你有没有发现自己在头痛欲裂的情况下度过了一天，然后想起你忘了喝咖啡？你并不是唯一的一个。有很多人试图戒掉咖啡。一个简单的谷歌搜索(Google search)会产生相当数量的“戒咖啡”、“戒酒(quit alcohol)”和“戒毒”的结果。令人印象深刻(Impressive)，对吧？然而，没有人真正关注这一点。虽然其他两种习惯受到社会指责，但咖啡实际上得到了认可。这就是为什么，在这篇文章中，我将描述我是如何决定戒掉咖啡的，我戒掉咖啡的方法以及它对我的睡眠和能量水平(sleep and energy levels)的影响。做一个量化的自我极客(self geek)凭借超过 9 个月的关于我自己的详细数据，我能够将一些生命体征与我对自己进行的实验联系起来。让我们开始吧：
我喝咖啡的历史
我从 9 年级开始喝咖啡。我参加了数学奥林匹克竞赛，我花了很多晚上来研究数学(research math)概念和解决问题。我为什么这样做？有几个原因。首先(First)，我有陪伴：作为夜猫子(night owl)，我不是唯一一个在线尝试解决复杂数学问题的人。第二(Second)，我的高中正在装修，我们安排在下午和晚上上课。这是大半夜保持清醒的完美借口，对吧？
在我高中结束时，情况变得更糟。在我最后一年的冬天，我试图申请几所美国大学，同时保持其他一切。我结束了整整一个月的 4 小时夜间工作，最重要的是 48 小时马拉松，以完成所有工作并及时交付应用程序。
然后来到了大学(University)。我们会熬夜阅读我们感兴趣的东西，偶尔参加聚会或试图在考试前把所有东西都塞进去。你应该在考试前的晚上去参观我们大学的教室。您会惊讶地发现有多少人在那里睡觉（错误..我的意思是学习）。那时，我会漫不经心地喝咖啡，甚至都懒得去数杯子。此外，咖啡很便宜，对吧？您可以在布加勒斯特(Bucharest)的许多地方以大约 50 美分到 1 美元的价格买到一杯美味的咖啡。
在大学学习期间，我开始与一位刚刚晋升为跨国公司团队负责人的老朋友一起工作。当然，我是在课程中最艰难的时刻，也就是最后一年，当时所有其他同事都辞职了。成为一个坏蛋真是太好了，对吧？我最终每周工作 90-100小时(hour workweeks)，有时甚至看不到曙光。尽管兼职工作本身只占了一小部分。
然后我完成了大学，我很快决定攻读博士学位(PhD)。我对自己想，得到一点报酬就可以确保我可以在得到报酬的同时做任何我想做的事情。我知道的很少！在履行其他职责（参与欧洲项目和教学）的同时，我不得不竭尽全力为研究腾出空间。每当我觉得我不能再继续下去的时候，咖啡总是在那里，就在附近。值得信赖的朋友！
最后，我对学术界感到如此沮丧，以至于我加入了一家科技创业公司(tech startup)。虽然最初想从博士学位(PhD)中辍学，但我决定完成它并经历了连续 6 个月的不间断工作，白天和黑夜(day and night)，周末或工作日(weekend or weekday)。到了这个地步，事情就真的失控了。每天喝 4 杯（人们，尤其是来自美国的人，一再告诉我罗马尼亚咖啡有多浓）。并补充大量巧克力。
之后它并没有变得更容易。当我完成博士学位(PhD)后，我们最终被收购并同时交付了一个大型项目。等等。
在某一时刻，我决定我与咖啡的关系必须改变。
动机(Motivation)- 是什么促使我决定(My Decision)戒掉咖啡(Drinking Coffee)？
我们中有很多人对咖啡(way coffee)接管我们生活的方式感到沮丧。在超市或购物中心(shopping mall)环顾四周，您将开始意识到咖啡行业(coffee industry)的规模。密切(Pay)关注超市的含咖啡因产品部分，或关注您所爱之人的日常生活。他们的一天是如何开始的？喝咖啡，对吧？
当我意识到以下事实后，我决定戒掉咖啡：
- 忘记它，或者在特定的日子里尽量不喝它让我很难过。所以要么我一直把这种物质留在我的身体里，要么根本没有。
- 我用它来让我的身体试图发送给我的信号静音。每当它告诉我它很累时，我就会用一些咖啡（也许还有一些巧克力）让它闭嘴。
- 这些年来，我与咖啡的关系恶化了，而且没有改善。它甚至没有保持不变。一两杯咖啡只是为了“开始”而没有任何实际效果。
戒掉咖啡，重新发明
我承认，我当时没有研究任何方法。也许我只是有一种疯狂的信心，我可以自己做。回想起来，我充其量只是天真。因为一次失败的尝试会大大降低你未来戒烟的机会。就食物而言，这意味着：饮食失败越多，永远不瘦的机会就越大。
我脑子里只有一个指导原则，我将其应用于我的大部分生活改进：进行小的、渐进的改进，这些改进是可持续的，并在采取行动之前进行衡量。(All I had in mind is one guiding principle that I apply to most of my life improvements: make small, gradual improvements that are sustainable and measure before acting.)
