Slept until 6 am almost. Feeling good. Not overly tired. No craving. I am going home on Sunday for 6 days and I hope I can kick the habit during this time.
Why don’t you take an Ibuprofen against the headache @Chiron . That’s what I did. Well, I usually never take pain killers so that’s okay for me.
Stay strong! Don’t drink that darn Bang. Those things are evil.
Thank you both @anon74766472 and @Nordique. 
I am prescribed 800mg tablets of ibuprofen to be taken 3x/d, so I can’t really take more. Tylenol also does nothing for pain relief for me, though I’ll take it for a fever. Unfortunately I just have to take the headaches as they come. Its part of why I’m still tapering instead of just taking the plunge to 0 from here.
Still going strong. I will take the foamed maker to my mother back home. So it’s out of my reach.
How are you doing today?
Good for you!
Backtracked yesterday. I could give plenty of reasons that would be true, but in the end I did so because I wanted to and simply gave in to temptation. No excuses.
Today I will continue forward.
@Nordique yes those Bang drinks are so toxic!
I’ve often thought to myself that I need to at least taper my caffeine habit down. I drink at least a pot of coffee a day. I’m not sure where to start on tapering down though.
Had a cappuccino. Heading back home by train. Not regretting it too much. I’ll say it anyway here.
Edit: Well that turned out to be quite the book. 
Sorry about that!
When approaching caffeine reduction, I think it’s a good idea to know why you want to do it; meaning, what type of benefit are you looking for or what kind of side effect are you trying to get away from. This is where your motivation and drive will really be housed.
Knowing exactly how much you take in will help with a taper. So the size of the pot matters, the roast type (the darker the roast, the less caffeine), how much of the grounds do you use, etc.
Your lifestyle will make a big difference in how you may want to approach this. If you have the ability to take a weekend to rest and deal with the worst of the withdrawals, going “cold turkey”, or “partial turkey” if you’re just wanting to cut back, might be the way for you. This is often the faster, though more miserable option. This is also assuming you don’t have any issues with caffeine where your withdrawal causes serious physical or emotional issues, for example. The “majority” of people have the same type of symptoms, but there are people who are strongly affected by removing it from their life.
If you want to simply cut down and do a taper, there are some options. You could reduce the grounds before you brew. If you did that, you could replace the missing grounds with decaf if you feel like that would provide too “watery” of a result. You can also cut back on the amount of coffee you drink. Say you drink an 8 cup pot on the regular, so instead you might cut back to 7.5 cups, then switch to drinking water. You will have some unpleasant side effects, but reducing bit by bit should help.
Honestly, I would keep track of how much coffee you drink every day for a week or so in order to really know what you’re taking in–this would include having a better idea of how many grounds are being used before brewing. Once you have this data, you can make clear decision’s an how much to remove. Of course, you don’t have to do that, this has simply always been my favorite approach because in involves more concrete numbers within which I can actually know what I’m doing.
There are also other ideas like moving part of your coffee consumption to tea that you can read about in past posts in this thread. There have been a lot of people who have tried different things. You can post in this thread as much as you need, if you find it helpful.
Good luck to you if you decide to give it a go.
Short update. I am on the train back home/new home. We have two words in German. Zu Hause and Heimat. Heimat is where I come from and zu Hause is where I am actually living for me. So essentially I am going from home to home. I left the foam maker at my mother’s 
I had between zero and one caffeine coffee during the week. That’s okay for me. It didn’t escalate.
How’s everyone doing?
Im still tapering. I had to skip coffee one morning for lab tests… dang it was hard. I drink about three cups (or bathtubs) mild coffee per morning/am. Trying not have any before EDIT AFTER noon. Will continue reducing the amount of coffee, and start taking green tea as a substitute. Green tea contains caffeine, but is a gentler solution. Stay strong everyone 
Doing well with less caffeine for the most part! I’m consuming 80% green or black tea instead of coffee and still feeling good. I think my relay run last week helped a lot … we were in small towns in NC and I didn’t have access to much, only the drinks I pre planned for. I probably only had about 200 mg for 3 days in a row… and felt okay! I’m wondering how much my dependence was psychosomatic now…
(only speaking for myself here!)
