6 Ways to Change Your Relationship with Coffee
Coffee is a drink that truly connects the world, and that is only one aspect of its magic.
It can get your blood flowing by just taking a few sips- something that, without coffee, can only be provoked by a brisk walk, a few reps of jumping jacks, or some adrenaline-inducing stress experience.
My first memories of drinking coffee happened so early in my life that it gives me a bit of validation in coming to terms with my addiction.
When I was six or seven years old, my grandma would buy me decadent frozen coffee drinks as a treat when she took me shopping. My mother would be the one to bear the brunt of my caffeine and sugar buzz for hours later.
When I was nine years old, my dad allowed my brother and I to drink coffee in the morning before school, although our mugs were definitely at least half full of sweet milky creamer.
My relationship with coffee only grew stronger as I got older, as it does for most of us.
While attending a highly competitive University in Montreal, Canada, I would regularly consume a liter or more of coffee a day during finals season. Coffee also has a huge social component, as it is both stimulating and delicious, often serving to facilitate connection and conversation.
All this to say, I love coffee so much I would never ask or even recommend anyone to give it up unless it was completely necessary for their health or wellbeing. However, changing or shifting your relationship to coffee to increase your awareness of how you use it and relate to it, as well as what it does for you, could be beneficial for us all.
In my experience, changing my relationship to coffee, though it has been a grueling process, has given me a lot of valuable insight into my own health and habits.
Understanding our relationship to coffee and regaining back the control we have over it has the power to actually help us enjoy our cups of joe even more while maintaining awareness of our choices and tendencies related to coffee.
So let’s get into it, 6 ways to change (maybe improve! or sanar, make healthier) your relationship to coffee:
Try Switching to Mushroom Coffee
Luckily for us living in modern times, creative people have harnessed the powers contained by medicinal and edible mushrooms to make their qualities more accessible to us in daily life. We have come a long way from our hunter-gatherer ancestors who may have had to forage for these superfoods, without any guarantee of being able to locate some. Lately, I have been starting my days with Ryze Mushroom Coffee, and I must say it has been revolutionary. As someone who has struggled to not be dependent on coffee, Ryze offers the perfect alternative without kicking the caffeine.
It works by blending six different mushrooms (Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, Reishi, Turkey Tail, Shiitake, and King Trumpet) each with their own powerful contributions to human health, with a small amount of organic arabica coffee. The Lion’s Mane and Cordyceps help with focus cognition, brain health, stamina, and energy. Turkey Tail and Shiitake bring the benefits to gut health and immunity, while Reishi provides mood support and the King Trumpet contributes to longevity. The mushrooms are grown organically in California. Once they are harvested and dried, they are ground into a powder which forms the base of the Ryze Coffee. The company emphasizes that, with half the caffeine of traditional coffee, Ryze offers a sustained energy boost with “no jitters” and “no crash”. After drinking it every day for two weeks now, I can confidently affirm this.
Overall, Ryze has helped me satisfy my commonplace craving for coffee on the mornings that tea just doesn’t cut it, but without the energy spike and crash often inevitable in consuming regular coffee. Ryze is incredibly smooth and after stirring, there is even a golden crema that settles at the top of the mug, reminiscent of drinking a cafe americano.
It is perfect for those who love both coffee and tea, as the flavor of the mushrooms create a unique herbal experience almost like a strong chai or pu-erh, but carried to the next level by the small amount of arabica coffee the blend contains.
If you would like to try Ryze for yourself, or perhaps if you are already on the mushroom coffee train, enter the code YOGASELVATICA at checkout to receive 15% off your purchase. Often, the Ryze folks have specials which let you get your second month’s order at a discounted rate, and they even throw in a lovely little wooden stirring spoon.
Time When You Start & Stop Coffee
Have you ever enjoyed your morning cup of coffee (or two, or three, or four…) only to find yourself feeling spacey and groggy as soon as the afternoon hits? Maybe then you feel inclined to have an afternoon or early evening coffee to jolt yourself back to life for the rest of the day? You are not alone.
Caffeine dependency can be a vicious cycle but there is hope for navigating it without giving up your daily coffee (or alternative) ritual!
Research has found that this groggy post-morning crash has a lot to do with a little known hormone called adenosine. Adenosine is the hormone released by our brains when we wake up, and takes about 45 minutes to run its full course in us before releasing us to enjoy the rest of the day.
However, if we reach for that first cup of coffee before those 45 minutes after waking have come to ahead, we prevent the adenosine from being able to complete its process. It is only able to do so once that caffeine buzz wares off, which usually occurs right around the early afternoon.
The trick becomes, then, to give yourself 45 minutes to wake up without caffeine before reaching for that first cup in the morning. Give your body and brain the opportunity to do what they need to do before you start pumping them with go-juice.
This way, the adenosine will have already run its course in your brain, and won’t return to haunt you in the afternoon once your caffeine buzz has faded.
To avoid cultivating an unhealthy coffee dependency, and help yourself get more restful sleep, it may be beneficial to stop consumption each day by noon. This practice might also help you maintain a nice level of caffeine tolerance so that you can keep enjoying that jolt of energy coffee provides, and not become completely desensitized to it.
Depending on your life style, this may be adapted to your own routine, needs, and bedtime, but resisting going back for that afternoon refill of coffee may help you get better sleep, impacting your long term wellness through one simple hack.
If this sounds next to impossible, consider trying for one week to finish up your coffee by 12pm and not take any more caffeine until the next morning. Observe how you feel in terms of how you slept, energy levels, and any other changes that you may notice.
Keep in mind, it often will take more than a week to really get a grasp on a new habit or how a change affects you in the long term.