当我决定完全戒掉咖啡时，我已经开始减少它了。前几个月充满了可乐和咖啡(Coke and coffee)，我开始担心了。我首先开始测量，发现我每隔两周喝了大约 30 杯咖啡，其中大部分是在工作日。看到数字后，归零的前景相当令人生畏。
此时的关键是把它看成一个长期的过程(term process)。一年有52周。如果我能找到每两周减少 1 杯咖啡的方法，我将在一年内完成！当然，这需要自己输入数据的纪律，因为那时还没有Vessyl。然而，我个人的理论是，如果有足够好的好处，人们将自己进行数据输入，而不是寻找自动化的方式。
在与戒烟有关的文献中，我试图做的是“逐渐减少”。有多种思想流派，主要分为这种方法（或类似方法）和彻底放弃（“冷火鸡”）。逐渐减少及其衍生物已被证明在试验中更有效（通过测量 6 个月或 1 年后的复发）。
我总共花了 8 周时间才完全戒掉咖啡。最后，我接受了终极考验：前往美国并在 5 天内返回参加会议——(conference —)而不是喝咖啡！尽管这很难，但我以出色的成绩通过了这一关，而且我认为由于缺少咖啡，我设法更轻松地度过了时差。(jet lag)
我戒掉咖啡的冲刺
我是一名软件工程师(software engineer)，我以工程师的视角处理几乎所有事情。从敏捷方法中学习，我在 2 周的冲刺中接近戒掉咖啡。在这里，我将简要概述我的 sprint。从我决定退出到做这件事的那一刻，我总共花了 4 次冲刺——大约 56 天：
Sprint #1 (March 17th - March 30th) — only measured the coffee I drank. Result: 28 cups.
Sprint #2 (March 31st - April 13th) — only measured the coffee I drank. Result: 26 cups.
Sprint #3 (April 14th - April 27th) ——只测量了我喝的咖啡。结果：26杯，最后一天（ 4月27日(April 27th)）头痛得很厉害，因为我忘记喝咖啡了。这是我真正决定放弃的时候。
Sprint #4 (April 28th - May 11th) — added the goal of drinking a maximum of 20 coffees. I was helped by the fact that I visited London between May 1st-May 4th, so I did not really have to wake up to an alarm clock during a few of those days. I ended up getting by on one coffee per day during my London visit, and on 2 daily coffees for most of the other days.
Sprint #5 (May 12th - May 25th) — I realised that my previous goal was too aggressive and highly dependent on context. I decided to improve my previous goal only by a little and set it to a maximum of 17 coffees. In the first week I drank my coffee only during weekdays, and I was struck by a nasty cold in the second week. That prompted me to rest more in order to get through it, and I barely reached my goal. This proved to be context-dependent again.
Sprint #6 (May 26th - June 8th) — changed my goal again to drinking only 14 coffees and I ended drinking only 10. I was away at the seaside with my wife and friends in the June 7th-June 9th period, so that helped a bit with my mental dependency as well. I was very encouraged by the fact that I was managing to be productive during the day even without coffee, as my comment from May 28th reads: "productive workday with 0 coffee. YAY!".
