Could Coffee Be The Source of Your Stress Anxiety

Hello and welcome this is self-control how to build a better life the podcast that will inspire you to take control of your mind and your mindset to go forward and build the life that you want to live the life that you deserve to live and in fact it may not be that far away if you're willing to you know do a little bit of the hard work of getting to know yourself getting to understand how to control yourself. I want to talk today about something that many of us do it's socially acceptable it's on every street corner but it was in fact ruining my quality of life that is coffee drinking coffee every day was reducing my quality of life it was stressing me out ratcheting up my anxiety and really making life just that little bit that little bit unenjoyable there was an edge to my life that I am only now seeing in retrospect because of coffee and I'm very glad to have eliminated it from my life and I'm wondering if maybe some of my insights from that process could be useful to you if caffeine is something that you use and you on the other hand maybe have some issues with stress anxiety feeling rushed frequent urination dehydration strange eating habits poor sleep all these things caffeine can wreak havoc on us in a very sinister and subtle way so let's talk about it talk a little bit about how it works talk about how I became aware of this in the first place and the three ways that it affected me the most I will also speak briefly today on how I quit coffee so if you're looking to maybe quit drinking coffee or quit some other bad habit I think this will apply so stay tuned for that we're going to walk through all that as quickly as I can and try and bring some value to you and help you live a better life so first and foremost I have to say I do draw the line at telling people what to put in their bodies or what not to put in their bodies I'm not telling you to quit drinking coffee I'm telling you that somebody suggested that I should maybe think about doing it I eventually did do it and my life has gotten better but I think a lot of content creators podcasters you know twitter famous people they prescribe they prescribe a blanket solution to everybody and I just I don't want to do that I think that's where they stray I think that's how you build cults I simply want you to think for yourself about what I'm telling you here today and you know what I talk about as I have in the past and will today and reducing anxiety reducing stress beating depression what I'm offering is a tool that you could add to your toolkit I'm not going to say you know stop going to therapy and just think like I do or stop taking your meds and just think like I do this is hopefully something you could add to the arsenal add to the fight this doesn't even have to be a fight but let's just say this is something you can take along with you on your journey of becoming so with that said if you find that you have issues with stress with anxiety with feeling rushed during the day you know feeling like you just have to go get things done all the time and it's you're kind of always chasing the day if you feel maybe that living life is some kind of and it antagonizes you you know if there's an edge to life where you kind of you're not always at peace you just can't seem to be fully aware or happy all the time you know if something doesn't go your way it seems like a challenge to you if if small things become big things in your mind because you feel a certain amount of just like base level stress if you have problems with sleep if you have problems with dehydration because you're always urinating that's a that's a really weird one but a big one when it comes to you may need to truly consider the role that caffeine is playing in your life it can come in the form of coffee energy drinks chocolate right it's it's it's in everything truly like there's caffeine and chocolate ice cream and sometimes you know i personally wouldn't even think about that here i'm eating some chocolate ice cream a few hours before bed and then having a terrible sleep well caffeine caffeine really wreaks havoc on our nervous system so i've been drinking coffee for about 10 years up until you know this past summer and like most people i started in university right like it's a stimulant right it's an upper it's very good for those late night study sessions or those evening labs or to you know to get you through a day of classes when you've been out having too much fun the night before but what happened was i graduated and then now i'm into a full-on lifestyle with coffee where i'm just kind of using it as a crutch and i developed a physical addiction meaning i would get headaches if i didn't have that first cup pretty pretty quick in the morning after waking up and again when it comes to coffee you know it's socially acceptable it's a socially acceptable drug it's on every street corner it's very easy to get there's mega mega mega corporations that make billions of dollars off it it's a part of our society and many many people i think uh are addicted to it like i was but many people may not realize the the destruction that it's that it's doing to them you know it's very easy to get your hands on some coffee you could drink it all day long if you wanted to it comes in many forms caffeine itself is in just about anything but we need to understand that caffeine does not in fact make us doesn't give us energy in fact my friend johan who i'm going to talk a bit more about him in a minute my friend johan said that caffeine borrows from tomorrow's energy because caffeine and here i'm going to put my white lab coat on trust me on this caffeine binds to a receptor in our brain that normally is an adenosine receptor and adenosine is the chemical that as it begins to rise in our brain over the course of the day it cues uh sleepiness so when caffeine binds to adenosine receptors in the brain it doesn't trigger that those neural pathways to create sleepiness and in fact prevents us from feeling sleepy