Guys and girls, I am failing. I haven’t slept well the last days and am tired. I had a coffee yesterday and decided to buy coffee this morning (grocery shopping). I don’t know. It was a decision. I don’t know if the feeling I am chasing after is an illusion of my mind. Like a dream far away in my past. When I first quit caffeine, at least that is my story I like to remember, that I slept like a baby until it was over and found a way back into a good pattern. I don’t remember if I drank a lot of alcohol at that time. I was still drinking, that’s a fact. But how much? I never found this state of sleep again. I stay tuned.
@Fireweed, @Bootz, @fl_flower_grl, and @anon74766472 how are you doing with your caffeine goals?
@anon74766472 I often get insomnia when I quit caffeine and it’s a little frustrating to deal with because it is this wall I have to climb over to get to my goal. I don’t know why sometimes there is great sleep and sometimes there is little sleep. I wonder if hormone cycles and/or where the moon is plays a part. Hormones would make sense for sure, and since the moon has a pull on the earth’s water, it makes sense that it would have an effect on our mostly water bodies and brains.
Last week I completely back tracked. I had a lot of social obligations to attend to, and I can only be social for so long before I feel emotionally drained, which leads to feeling physically drained. To those who don’t know me well, I am very much seen as a lively extrovert; but as an introvert, I require a lot of quiet alone time to recover, and this is my preferred default mode until I interact with people once again.
There is something about simply being around other people that exhausts some kind of reserve levels that I have. It’s this strange stress I can feel in my body, even if I’m not interacting with anyone. I believe this may be due to growing up in a space where I was often alone and isolated from the world in general. Like there is a certain amount of stress endurance I never develped toward social stresses. 
But anyway, I simply allowed myself to drop back into taking in however much caffeine I needed to get through last week and weekend. On Tuesday, I decided to simply stop taking caffeine, so I’m in day 3 of caffeine abstinence. I slept okay the first night, but last night was aweful. Miss Kitty was very worked up about something and eventually I had to shut her out of the bedroom.
Getting up was tough and I’m still dragging. In general, I have constant pain (I was hit by a snowplow several years ago), which the caffeine actually helps with, and it it starting to get colder at night and into the morning, so getting up and moving is a little rough, but managable. I know that the first 3-7 days is the hardest for me, but I’m trying to stick it out. Once I’m over the hump, I can start pulling myself off the OTC sleep medicine I take, because if I take caffeine I will not sleep without it.
I always appreciate your insights so much.
Meh, this week has been rough - I started working out in the mornings again since my husbands work schedule changed… some days that means I’m up at 430 … which means I need way more caffeine that day 
Working on it though!!
Hi @Bootz! Yes, green tea is complicated. When my braintumor re-grew it was one of the triggers for migraine attacks. So, no thanks at that time. Also might depend on how strong you take it. White tea is a milder version but lacks some of the green tea’s health benefits. There also is a decaffeinated product which is said to calm down, so it’s more like a sleeping time tea. In that sense i prefer chamomile and licorice.
I hear you @anon74766472. For how long have you been sober? My sleep was a disaster during first half a year. Have had problems ever since but much much better now 
Thanks for checking up @Chiron 
Phases of the moon, hormones, stress levels, whatever… all of them seem to affect if you ask me. Im still on slow tapering, waiting for a perfect timing or at least 65,% perfect 
to kick butt. Mental preparing is real.
Ive done some adjusting to my daily schedule in order to get better sleep and it seems to function. I no longer need sleeping aid except melatonin and im very happy about that. Step by step
Only some weeks. It’s okay for me now. Since I left the foam maker at my mother’s it is a lot more reasonable.
Ha, what a smart move 