Benefits of Quitting Coffee - How It Can Boost Your Productivity
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Table Of Contents
In the modern workplace, coffee is an absolute lifesaver, a corporate angel (and yes, it wears a suit), dishing out lovely little cups of energy around the office and helping you out when you’re feeling sluggish from the night before.
And you’re not alone in enjoying the many benefits of coffee; as Reuters points out, the average American enjoys 3.1 cups of coffee on a daily basis.
What’s more, Voltaire, the famous French writer, and philosopher of the enlightenment period was a huge proponent of a good cup o’ joe as well. In fact, it is said that he used to drink up to a whopping 40 cups of coffee a day!
Today, giving up coffee in the workplace comes off as just illogical to most professionals. After all, its productivity-enhancing effects are second to none, right?
Not really, as it turns out. Because while it may have worked for Voltaire, data shows that drinking coffee might be taking a bigger toll on your productivity than you think.
But, in order to understand how quitting coffee can improve your productivity; first, we need to delve further into what caffeine actually is and how it works in the first place.
How Does Caffeine Work?
When we talk about the detrimental effects of coffee on your productivity, we are, of course, talking more specifically about caffeine, the stimulant within coffee responsible for most of its perceivable effects. Caffeine is a drug, and like any other drug, it can have both positive and negative effects on your productivity.
But coffee is not the only drink with caffeine in it. In fact, most of the popular beverages we consume regularly have caffeine in them.
However, what puts quitting coffee to boost productivity in the spotlight is the sheer volume of caffeine within coffee compared to some of the other popular beverages like coke and tea. A regular cup of coffee packs twice as much caffeine as the same amount of tea and a whopping four times more caffeine than in a cup of coke!
When consumed, the caffeine in these beverages acts very quickly. As a result, most people will immediately feel an extra feeling of alertness. And according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, it will stay in your system for over 6-10 hours.
Caffeine makes you more sensitive to dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a role in how we feel happiness. So yes, even if it doesn’t deliver happiness to your door, coffee does at least increase your capacity for happiness.
What’s more, caffeine blocks a particular molecule in your body called Adenosine. It is a sleep-inducing molecule that tells you when it might be time to sleep and rest. The combination of these two functions brings about alertness, increased energy, and a feeling of enhanced focus.
So, why then should we even consider avoiding caffeine?
How Does Quitting Coffee Improve Productivity?
In a word, yes. Quitting coffee will improve your productivity. Especially in the long run, the many detrimental effects of caffeine will begin to outweigh its benefits. By quitting coffee, you can; improve your sleep, avoid caffeine slumps, work on underlying issues related to energy, and eliminate the nasty withdrawal symptoms.
But How Exactly Does Quitting Coffee Increase Productivity?- Benefits of Quitting Coffee
No Coffee Means Better Sleep
As we know, sleep is the ultimate productivity tool. What the wheel, fire, and agriculture are to civilization is what sleep is to productivity; without it, you’re in deep trouble.
There is a truckload of benefits sleeping provides to your mind and body. And many of these are directly linked to productivity. Some of these benefits are:
- Increased energy levels
- Better memory
- Improved communicative functions
- A more balanced mood
- Reduced stress
- Overall increase in cognitive functions
Without an adequate amount of sleep, you simply don’t have a foundation to build on for productivity. As a matter of fact, Fort Healthcare states that sleeping for only 1.5 hours less can decrease your alertness by as much as %32!
As we mentioned above, the caffeine inside coffee blocks your Adenosine molecule, which is pivotal for your brain to register when it’s time to rest. And because caffeine has such a long half-life, an average coffee drinker will almost definitely struggle or at least lose a portion of their sleeping period.
This will have a hugely detrimental impact on your cognitive functions and completely ruin your mood for the next day.
Caffeine is also a diuretic. It increases your urine production, which can cause dehydration and headaches, as well as other side effects such as dizziness, fatigue, and dry mouth.
In addition to this, caffeine can also cause anxiety and panic attacks, which will make it harder for you to concentrate.
Quitting coffee is very different from quitting other addictive stimulants because the many benefits of caffeine are very vivid and immediate, while the detrimental effects are harder to uncover.
