My 30-Day Dopamine Detox: No Caffeine, Alcohol, Sex, Or ‘Sweetness’

Here is a brief summary of the key points in the transcript: - The speaker gave up caffeine, alcohol, sex, and anything sweet for a month cold turkey. This was done while taking time off and was inspired by someone else who quit caffeine after feeling dependent on it. - Going without caffeine resulted in the best sleep the speaker has had in 20 years. It helped reveal his natural baseline without stimulants. - Caffeine is often used as a "security blanket" and gives a feeling of consistency when life feels out of control. The speaker started drinking it again recently due to some challenging life circumstances. - Caffeine disrupts the speaker's sleep quality even though he can fall asleep after drinking it. After just 2-3 days of use, the speaker notices dark circles under his eyes. - Withdrawal symptoms from caffeine happen very quickly, in just 1-2 days of use. This makes caffeine a very powerful drug. - The speaker plans to quit caffeine again in January now that he knows his baseline without it. He gained important self-knowledge from this experiment.

Speaker A: I took a month off of caffeine, anything caffeinated, which was the cold turkey. Cold turkey. Which was the first time I've done that, probably, I would have to imagine, since I was, what, 16? I mean, it's been forever.

Speaker B: Let me ask you a question here. Why would you do that cold turkey? Why not just do like, oh, a half a cup of coffee today and then maybe a quarter cup a few days later? Like, why go? This is like, the extreme, Tim.

Speaker A: Well, did you get headaches? Extreme? Yeah, I got headaches, but it was during a period where I could.

Speaker B: But you had Vicodin?

Speaker A: No, I didn't use Vicodin. I knew that I could accept the headaches, and I had a period of time where there really was a low cost, where, like, professionally, I was taking three to four weeks off the grid, and I knew that I had a grace period where I could sustain it. So I did effectively, no caffeine, no alcohol. And I suppose the most important other item, sex. No sex, no ejaculation, which is. We can talk about that. That's pretty easy. The harder one is I did nothing sweet. So not just containing sugar, but nothing sweet. So anything that has an artificial sweetener was added.

Speaker B: Would you consider this tequila sweet?

Speaker A: I would not consider this tequila sweet. And there is a bit of subjectivity for a lot of it says sweet notes to it.

Speaker B: Like it?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's got some floral notes to it. But by the kind of letter of the law, I wouldn't consider this subjectively to be sweet. But for instance, any kind of juice out of any type of sweetener. Of course, out. Let's just say different types of plantains. If they are sweet to the taste, they're out. Sweet potatoes out. And is that hard for you?

Speaker B: That's not hard for me.

Speaker A: It doesn't seem hard, but let's just extend this. Almost every toothpaste has sorbitol or some kind of crap in it. That is a sweetener.

Speaker B: So no brush your teeth for two weeks.

Speaker A: I brush my teeth with sodium bicarb. Just baking soda straight up. I brushed my teeth with that for. For a handful of weeks. And what you also realize is, in the US or in this case, when I went to Korea, if you ask people if. If a, B or c has any added sugar, there is sugar or some type of sweetener in almost everything that you come across. That was interesting. It was challenging because it severely limited what I could eat. But the caffeine was an amazing experience. Now, I alluded to this a little bit earlier. I'm back on the sauce over the last week, week and a half, which I regret, number one. And I'm paying a lot for, like, there are costs. I can explain. So let me back up and I'll just give you the punch.

Speaker B: Tell us why you did this to begin with. Cause you didn't mention that like it wasn't a new year's resolution. Why?

Speaker A: Yeah. So the reason I did it started because I was in South America doing a bunch of weird stuff, and there were restrictions. And then I just extended everything but weird stuff.

Speaker B: Let's use psychedelic stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, psychedelics.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Which will tie into a part of my strange story later. But I hadn't done the type of training I was doing in South America in probably five or six years. And so I took restrictions very seriously. I think that is important, in my opinion. And then I extended them all. And I wanted to see, in part because I met someone who said they had stopped drinking anything, caffeinated cold turkey, because they felt like a loser, because they'd become dependent on it. And they missed a really important ski day, like one of the first days of the season. And they're a really good skier. And they were with a group of people, and they were the only. I believe they were the only person who skipped. And that day, they were just like, no more. And to this day, like, two years later, caffeine free.

