Too much coffee?

by Tom Johnson on Apr 24, 2026
categories: technical-writing

I don’t entirely understand my relationship with coffee, but I think I have some character flaws that could be advantageous in some situations and disadvantageous in others. In some areas of my life, I’m an all-or-nothing person. This seems to be true with coffee. When I’m drinking coffee, I can’t seem to stop myself from drinking 3-4 cups a day. Before long, I can sense my body basically becoming desiccated (from the way coffee acts as a diuretic). I’m not sure why, but I drink coffee more out of boredom than need. And sometimes I drink it to avoid the caffeine headaches that come if you don’t get enough.

Anyway, last week I seemed to hit some kind of physical threshold where my brain was just in a constantly tired state, no matter how much caffeine I consumed. It was like I’d woken up tired and could never switch out of that tired state. This physical state might have been brought on because of previous rounds where I’d given up coffee for a couple of weeks only to return to it again in full force. Perhaps this created a whiplash, but I felt like coffee no longer had any effect on me that was positive. So yet again, I decided to quit coffee.

Whenever I quit coffee, after a couple of weeks I relapse because I can’t quite remember why I quit coffee. There’s also a reason people drink coffee: how else do you get past those sleepy/tired states in the afternoon? How do you jump start your brain in the mornings? Coffee!

But the part of this story that bothers me is the addiction around it. My wife can drink half a cup of coffee a day, and sometimes skip coffee altogether. It doesn’t faze her. She can also ration out chocolate over a week or longer. If she drinks alcohol, she often has half a glass.

My dad was an alcoholic, and though he turned sober for much of his life after my sister and I were born, he continued to attend AA meetings. My mom told me this story frequently. She would say, Dad would tell me that at a party, he would drink a glass of wine like other people. But most people would stop after 1-2 glasses. But Dad couldn’t seem to stop. He would drink 5-6 glasses of wine until he was intoxicated. He was confused about why he couldn’t stop at 1 glass. Why did he feel compelled to keep drinking? He didn’t know.

His father was also an alcoholic. I never met my grandfather, but apparently he was a genius mechanic. However, he was also an alcoholic, and he would drag my father from town to town every 6 months because he couldn’t hold down a job due to his drinking. This also had the negative effect of turning my father into a loner, because my father was never in a single town long enough to form lasting relationships. As a result, my father never had good social skills and would come across as a bit aloof or would sometimes say socially awkward things. There was always a bit of social distance between him and others.

Anyway, I think about my father and grandfather’s alcoholic tendencies a lot when it comes to coffee. Perhaps I lucked out in a strange way by becoming Mormon at 16, and then staying in the church for a good 20 years before leaving. During those formative years, I steered clear of alcohol, drugs, and even coffee (I’d never started any of these substances anyway.) Even after leaving Mormonism, I decided to stay away from alcohol and other drugs, though I’d occasionally try sips of wine now and then. But I’d never drunk enough to get intoxicated, and so I didn’t really see the appeal of drinking wine. It tastes bitter and undesirable to me. I’d like to keep it that way. If I don’t have a vice with the bottle, why introduce one in my life, as there could be a high risk of becoming an alcoholic like my father and grandfather, and then I’d perhaps have to exert a lot of energy to stay sober.

But coffee? Sure. Let me drink it. In fact, sitting at a computer, or going to coffee shops — it’s hard not to partake of the coffee culture. So why can’t I just drink one cup of coffee in the morning and be content with that, like my wife can do? Why do I find myself getting another cup when I need a break or small pick-me-up, and then another cup later for the same reason? All the while, I think, it’s only coffee. And in some ways I’ve seen positive effects on my A1C levels from drinking black coffee with a dash of milk. I even told myself that as long as I only drank drip coffee, I would naturally not over-drink it — because drip coffee isn’t nearly as good as sugary lattes and cold brews with cream, etc.

And yet, last week there I was, with a constantly tired mental state even after having drunk a triple shot in a venti from Starbucks. At that point I decided to yet again quit coffee.

It seems that in some areas of my life, I lack this ability to moderate. I’m either all or nothing. This can be good when I embrace some habit that’s beneficial, and terrible when it’s a vice. Perhaps I’m addicted to the dopamine hit of blogging, or the similar euphoria of hitting a jump shot while playing basketball.

Anyway, it’s now been more than a week, and I’ve made it through the coffee withdrawal state. If I get a headache, I take a small caffeine pill (50 mg), and it usually fixes things. In abandoning coffee, though, I’ve only taken about half a dozen caffeine pills.

Yesterday I realized that I’m drinking a ton of liquid (mostly water). Way more than I used to. And it feels good. I also like not being addicted to coffee. Even so, when I see other people drinking coffee, it reminds me about my own inability to moderate, and my family history. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to moderate; it just is.