so you can understand it's not you've been given some magical energy it's that your body has been prevented from doing the natural rhythm of feeling like it's time to go to bed at bedtime and it's also important to note that caffeine can stay in our bloodstream for 10 to 12 hours so if you're sensitive to it like i probably am you know you could drink a cup of coffee or two three cups of coffee in the morning into the mid or early afternoon and then even when you're trying to go to bed a few hours later or you know at nighttime that caffeine is still at work in your brain presenting or preventing i should say that adenosine response preventing that sleepiness preventing that natural sort of falling into sleep so about a year ago when i was doing this podcast under another name i interviewed johan satour and you may recall just a few months ago i i interviewed him again for the self-control podcast now johan himself is a podcaster and content creator but he's also a therapist a cognitive behavioral therapist and a hypnotherapist he works with many many people to help them improve their quality of life and what he's discovered is that a big part of our reduction in quality of life is due to neurotoxins caffeine being another primary driver of people living a poor quality of life quite frankly so i actually want to i went down and i pulled out the clip from the old podcast with johan explaining how caffeine works on the nervous system and what it actually does to us so let's listen to johan's uh explanation of the science behind caffeine right now and oftentimes even if somebody doesn't come to me for health coaching there's changes that they need to make like they need to stop drinking coffee for example because coffee is the thing that throws you into fight or flight more than anything else and it's the most consumed beverage and the reason for that is because we're hypnotized to believe that it's good for us right and just to talk about that for a second and you know piss off all your listeners that are probably sipping on a cup of coffee right now the consumption of caffeine in in general whether it's caffeinated tea whatever if it's in chocolate whatever caffeine causes the neurons of the brain to fire so rapidly that a chemical response is triggered in the pituitary gland and this response is the production of acth which is adrenocorticotrophic hormone so acth communicates to the adrenal glands to produce stress hormones these go on and then act directly on the brain and the nervous system in detrimental ways and well like i said before it pushes you into fight or flight which means that consuming caffeine daily causes the majority of us to be walking around in emergency stress mode and so the subconscious mind is running your life you are not running your life right the instant you raise that cup of coffee to your lips the game is over for you 95 of your life you are in the subconscious and it affects our brain's ability to solve problems it doesn't aid in cognition like they say so everything unknown to us is actually a tremendous challenge for us and it's raising your cortisol levels for 18 hours so by the time you you have de-stressed from that cortisol rush you know you're trying to go to sleep and you're not doing so well at it like you're not sleeping as well as you think you are if you if you're if you're eating whatever you eat in your regular diet just to keep it simple and you still feel irritable or depressed or anxious or even fatigued at certain points throughout the day you should probably take an inventory of things that you're consuming because a good chance that caffeine is buried in those things and then it's greatly screwing up your life because it's throwing you into the subconscious programs and whatever poor results you're creating in your life then you got to take a look at your subconscious programs and see what programs could i be running that's causing this so after hearing that i got to tell you i was never the same again and i knew in my in my heart that i would one day have to quit drinking coffee and when i last spoke to johan we both kind of laughed because he suggested i quit coffee and that was back in april of 2022 and it wasn't until about september of 2022 that i started the process of quitting and i would say by december of 2022 i was i was off of caffeine you know johan bugged me when we spoke in february he said when i told you about it the first time your subconscious programming stopped you and it spoke for you and it said well i don't think i can do that and that's a response that i found from a lot of people when you present this idea to them it is radical right because coffee is so socially acceptable and it's marketed in a way where it's like it's happy it's a warm thing it's good for you it keeps you going it gets you through the day why wouldn't you want the miracle elixir but that's part of the sinister nature of it and i really have to say that once johan explained to me that the way caffeine works on our brain on our nervous system it puts us into a perpetual as long as we're drinking it every day a perpetual state of stress we're in a fight or flight mode all the time right that's kind of a low grade baseline stress due to drinking coffee right so when i say if you feel challenged during the day if you feel antagonized by just regular average things it could be because coffee has put you in this state of fight or flight you're in a stressed out state and things that come into your perception now suddenly look like challenges look like something you need to deal with right something that you need to be afraid of perhaps when it could just be a regular everyday thing and i can honestly say now in retrospect about six months or so without caffeine and looking back on my journals from from years past and just thinking about life even as recently as as last summer last spring everything everything was a struggle and in a little in a little minor way there was an edge to life that i didn't need to have now that's