Speaker B: I lost something there. When I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee, I can go skiing. Why did they miss skiing? Because they couldn't have coffee.

Speaker A: Because they didn't have coffee that morning and they were so tired.

Speaker B: Oh, I see. That.

Speaker A: They felt like they couldn't do it, so they stayed on the ski lift. Instead of getting off, they just went around, went straight back down.

Speaker B: That's amazing.

Speaker A: And called it a day. And to their credit, they'd be under.

Speaker B: The weather or something, but to their.

Speaker A: Credit, they were just like, this is fucking loser behavior enough. And they went to zero. That caught my attention. Because when you talk to someone, no offense to anyone who fits in this category, but let's just say if someone is a Mormon and they've never had caffeine, that's not my life. Right. They've never had a hit of the sauce. I mean, although technically there are workarounds, like Diet Coke instead of coffee. But we're not going to get into the weeds here. But, like, if somebody hasn't had a taste of. Of the delicious poison. There's so many things, right? There's so many things like this where it's like, okay, if you've had one significant other and you've never been out and about and sampled the buffet of the world, we can't really have. It's very hard to have an apples to apples talk about relationships. It's a different situation. Same with caffeine. But this person had been hitting the sauce for decades, and then they got off. And that was inspiring to me. Then I had this restriction and I just extended it. And just to give the punchline, my sleeping issues that I've had for decades, every single one, just vanished. Best sleep of the last 20 years. Woke up wide awake every morning after the first, like, let's just call it like a week and a half, had tons of energy and got a super high volume of stuff done. And what I realized and part of the reason, to answer your meta question, why did I do all of these things? I was curious what my real baseline was like. What does real baseline look like? What is Tim, untouched, unaffected by all these various supplements? Oh, that's another thing. I took a month off of all supplements. I only took my prescription meds, like the uloric and so on. Yeah, I got rid of all supplements.

Speaker B: And no deca or testosterone.

Speaker A: No deca, no nothing.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And I was very curious to reacquaint myself with what, like the sort of pure baseline Tim is. And turns out baseline Tim does really well. And why go back then? Why? Why?

Speaker B: Well, you got hungover.

Speaker A: No, I didn't get hungover. I didn't get hungover cause it's good.

Speaker B: After I hang over a little bit of lead shoes.

Speaker A: So I also, before I went, went to South America, I listened to an audiobook which was called, or is called the easy way to quit caffeine. And that, that is an extension of a brand that started with smoking. I think it's the easy way to quit smoking. And I know people who have, literally multiple people who've listened to this, they have their last cigarette and they're done and they stop. So it's a little hokey, but that made an impact on me as well.

Speaker B: I'll do that for January. I'm writing that down on my list. January, no caffeine.

Speaker A: And now that I know I can do it, I'm definitely going to do it again. The reason that I got back on it, and this is, I'll actually add just a little bit of color. The first is that there were days without caffeine where I would say to myself, I'm tired. I really want a cappuccino. But I realized because I interrogated it, I was like, well, I'm not allowed to have a cappuccino. Am I really tired? And I came to the conclusion that, no, I wasn't actually tired. I just wasn't fucking wired. You see what I mean? Like, my normal had become multiple coffees in the morning and God knows what else. So I had taken as my baseline a default. I mean, wired sounds too negative, but, like, stimulated state. And when that was removed, the story that I conjured was, I'm tired. But when I was unable to have the cappuccino and I went on to record a podcast. Podcast. Turns out great. Like, okay, let me revisit this. I wasn't tired. I was just calm. Interesting. Crazy interesting. And why did I get back on coffee? Coffee, for me, I've realized, is probably like alcohol for a lot of folks. And there's sometimes. I'm not going to lie. Look, let's be honest here. Like, there are times when it's like I want to take the edge off. Sure, have a drink. Yeah, right. But more often, because I don't drink that much. I use coffee as a security blanket when my life gets hit with something unpredictable or unpredicted and things seem a little out of control, or I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through something like walking to the coffee shop in the morning and having that coffee. It's a life raft of consistency. We saw this during COVID where people would line up at Starbucks for 3 hours to get a coffee because it was like, the one semblance of malice, you know?