Sprint #7 (June 9th - June 22nd) — during this sprint I drank my last coffee in the first day (June 9th), and decided to go cold turkey at this point. I had gathered enough momentum and I had a very good test coming up in the next week, so I took the plunge. The most difficult part of this sprint was that while at the conference in USA, I was feeling groggy all the time and they only had black tea or green tea at best, which I tried to avoid at all costs. However, I over-compensated for my tiredness (an average of about 4 hours of sleep a night, including sleeping on a plane) with eating a lot of junk food. Even though I successfully reached my coffee goal at the end of the sprint, I did it at the cost of other health-related aspects: gained 2 kg (4.4 lbs) and was unable to find the mental energy to log my food.
Sprint 是如何工作的
首先(First)，我每天早上都会检查我的 sprint 仪表板（通常是Google 电子表格）。(Google Spreadsheet)通过将我的数据放在电子表格中，我的进入门槛非常低，因为我知道我早上的例行公事(morning routine)很容易被周末和旅行打乱。只要看看目标和目前的进展，我就会在接下来的一天里意识到我必须注意什么。
虽然我在冲刺中逐渐进步，但我自然倾向于在接近尾声时变得更加雄心勃勃以实现我的目标。这就是制定不那么激进的目标非常重要的地方——它会更容易争先恐后地实现它们，而且它们更容易实现。
在冲刺快结束时，我开始考虑下一个冲刺的目标。我通常有 2-3 个短跑目标，其中一个通常与体重有关（因为那时我正在减肥）。
在每个 sprint 之后，我都会进行一次小型sprint 回顾(sprint retrospective)，以了解为什么我实现了（或未能实现）我的目标，以及应该如何进一步接近它们。
我尽量避免一个 sprint 的目标超过 3 个，因为我发现很难将注意力集中在这么多结果上。或许，最有效的方法是只有一个目标，但这需要一定程度的耐心，而很多人（包括我自己）都没有。
戒掉咖啡能提高(Does Quitting Coffee Improve)睡眠质量(Sleep Quality)吗？
我很高兴能从我的BodyMedia中挖掘我的睡眠数据，看看在戒掉咖啡后我的睡眠质量是否有任何长期的改善。我的结论是有，但它们被我做出其他重要的生活改变（比如改变职业道路(career path)）打乱了。此外，我“只有”有大约 8 个月的关于我自己的数据。这可能看起来很多，但是当您尝试对其进行处理时，您会注意到您需要更多。
为此，我为自己发明了一个睡眠分数(sleep score)，它是以下 4 个指标的平均值，我称之为“综合睡眠分数(sleep score)”：
- (Sleep score)整晚的睡眠分数（我实际上在床上躺着的时间的百分比）。
- 第一个小时的睡眠分数(Sleep score)（这是因为我曾经难以入睡；我是一个多动的人，喝咖啡(person and drinking coffee)也无济于事）。
- 入睡时间（入睡所需的分钟数）。这是不准确的，因为传感器无法区分是我在看电影还是我在努力入睡。将来，我会想办法衡量它。
- BodyMedia(Number)检测到的睡眠间隔数(BodyMedia)（或者，在睡眠用语中 -辗转反侧(toss & turns)的次数）。
这些指标中的每一个都被标准化为 0-100 并取平均值。我对咖啡的数量做了同样的处理（乘以 33，因为当我记录它们时，我每天喝的咖啡不超过 3 杯），我在下图中对它们进行了比较：
该图显示了7 月(July)和8(August)月初睡眠质量（红色图）的提高。紧随其后的是明显的暴跌，因为我正在换工作，这对任何人来说都是有压力的。如您所见，现在我的睡眠分数(sleep score)稳定了很多，而且越来越多地超过 75。
对于睡眠，我使用了移动平均线（一个旧值比新值更重要的数学公式(mathematical formula)），因为我试图更好地了解长期趋势。起初，我对没有明显的向上改善感到失望。但我想我在两个方面错误地设定了我的期望：
- 没有传感器可以测量您早上的休息情况。这就是戒掉咖啡后真正得到改善的地方。我会想办法从长远来看测量它的副作用，以便进行更多的实验。
- 即使是 10 % improvement也不是那么合理；这意味着在一两年内，只要有足够的野心，我就能达到近乎完美的睡眠。
由于我在戒掉咖啡之前总共进行了 7 次冲刺（大约 100 天），并且之后的睡眠数据也差不多，所以我决定比较day D and day D+100睡眠得分(sleep score)，绘制图表并累积。这会告诉我我是否确实睡得更好。
就在这里。你看到的蓝色(blue graph)大图是我在 3 个月内睡眠质量的提高（当它高于基线时，这意味着我的睡眠质量累积起来比前一段时间好）。
这张图很有道理。戒掉咖啡后，我立即经历了一个更稳定的时期，在那里我试图多休息并(rest and charge)为电池充电。最近，我开始非常紧张地从事一组个人项目（包括这些文章），这解释了睡眠质量的复发。但是，有两点非常重要：