But when you consider the hours of sleep you may sacrifice for the comparatively meagre benefits of coffee, you may come to see that quitting coffee for better sleep will be much more beneficial in the long term.
Drinking Coffee Has Many Negative Side Effects
With time, the detrimental effects of the caffeine inside coffee begin to rear their heads more, especially in middle-aged or older people. There are many side effects outside the domain of productivity that caffeine poses, but to keep on track, we’ll be talking specifically about those that directly affect your productivity.
At Before Sunset, we often touch on just how important being focused and avoiding distractions can be hugely important for productivity. In fact, some of our champion time tracking methods, like The 25-minute Timer Technique, are built solely around retaining your focus. But prolonged caffeine use can do the exact opposite and hurt your focus instead.
Dizziness, headaches, and anxiety are just some side effects of caffeine that are especially prevalent in older people and those who regularly consume higher volumes of caffeine. These have the potential to really hurt your performance at work. Just imagine yourself drinking a cup of coffee before an important presentation and having to deal with headaches throughout it.
The caffeine crash is also a real thing. Once your body gets used to having the boost of energy from caffeine, it starts producing less and less adenosine, which is what keeps you awake. This is the reason why you have to keep increasing your caffeine intake to get the same effect.
Rather than relying solely on coffee to boost your productivity, why not head over to our 14 Easy Time Management Tips to Apply guide to learn more about how time management can skyrocket your productivity? Besides, there’s nothing better than using technology to improve your productivity rather than the juice of some crushed-up magic bean!
Caffeine Slumps Kill Productivity
A caffeine slump, also known as a caffeine crash, is a state of absolute inability to work a few hours after drinking coffee while in a tired state. Symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, loss of focus, irritability, and nausea, which we can all agree are definitely not what you expect from a cup of coffee.
If you wake up early and feel tired by the time you arrive at work, and reach for the coffee machine as soon as you go through the door, you might wanna take into consideration the very present possibility of having a caffeine slump in the afternoon, once the effects of the coffee have dissipated.
How can you tell if it's a caffeine slump or just tiredness? It is difficult to distinguish the two, and most people don't even realize that they are experiencing a caffeine slump until they stop drinking coffee altogether and realize that they feel much better.
One of the best ways to tell if you're experiencing a caffeine slump is to track your energy levels throughout the day, by making a note of how you're feeling every time you drink coffee.
You will then be able to tell when the effects begin to dissipate and your energy levels drop, which will give you a clear indication that you need to drink more coffee.
Caffeine slumps massively decrease not only your productivity but also your mental well-being. For regular coffee drinkers, here are some tips you can use to avoid caffeine slumps:
- Don’t drink coffee on an empty stomach
- Regulate your sleep hours to reduce fatigue
- Drink plenty of water
- Spread out drinking coffee throughout the day
A Caffeine-Free Life
Coffee is great because coffee makes you feel energetic and focused!
But why do you even need coffee to feel like that in the first place?
For many people considering quitting drinking coffee, the ultimate aim is to quit coffee without having to sacrifice its many benefits to productivity. But it turns out that coffee itself prevents you from delving deeper and uncovering the reasons behind your decreased energy levels.
To put it simply, coffee works like a panacea. With coffee around, you don’t feel the need to ask yourself why you wake up in the morning feeling like you’ve been hit by an 18-wheeler. But if you take the time to solve all the issues that negatively impact your base energy levels, you won’t be needing coffee in the first place!
And yes, it may sound a bit farfetched, but by no means is it impossible. Increasing your base energy levels can be as simple as going to bed an hour early every night or even changing your pillows or mattress!
An Extra Tool for Peak Productivity: Before Sunset Time Tracker
In this review, we talked about how quitting coffee can improve your productivity, but there are so many other tactics you can use to get more work done in the same period of time. At Before Sunset, we strive to help you do just that.
Our extensive time-tracking AI helps you monitor and analyze how much time you and your team spend every day on specific tasks.
By knowing what activities consume a large amount of your time, you will see what you need to spend less time on to be able to shift your attention to the more essential tasks of the day. Our dynamic AI will even analyze your time consumption and give you feedback on what you can do to use your time more wisely and send your productivity through the roof!
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