A Spoonful of Coconut Oil in Your Coffee
Maybe you’ve heard of or tried “bulletproof” coffee, which is black coffee with a spoonful of butter in it that serves to cut the acidity to your gut. For those of us who prefer to avoid butter, the same thing can also be done with coconut oil.
Anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of coconut oil added to a cup of black coffee will soften the blow coffee can sometimes have to the digestive system, especially on an empty stomach.
If you are sensitive to the acidity of coffee, something as simple as a spoonful of coconut oil may make the difference for you between having stomach pain for the rest of the morning, or not. You can learn more about the health benefits of adding coconut oil to your coffee from this comprehensive article by MindBodyGreen.
I tend to just stir the coconut oil into my coffee with a spoon, but if you want a more thorough mixture, you may use a blender or immersion blender to break down the oil as much as possible.
If you go with a simple spoon stir, you will see the bubbles of fat from the coconut oil floating in your morning brew, and it will obviously taste like coconut oil as well.
If either of these things is a bother, you can add other things to your coffee to balance them such as a splash of oat milk (find my D.I.Y. oat milk recipe here). I like to add a dash of cinnamon to my coffee with coconut oil and find that the fat of the oil does make a huge difference for me in how my stomach feels during and after morning coffee.
4. Double Down on Tea Bags
We’ve all heard it before, perhaps the most common of recommendations on the topic of changing or stopping your coffee habit: just switch to tea!
They say make it sound easy and simple, as if the two drinks are more or less the same. True coffee addicts know this is far from the truth. Although I’ve also dabbled in tea and enjoyed it when the moments right, it never felt like something that could replace coffee for me.
It took me months on the AIP diet to grow to appreciate and value tea for what it is, it’s own thing entirely, a world a part from coffee in flavor, effect, and feeling. However, it does have a lot to offer in its vastness of herbal varieties, medicinal and otherwise, and there is even a huge variety of caffeinated teas of every kind, green, black, white, red…the list goes on.
I discovered something surprising that works for me on days I am really craving coffee but working on not being swayed by my every urge, as I try to gain more control over my own health and habits. This new trick is using 2 tea bags (of the same flavor) in a slightly larger mug than one I would use for a cup of coffee or 1 tea bag.
The double-steeping creates a stronger flavor, and more dense concentration, reminiscent of that of coffee in the sense that the water has definitely undergone an alchemical change from its original state- which is not always the case with one tea bag.
This trick works just as well for drinking caffeinated teas like green tea or earl grey, as it does for herbal teas. Doubling down on chamomile at night works wonders to get all those medicinal, herbal, magical powers in your system before bedtime.
Plus, let’s be honest, sometimes a girl doesn’t have time to boil water again for brewing a second cup before she wants to climb into a warm bath or warm bed. But it is quite easy to pop a second tea bag into the steaming mug and call it good.
Staggering Your Consumption
If you’ve been drinking coffee most of your life and have a sentimental, comfort-based, or ritualistic relationship with it, it is very likely you would never completely give it up unless forced to by some unexpected life event or health necessity.
But gaining control of our own patterns and tendencies is truly liberating, and breaking out of the crash and burn cycle many of us unknowingly slip into with coffee over time can free our minds and guts to reset and recalibrate in a way that can be profoundly positive for our overall health.
While on the AIP diet, I gave up coffee for several months. In the beginning, I felt sad about it, as if I had given up contact with a dear friend. When I tried reintroducing it, I found I had flares in my joint pain so thought it better to continue to try living without coffee the best that I could. However, the heart connection to the beverage did not prove easy to simply let go of.
Over time as I gradually tried coffee again, in smaller amounts, and less frequently, I found it didn’t really bother me anymore- as long as I kept my servings slight and didn’t regress to chugging the stuff all day every day, it seemed possible I was going to be able to have coffee in my life again.
It felt incredibly freeing to not need coffee the second I woke up, to be able to be productive without it, and to be able to enjoy the qualities other beverages have to offer without feeling like I was missing out.
Coffee Journal/Sensation Observation
On the long journey of learning our bodies’ patterns and realities, keeping a consistent log of what you feel and observe can be a crucial component of healing.
One day when I tried coffee again after a break of several weeks, I noticed right after drinking it what felt reminiscent of a sucker-punch to the gut. Shortly after, I noticed I was getting shaky, and had a sudden subtle sense of anxiety.
I had assumed I could just go back to drinking coffee in the same manner in which I always had, black, on an empty stomach, and as much as I would like. All the dietary changes I had implemented over the previous weeks and months had also impacted by gut biome and central nervous system, which I was now somewhat bombarding with a hot, acidic, seed-based beverage full of caffeine and other components that my overall whole-body system was no longer as used to as it once was.
Writing these things down in a little journal not only creates a written living document for you to reference in the future, but also cultivates a general awareness of your body’s reactions and information.
One of the most amazing things about the body is that it cannot lie to us. Of course, we can decide not to listen to it, or choose to not acknowledge or honor the information it gives us, but we can also choose to try to listen with increasingly more attention and awareness. After all, our bodies are our side- the also want a healthful, happy, best life for us.
That said, if you want to change or maybe even improve your relationship to coffee, it could be a good idea for you to take small break from it entirely- be it a few days, a week, or more. When you are ready to try it again, observe closely your body’s signals.
Often your brain will be celebrating even just the idea of that steamy, warm cup of comfort, but your stomach, nerves, or even your joints may have something different to say. Be in conversation with your body, and listen before you speak.
Keeping a journal/coffee or food log will help you keep track of all the secrets your body shares with you, because even if we feel like we will remember everything we notice and observe, in the long-run it is impossible to recall every twist and turn along the winding road of our own health.
