more times in 2024/25. I moved onto oat flat whites. They were very bitter but much more flavoursome than a regular Americano with milk.
After being intentional about giving up, there was still this back and forth in my mind about it.
Should I drink coffee today?
No, I have given it up.
But I’m feeling tired, so why not?
Yes, but it’s so toxic and acidic in the body.
Well, then you’ll just have to try and give up again tomorrow.
This back and forth went on for months through my giving up and relapses. At most, I went for three months straight without coffee.
What Finally Changed
It wasn’t until I improved my diet by adding significantly more fruit in early 2026 that I felt like I no longer blindly surrendered to the need for coffee.
And, in parallel to this, I was improving my sleep habits.
Some time in 2025, I decided to stop wearing a watch. Through lots of inner work, I realised that my sense of productivity was performative. Since my younger years, I had always done well in school, and that felt like an important metric in terms of receiving love and validation at home from my dad, him being a smart and highly academic man.
So I took that attitude into my teens and early adult years. Mix that with the pressures and responsibilities of adulthood, and I think this morphed into something rather toxic and unhealthy. Until I was able to truly resolve this and dissolve this energy, I was always going to be dependent on coffee.
And I think that is the true key to liberating ourselves from any caffeine addiction.
What does coffee give me that I wouldn’t get otherwise if I didn’t drink it?
A sense of what?
Productivity?
Alertness?
A bit of energy?
In my case, when I eliminated all of the habits that were related to my sense of productivity, not only did I finally become put off coffee, but I also relieved myself of so much pent-up stress and got rid of the expectations I had put on myself since childhood. And, most importantly, I was able to regulate and improve my sleep.
It's easy to neglect sleep if other priorities come first like staying awake to make more money or to complete more work.
Sleep, as Matthew Walker points out in his book, is crucial for the proper functioning of the body. However, it’s easy to neglect it if other priorities come first, like staying awake to make enough or more money.
My Life Without Coffee
As I ate more and more fruit, some days exclusively fruit, my energy increased and my sleep improved too. I stopped using an alarm entirely whilst giving myself ample time to sleep and get to bed. Also, I nap almost every day for between 5–15 minutes. Again, no use of an alarm. I simply sleep and trust that my body will wake up when it is feeling recharged.
Eating fruit fills me with so much energy and lightness, there's no place for caffeine anymore or masking any fatigue with coffee.
The less we meddle in the body’s ways of self-regulation, the easier life becomes. And that was the case here.
My identity was no longer warped around the concept of doing and being more, but being myself.
Today, I don’t miss coffee. Not because I can resist it, but because I genuinely don’t need it. It doesn’t speak to the new identity that I get to embody every day as a fruitarian.
A Final Thought
If you’re trying to give up coffee, know that it’s a process. As you can see from my journey, change doesn’t come overnight.
It’s about showing up for yourself, over and over, through the slip-ups, releases and the urges, as we look deeper within ourselves and ask:
"Who is the me I want to be without this addiction to coffee?"
Because if you can answer that question, you’re already halfway there to quitting.