gone i'm truly truly i could say i'm relaxed for once i'm chill i'm just i'm allowing life to in some senses what i can't control happens and i just do what i can do but i don't feel like i'm being put upon or challenged or antagonized by life thanks to finally getting off the coffee but you know when it comes to issues of mental health and substance abuse and mindset quite often it's a lack of awareness that that exists like we're numb to the fact that we are harming ourselves we're numb to how we're abusing ourselves and if we're if we're so used to drinking coffee right like if you're consuming something every day for 10 years the chances are you're not at all aware of how it's really affecting you so it's only in retrospect that we realize how we're hurting ourselves it's only in looking back after having quit the behavior how how detrimental it truly was okay so let me tell you now the three ways that i identified that coffee was really making my life hard ruining my quality of life and then we'll talk about how i quit drinking the stuff okay the first way in which my consumption of coffee was you know reducing my quality of life making life a little bit more difficult than it had to be simply the time i spent dealing with coffee and and how it affected my lifestyle right so as recently as this past november i was drinking mostly decaf coffee i would i had to have it first thing in the morning so now my morning routine is built around getting up grinding the beans making the coffee having my little ritual sitting there and drinking well that could be half an hour right so now simply by quitting coffee i've managed to inject half an hour of time back into my day also if i was away from home traveling not sleeping in my own bed waking up not in my own bed i had to be aware of well where's the coffee supply right am i at the hotel do i need to go buy some coffee is there a coffee maker here um if i'm at a friend's place you know what's the situation are they gonna make me some coffee in the morning because i'm gonna get a headache if i don't get coffee first thing in the morning sounds like a drug problem doesn't it and so like i say now that i don't build my morning routine around coffee i've actually been able to overhaul my entire morning routine i moved by journaling into the evening and now my morning can simply be go for a walk get a workout and then get to work i'm not worried about uh do i have the coffee beans oh i gotta boil the water oh okay i gotta sit down drink this coffee think about blah blah blah the time saved and the stress reduction of not having a vice first thing in the morning not having to sit down and drink that hot cup of stress first thing in the morning has uh elevated my quality of life immeasurably truly i get way more done in the morning i get way more done in the day because i don't sit down to start my day with a cup of stress all right the second way in which coffee was reducing my quality of life it wreaked havoc on my nervous system it led to anxiety and it actually led to dehydration as well so we understand how coffee does not truly energize us in any real way it stresses us out it puts us on alert right and it actually in in the long run steals our energy and like i said reading my journals from last year i could sense how in a lot of ways i felt antagonized by life by simple things felt like challenges simple things felt like a problem when nowadays these things happen to me and i see them for what they are it's not like anything has been done to me right it's just that i can now clearly see the issue for what it is and that's because i'm not in that fight or flight mode every day anymore i'm not at that baseline of stress up to my eyeballs i'm the stress is way down and i'm not in i'm not doing it to myself anymore as well coffee is a caffeine at least as a diuretic right so it causes urination so a lot of the times you know i'd get up drink some water drink some coffee and then by the time i'm getting to where i'm going in the morning i had to use the bathroom so urgently it was like it was a problem and in fact i had to urinate uh let's say uh in a crisis level uh all day long in fact and that might not be the case for everybody but it really it really led to that stress level which then led to that diuretic effect and when you're always when you're always urinating you know your body is moving a lot of water it's not keeping that water for the processes that it needs and a lot of minerals are going out the door as well so you're dehydrated you're deeply dehydrated and it's kind of a sinister thing coffee because two major factors for aging us at least making us look aged uh is chronic stress and chronic dehydration well coffee's good for both of those things so i'm not going to say that drinking coffee will prematurely age you but i don't like the road that i was on uh pissing my pants every morning and and being in a stressed out state i'm glad that i was able to stop drinking this stuff uh you know at least at least now in my mid-30s i also noticed that having now quit coffee the anxiety level is just way way down it's like for me anxiety and i'm not sure if this is the case for you but for me you know my anxiety took on it was like a bloodhound pulling on the leash right it was like next next next you gotta do this you gotta do this you gotta do this what's next what's next but then also well what if what if this happens what if it's like this tornado of of um of hypotheticals going on in my mind that's all gone now and that anxiety would persist early in the morning before i drank coffee throughout the day and it was fueled by the caffeine but i think i also got myself to a place where i was just at a baseline of anxiety do do i think in large part to the caffeine so i really got to tell you if you're looking to reduce the stress levels in your life if you're looking to reduce the anxiety in your life and if you're looking to be a little kinder to your nervous system and stay hydrated consider your caffeine