- 累积睡眠分数(sleep score)的大山(upward hill)意味着我在很长一段时间内一直比以前睡得更好。
- 尽管我经历了一段艰难时期，但我现在正在恢复，这表明我经历艰难时期的能力并没有因为戒掉咖啡而改变。这(Which)本身就是一项重大成就。
戒掉咖啡的其他好处
首先(First)，我的一天开始得更快(day quicker)。我每天多花 5 到 10 分钟来准备咖啡和喝咖啡(coffee and drinking)。
即使睡了更少的时间，我也会更加休息。每当我的身体告诉我是时候了，我就会多休息。正因为如此，我的工作效率有了很大提高，而且我更倾向于专注于我所做的事情。
现在睡觉容易多了。因为我也练习间歇性禁食 (IF)(intermittent fasting (IF))，到了深夜，我真的很累，在我的Kindle上阅读几分钟就足以让我快速有效地入睡。
最重要的是，我更了解自己的身体。我知道哪些食物能正确喂养它，哪些不能，以及我如何影响它的能量水平。现在我可以跑了，但我不能躲。没有咖啡可以抑制它试图发送给我的信号。
结论
首先(First)，从我的系统中取出咖啡感觉很棒。但这是一种根深蒂固的习惯和社交活动，尤其是在办公室工作中，很难摆脱它。我想念我和妻子或同事的早晨咖啡。(morning coffee)
事实证明，增量收益的概念在戒掉咖啡方面非常成功——而且值得一提的是，我可以作为一名软件工程师(software engineer)（使用 sprint）来组织我的活动。再一次，有确凿的证据表明过程比结果更重要。
我很高兴看到现状(status quo)可以受到挑战。我真的需要咖啡吗？也许不吧。它会伤害你吗？对我来说绝对是这样。你有类似的故事吗？我很想听听你的！
Andrei Ismail 是一位经验丰富的软件工程师，拥有创业经验和人工智能博士学位。他在 6 个月内减掉了 50 磅，目前正在为极客制定健身教练计划，可在WEIGHT LOSS FOR ENGINEERS获得。(Andrei Ismail is an experienced software engineer with startup experience under his belt and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He has lost 50 pounds in 6 months and is currently working on a fitness coaching program for geeks, available at WEIGHT LOSS FOR ENGINEERS.)
A Geek's Quest To Quitting Coffee - How I Managed To Pull It Off
Have you ever found yourself getting through a day with еxcruciating headaches and then remembering thаt you forgot to drink coffee? You're not the onlу one. There iѕ a very large number of people trying to quit coffee. A simple Gоoglе search уields а comparable number of results for "quit cоffee", "quit alcohol" аnd "quit drugs". Impressive, right? Yet, nobody really pays attentiоn to this one that much. And while the other 2 habits аrе blamed by society, coffee is actually endorѕed. That's why, in thiѕ article I am going to describe how I ended up deciding to quit drinking сoffеe, mу method for doing it and the impact it hаd on my slеep and energy levels. Being a quantified self geek with over 9 months of detailed data about myself, I am able to correlate a numbеr of vital signs to the experiments that I do on myself. Let'ѕ get started:
My History With Drinking Coffee
I started drinking coffee in the 9th grade. I was taking part in the math olympiads and I was spending a lot of nights trying to research math concepts and solving problems. Why did I do that? For several reasons. First off, I had company: I was not the only one online as a night owl trying to solve complicated math problems. Second, my high school was going through some renovations, and we were scheduled to go to class in the afternoon and in the evening. It was the perfect excuse to stay awake most of the night, right?
