A few months ago I finished reading Why We Sleep, having come across it through its mentions on innumerable podcast episodes and YouTube constantly recommending me this video. Well-marketed, perhaps?

There are some scathing criticisms of the book but those seem too harsh, in my opinion - there’s a bit of nitpicking here and there, some statements feel exaggerated, and there’s some amount of ad hominem too. Nevertheless, barring the criticism and some errors here and there in the book, its case is made pretty well and at the end of the day you…sleep. Or rather you should. Properly.

I have had terrible sleeping habits for quite a few years and this book was like a wake-up call to effect some changes in my lifestyle that’d enable me to sleep better. One of them was about coffee consumption - I’d been having a lot of coffee nearly every day for the past several years without even thinking if I was being affected in any way. Reading about the half-life of caffeine (sounds like a good movie title, eh?) in the book really put things into perspective, and the immediate step to be taken was to stop drinking coffee after 4 PM. No big deal.

But I was working on my Master’s thesis around that time and hence didn’t compromise on the volume of coffee being consumed, lest the effect of such a change be too radical; I put it on my To-do list for later. Come October (after Billy Joe Armstrong was done with his caffeine experiment), after the conclusion of my thesis and some other misc stuff immediately following it, I thought it’d be a good time to cut down on caffeine intake. I brought the consumption levels from wherever they were down to one cup a day, and that too no later than 12 PM.

It was interesting at the outset - I could feel the change in my mood on a daily basis right away. Perhaps this isn’t scientific and too anecdotal (could be a massive placebo effect of sorts) but I could really feel the lows for at least a week immediately following this change, whether attributable to it or not. But after a week or so, everything felt almost the same as before - but without any craving for coffee - and strangely enough, I started feeling more focused on whatever I was doing. My running routine hasn’t suffered at all, contrary to what I thought would be the case. However, I have yet to witness the effect on sleep (it still is quite poor) but maybe it’ll take a while. Now I just drink hot water when I feel like consuming coffee, and it doesn’t even seem strange anymore.

This sudden coffee brake has had some noticeable effects, but these are anecdotal. Maybe some hard research might be worthwhile to gauge from data and look at such decisions more quantitatively.

I just noticed that brake and break are anagrams. Is it because of this break from coffee?