Login | June 07, 2026
Taking a break from coffee
PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World
Published: August 7, 2023
Amazingly enough I’d cut myself off coffee a month ago and I’m actually doing quite well cuz let me tell youI was a bonafide javaholic.
Now in as much as I love the whole morning ritual surrounding my java sessions, I nonetheless had to make the break - at least temporarily - for several reasons.
First, I’ve been getting too jittery for a couple of hours after drinking coffee. Second, my sleep quality had been gradually deteriorating and becoming far less qualitative than it used to be. And third, I’d experienced a couple bouts of elevated heart rate an hour or two post-coffee.
Now at this point you’re likely thinking that I was chugging down two or three double espressos every morning, but that’s very far from the case.
I'd actually only been drinking two cups of a tasty Italian dark roast brewed in our French press. Yet over the past several months those two cups of java had begun to play havoc with my mental and physical well being.
So today, one month off coffee and I seemed to have eliminated each of the three symptoms that were plaguing me. And when I ran this scenario past one of my orthopedic docs he provided me with a little more info with which to dig into this strange phenomenon.
Here’s what I’ve learned thus far.
Since caffeine is a nervous system stimulant that affects us physiologically, it’s considered a drug (a legal and beneficial ergogenic aid as I explained in my Jan. 30 column, Caffeine and endurance).
And despite caffeine inducing a number of physiological and cognitive benefits via the consumption of coffee and tea - and/or other caffeinated stimulants - it can also induce negative side effects.
These so called side effects occur through a series of events involving a myriad of biochemical changes which take place in our bodies as we age.
Thus, our sensitivity to the effects of caffeine can do a pole reversal, changing from positive to negative. It’s termed caffeine sensitivity and it becomes more and more common as we age.
And this isn’t some vague hypothesis, it’s been validated in peer-reviewed research that older adults clear caffeine from their bodies more slowly than younger adults.
In one study, Predicted metabolic drug clearance with increasing adult age, published in the April 2013 issue of the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, researchers found that coffee drinkers between the ages of 65 and 70 took 33% longer to metabolize caffeine than did younger coffee drinking participants.
This slower clearance rate means the same amount of coffee that I have been habitually drinking for decades might now be having an amplified effect on my body.
Such an amplification can cause the exact unpleasant symptoms I’d mentioned earlier. And once I quit I soon developed a couple of withdrawal symptoms that are commonly associated with kicking coffee bean, which in my case consisted of headaches and mild anxiety.
So what does research point to as the cause for this caffeine flip flop from beneficial to detrimental?
It begins with the fact that caffeine is absorbed by the body amazingly fast.
Research has shown that within 45 minutes of drinking that morning cup of joe, 99% of the caffeine in the cup is absorbed. And it races from the digestive tract to the bloodstream like a high speed dragster, reaching peak levels within 15 minutes of consumption.
A few hours after consuming our coffee specific liver enzymes commence to gradually metabolize the caffeine via a series of biochemical processes.
In younger adults, the liver can metabolize about half of the circulating caffeine in about six hours. Yet for dinosaurs like me, well, those enzymes involved in the caffeine metabolism process become less efficient, leading to a much slower clearance rate.
Throw in other factors such as medications etc., and the rate of caffeine metabolism declines a bit more.
So if you’ve been noting some not-so-nice side effects after your morning coffee ritual you just might want to have a talk with your doc.
If she thinks it could indeed be a coffee sensitivity issue, you’ve got two choices: Cold turkey or reducing your coffee consumption to one single eight-ounce cup.
And since I’m an all or nothing creature, I opted for the no cups solution because with my personality that one cup could easily lead to two.