Towards the end of my high-school years, things got worse. In the winter of my final year, I was trying to apply to several US universities while keeping everything else together. I ended up doing one whole month of 4-hour nights, and the cherry on the top was a 48-hour marathon to finish everything and have the applications shipped in time.
Then came the University. We would stay up late reading stuff that we were interested in, occasionally partying or trying to cram everything before an exam. You should go and visit our university's classrooms in the nights before the exams. You'll be surprised how many people you will find there sleeping (err.. I meant studying). In those days, I would drink coffee mindlessly without even bothering to count the cups in any way. Besides, coffee is cheap, right? You can get a nice cup of coffee in many places in Bucharest for about 50¢ to $1.
During my university studies, I started to work with an old friend who had just been promoted to team leader in a global company. Naturally, I did this at the toughest moment in the curriculum, the final year, when all other colleagues were quitting their jobs. It was so nice to be a badass, right? I ended up working 90-100 hour workweeks and sometimes not seeing the light of day. Even though the part-time job itself was taking up a small proportion of that.
Then I finished university and I quickly decided to go towards a PhD. I thought to myself that getting paid a little would ensure that I could work on whatever I wanted to, while getting paid. Little did I know! I had to work my ass off to make room for research while performing my other duties (being involved in European projects and teaching). Whenever I felt I could not go on anymore, coffee was always there, close by. A trustworthy friend!
Finally, I got so frustrated with academia, that I joined a tech startup. While initially wanting to drop out of PhD, I decided to finish it and went through 6 months straight of working non-stop, day and night, weekend or weekday. At this point, things were really getting out of control. Drinking 4 cups a day (and people, especially from the US, repeatedly told me how strong Romanian coffee is). And supplementing that with plenty of chocolate.
And it did not get any easier afterwards. As soon as I finished my PhD, we ended up getting acquired and shipping a massive project at the same time. And so on.
At one point I decided that my relationship with coffee had to change.
Motivation - What Triggered My Decision To Quit Drinking Coffee?
There's quite a bunch of us out there who are frustrated with the way coffee took over our lives. Take a look around you, while in the supermarket or in the shopping mall and you'll start realising the size of the coffee industry. Pay close attention to the caffeinated products section in the supermarket, or to the daily routine of your loved ones. How does their day start? With coffee, right?
I decided to quit coffee once I realised the following facts:
- Forgetting about it, or trying not to drink it in a particular day was giving me a really hard time. So it's either I keep this substance in my body all the time or not at all.
- I was using it to silence the signals my body was trying to send me. Whenever it would tell me it's tired, I would shut it up with some coffee (and maybe some chocolate).
- My relationship with coffee had degraded over the years, and did not improve. It did not even remain constant. One or two coffees were required just to "get started" without having any real effect.
Quitting Coffee, Reinvented
I admit, I did not research any methods at the time. Maybe I just had a crazy confidence that I can do it by myself. Looking back, I was naive at best. Because a failed attempt will dramatically decrease your chance of quitting in the future. In terms of food, that translates to: the more failed diets, the more chances of not ever being thin.
All I had in mind is one guiding principle that I apply to most of my life improvements: make small, gradual improvements that are sustainable and measure before acting.
When I had decided to quit coffee completely, I was already cutting down on it. The previous months were filled with Coke and coffee, and I was getting worried. I started measuring first, and discovered that I was drinking about 30 coffees in a 2-weeks interval, and most of them during weekdays. After seeing the numbers, the perspective of getting to zero was pretty daunting.
The key at this point was to regard it as a long term process. A year has 52 weeks. If I found a way to diminish the number of coffees by 1 every 2 weeks, I will be done within a year! Of course, it would take the discipline of entering data myself, because there was no Vessyl back then. However, my personal theory is that given a good enough benefit, people will do the data entry themselves instead of looking for an automated way.