intake it could really be wreaking havoc on your whole body the third way that coffee was the third way that my use of caffeine my my use of coffee was affecting my quality of life was it really put me into a place where i became very biased about the way i was eating so i'm a big proponent of intermittent fasting right i fast for 16 to 20 hours every day but i was i was using coffee to kind of cut down the hunger pangs i used coffee as a as an appetite suppressant and i would fast into the middle of the day and i i don't think there's really anything worse you can do to your to your gut than pour coffee and into an empty gut first thing in the morning and i did it for six seven years so i'm only now realizing um how i kind of played myself right what i've been able to do now having stopped drinking coffee is just accept you can eat earlier in the day and if you still want to do these 16 20 hour fasts just stop eating sooner in the in late afternoon early evening and you can still get that time fasted and then eat in the morning don't use coffee as a meal replacement it it really just ratchets up the anxiety you know a friend of mine he he's notorious this guy can fast for 36 hours sometimes and it's i'm really in awe of his ability to do it and i said well don't you get like anxious when you fast for a long time and he said no i said well i do he said well are you drinking are you drinking caffeinated coffee while you're doing these fasts it's like yeah he's like well there's the anxiety you know we as humans and again i'm not telling you to to do intermittent fasting like look into it for yourself but i choose to do it it really helps keep the fat body fat down it helps with a lot of mental processes it really is a wonderful thing um to not be always digesting but i i really realize now how i i really screwed the whole thing up for years on end by thinking that coffee was the way to get me through the fast it really is not the case for me anyway in fact you know a lot of people get like the a pain in their in their stomach from drinking coffee um obviously that's not an issue for myself anymore i can honestly say that i can fast better i can fast comfortably without coffee all right let's talk quickly about how i quit drinking coffee i went easy there's no way i could go cold turkey there's just there's no way the headaches i think would have been would have been a nightmare and it just why make life even that much more unenjoyable where i was at truly what i did in september of this this past year i just started slowly cutting in ground up decaf coffee with ground up regular coffee truly i think i was doing three or four scoops of the ground up regular coffee to one scoop of decaf and then maybe after two weeks shifted to three to one two to one then i was at equal parts decaf and calf and then made that shift where now i had more decaf coffee in with the caffeinated and of course i was grinding the beans every day and blending up this blend of of half and half this i think is the way to quit at least for me a lot of habits is is incrementally like that it's like it's the same way that i quit looking at sexual media and pornography online i couldn't just do it all at once it was you know you had to grab a hold of the reins once and stop yourself today and then tomorrow all right you're not strong enough to do it you let it go i do think the coffee model that i used is the way to quit these bad habits if you are afforded the time right like if it's not a life-threatening pursuit that you're after if it's something softer like coffee that you want to quit give yourself the time to just get off that horse incrementally right so then eventually what happened was was by december of this year i was now drinking fully decaf coffee and you may be saying well there's still caffeine in decaf and that is true that is true according to what i've read it's something about two milligrams of caffeine in a cup of decaf compared to 80 90 100 milligrams of caffeine in a regular cup of coffee so you know uh it wasn't until the last few weeks that i fully went off decaf as well so we may say that maybe i haven't truly been off caffeine as long as i'd like to say but um that would be my advice to you if you're looking to quit it's what worked for me start to just ease yourself off and i think i think you'll find uh it'll be a lot more enjoyable of a process you know you'll feel a lot more accomplished when you say well i quit for three days and then went back on it it's like i didn't quit i just started to do less and less to the point where i was down to zero eventually so there you have it if you find that you have issues with stress with anxiety with feeling antagonized feeling challenged feeling like life has an edge to it for no apparent reason chronic dehydration chronic urination poor sleep poor energy if you're using coffee as a meal uh replacement and then not having the nutritional or uh physical outcomes that you'd like to have let's put two and two together here caffeine is not necessarily your friend it may have uses you know if you're a parent or you're a struggling student you may need to use caffeine to uh to keep you awake but uh as a as a everyday thing as a lifestyle thing for me it just quit working so consider consider that for yourself if you're looking uh at living a better life right uh stress anxiety depression even maybe quit the stimulants you know that's what someone was good enough to tell me and i'm trying to push that forward so with that in mind i'd love to hear your story about your use of caffeine please get in touch with me through facebook i'll leave a link to my profile in the notes below and uh let's have a conversation about quitting the things that are that are not so kind to us and quitting those things that we maybe didn't even know were a problem until we were able to sort of look back in hindsight and keep that conversation going thank you for listening thank you for watching and until we speak again please remember that better is possible