In literature that is related to quitting smoking, what I was trying to do is named "gradual reduction". There are multiple schools of thought, and they are mainly divided among this method (or similar) and quitting altogether abruptly ("cold turkey"). Gradual reduction and its derivatives have proven to be much more effective in trials (by measuring relapse after 6 months or 1 year).
It took me a total of 8 weeks to quit coffee altogether. And at the end I had the ultimate test: travelling to the US and back in 5 days for a conference — and not drinking coffee! I passed this one with flying colors although it was hard and I think I managed to get through jet lag more easily because of the lack of coffee.
My Sprints For Quitting Coffee
I am a software engineer and I approach almost everything with an engineer's perspective. Learning from the agile methodology, I approached quitting coffee in 2-week sprints. Here I will give a short overview of my sprints. It took me a total of 4 sprints from the moment I decided to quit to doing it - about 56 days:
Sprint #1 (March 17th - March 30th) — only measured the coffee I drank. Result: 28 cups.
Sprint #2 (March 31st - April 13th) — only measured the coffee I drank. Result: 26 cups.
Sprint #3 (April 14th - April 27th) — only measured the coffee I drank. Result: 26 cups and a huge headache on the last day (April 27th), because I had forgotten to drink coffee. This is when I really decided to quit.
Sprint #4 (April 28th - May 11th) — added the goal of drinking a maximum of 20 coffees. I was helped by the fact that I visited London between May 1st-May 4th, so I did not really have to wake up to an alarm clock during a few of those days. I ended up getting by on one coffee per day during my London visit, and on 2 daily coffees for most of the other days.
Sprint #5 (May 12th - May 25th) — I realised that my previous goal was too aggressive and highly dependent on context. I decided to improve my previous goal only by a little and set it to a maximum of 17 coffees. In the first week I drank my coffee only during weekdays, and I was struck by a nasty cold in the second week. That prompted me to rest more in order to get through it, and I barely reached my goal. This proved to be context-dependent again.
Sprint #6 (May 26th - June 8th) — changed my goal again to drinking only 14 coffees and I ended drinking only 10. I was away at the seaside with my wife and friends in the June 7th-June 9th period, so that helped a bit with my mental dependency as well. I was very encouraged by the fact that I was managing to be productive during the day even without coffee, as my comment from May 28th reads: "productive workday with 0 coffee. YAY!".
Sprint #7 (June 9th - June 22nd) — during this sprint I drank my last coffee in the first day (June 9th), and decided to go cold turkey at this point. I had gathered enough momentum and I had a very good test coming up in the next week, so I took the plunge. The most difficult part of this sprint was that while at the conference in USA, I was feeling groggy all the time and they only had black tea or green tea at best, which I tried to avoid at all costs. However, I over-compensated for my tiredness (an average of about 4 hours of sleep a night, including sleeping on a plane) with eating a lot of junk food. Even though I successfully reached my coffee goal at the end of the sprint, I did it at the cost of other health-related aspects: gained 2 kg (4.4 lbs) and was unable to find the mental energy to log my food.
How A Sprint Works
First of all, I check my sprint's dashboard (usually a Google Spreadsheet) each morning in my daily routine. I made the entry barrier really low by placing my data in a spreadsheet, because I knew that my morning routine can be disrupted very easily by weekends and trips. Just looking at the target and at the current progress will make me aware for the rest of the day of what I have to pay attention to.
While I gradually progress through the sprint, I naturally tend to become more ambitious towards the end to achieve my goal. This is where it's really important to have less aggressive goals - it will be easier to scramble to meet them and it will be more plausible that they are reachable.
Towards the end of the sprint, I start to think about the goals for the next one. I usually had 2-3 goals for a sprint, and usually one of them would be related to weight (because I was losing weight at that point).
After each sprint I would have a small sprint retrospective, to understand why I achieved (or failed to achieve) my goals, and how they should be approached going further.
I try to avoid having more than 3 goals for one sprint, because I find it difficult to focus my mind on so many results. Probably, what works best is having only one goal, but that takes a degree of patience that a lot of people (including myself) don't have.
Does Quitting Coffee Improve Your Sleep Quality?
I was quite excited to dig up my sleep data from my BodyMedia and to see whether there are any longer term improvements in my sleep quality after quitting coffee. My conclusion is that there are, but they were disrupted by my making other important life changes (like changing the career path). Also, I "only" have about 8 months of data about myself. And that might seem like a lot, but when you will try to crunch it, you will notice that you need much more.
To this end, I invented a sleep score for myself that is the average of the following 4 metrics, that I call "composite sleep score":
- Sleep score for the whole night (percentage of the time lying in bed in which I was actually sleeping).
- Sleep score for the first hour (this is because I used to have problems falling asleep; I am a hyperactive person and drinking coffee did not help either).
- Time to fall asleep (number of minutes it takes to fall asleep). This is not accurate because the sensor cannot distinguish between me watching a movie or me struggling to fall asleep. In the future, I will think of a way to measure that.
- Number of sleep intervals detected by BodyMedia (or, in sleep parlance — the number of toss & turns).
Each of these metrics was normalized to 0-100 and they were averaged. I did the same for the number of coffees (multiplied by 33, because while I was logging them I did not drink more than 3 coffees a day), and I compared them in the following graph:
The graph shows an increase in sleep quality (the red graph) towards July and the beginning of August. It's followed by an obvious plunge, because I was changing jobs, which is stressful for anyone. As you can see, now my sleep score is much more stable and it is more and more often above 75.
For sleep, I used the moving average (a mathematical formula where the older values matter less than the newer values), because I was trying to better see the longer term trends. At first, I was disappointed that there was no clear upwards improvement. But I guess I had set my expectations wrong in 2 ways:
- No sensor can measure how well rested you are in the morning. This is what actually improved after quitting coffee. I will think of a way to measure side effects of that on the longer term, in order to perform more experiments.
- Even a 10% improvement is not that plausible; that would mean that in a year or two, given enough ambition, I will be able to reach a near-perfect sleep.
Since I had a total of 7 sprints (about 100 days) before quitting coffee, and about as much data about sleep afterwards, I decided to compare the sleep score for day D and day D+100, graph it and accumulate it. This would tell me if I was indeed sleeping better or not.
And here it is. The big blue graph you see is the increase in sleep quality that I got over a period of 3 months (whenever it's above the groundline, it means that cumulatively I was sleeping better than the previous period of time).
This graph is quite plausible. I went through a more stable period immediately after quitting coffee, where I tried to get a bit more rest and charge my batteries. And recently, I've started to work on a set of personal projects really intensely (including these articles), which explains the relapse in sleep quality. However, there are two really important points:
- The big upward hill of the cumulative sleep score means that I was constantly getting better sleep than I was getting before for a good period of time.
- The fact that even though I went through a rough period, I am recovering right now shows that my ability to go through rough periods has not changed due to quitting coffee. Which is a major accomplishment in itself.
Other Benefits for Quitting Coffee
First of all, I start my day quicker. I gained 5 to 10 extra minutes each day which went into preparing the coffee and drinking it.
I wake up more rested, even after fewer hours of sleep. And I tend to rest more whenever my body tells me that it's time. My productivity has improved considerably because of this, and I tend to be more focused on what I do.
Going to sleep is much easier now. Because I also practice intermittent fasting (IF), by the late hours of the evening I am really tired and a few minutes of reading on my Kindle is just enough to get me to sleep quickly and efficiently.
Most importantly, I know my body better. I know which foods feed it correctly, and which don't, and how I can influence its energy levels. Now I can run, but I can't hide. There is no coffee to suppress the signals it's trying to send me.
Conclusion
First of all, it feels great to have coffee out of my system. But it's a deeply ingrained habit and social event, especially in office jobs, and it is very hard to get rid of it. I miss my morning coffee with my wife, or with my colleagues.
The concept of incremental gains has proven very successful in quitting coffee - and the rewarding thing was that I could organize my activity as a software engineer (using sprints). Once more, there is solid proof that the process is more important than the result.
I was quite pleased to see that the status quo can be challenged. Do I really need coffee? Maybe not. Does it harm you? That was definitely the case for me. Do you have similar stories? I would love to hear yours!
Andrei Ismail is an experienced software engineer with startup experience under his belt and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He has lost 50 pounds in 6 months and is currently working on a fitness coaching program for geeks, available at WEIGHT LOSS FOR ENGINEERS.