Speaker B: And there's also a high to it. So it's like, also a high.

Speaker A: So even though I realize intellectually that it's counterproductive, like, when I am feeling, as I have been for a host of reasons that I won't bore people with, but just gone through a pretty challenging week or two, my response to feeling a little anxious is to want coffee, even though it increases anxiety.

Speaker B: Now, are you a coffee? Physiologically, this is one thing, actually. We've known each other for a long time. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know that I've seen you do this. Are you an afternoon coffee guy at all? I don't know that I've seen you do, mate. Maybe a little bit later.

Speaker A: But I typically do not have coffee in the afternoons, and I really try not to have caffeine in the afternoons, which I violated this week. So in the last two days, or I should say in the last. Let's just say in the past seven days, I have violated that. And what I've realized, because I've run the n of one now and there are a bunch of different variables, so I realize this is imprecise, it's not a perfect science, is that I can drink coffee and fall asleep. That's not the problem, but it disrupts my sleep architecture.

Speaker B: Quality of sleep. Yeah.

Speaker A: I wake up after three days, very little time. Three days of drinking caffeine. I wake up and I have circles under my eyes, like, dark circles. Are you.

Speaker B: Are you quantifying this in the sense of, like, are you wearing an aura ring? Do you have any other data where you're looking at it?

Speaker A: I'm not currently capturing the data with an oura ring, but I have in the past, yeah, I've seen what it looks like, so I know that's the case. I'm falling asleep. My time in bed, if we're just looking at a clock, is fine, but I am waking up tired.

Speaker B: I hate that.

Speaker A: And then what do you want? You want another hit? Of course you want more of the sauce, and there's a lot to be said for it. This is not to completely knock coffee. Like, I don't think for the rest of my life I'm going to be caffeine free, but now I have a better awareness of what my baseline looks like, so I can return to that.

Speaker B: So let me tell you something crazy. This was before I met Daria, so I'm trying to go back in years now. So probably let's just call it 15 years ago. I gave up coffee for about six months.

Speaker A: Six months?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's legit.

Speaker B: Well, but I wasn't really that addicted to it. I was having, like, a cup every other day or whatever, and I went back. I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I went to ritual coffee, which is fantastic coffee place.

Speaker A: Great place.

Speaker B: And I ordered a tall, like, single origin coffee and I drank the whole thing. When you go six months without coffee and you have a full cup of coffee, you feel high as a kite.

Speaker A: Yeah, super high.

Speaker B: I was like, ten x what I feel today with a cup of coffee.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Cause your body just like. I mean, it is a powerful drug when you've gone without it for a while.

Speaker A: Super powerful.

Speaker B: Do you have any sense of how long it takes to, like, get that back? Like, how long have you done any.

Speaker A: Research to get what back? That.

Speaker B: An initial, like. Like childhood high of, like, that first cup of coffee.

Speaker A: How long do you go without before you get back? I don't know. I don't know. I will say on the opposite end, which is what I thought you were asking. How long does it take to develop tolerance and experience with withdrawal symptoms? It is so fast.

Speaker B: Oh, so fast. And one day, if you go without coffee, serious coffee drinkers will be headaches.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I would say, furthermore, if you stop drinking coffee, and I'm using coffee as a bit of a scapegoat here, like, I love coffee, but if you. If you go without caffeine and then you get back on caffeine and you're on it for two or three days and then you stop again, my personal experience is you are going to feel withdrawal symptoms. And that is, unlike most other drugs, it is a powerful, powerful, powerful drug. Right? Like it. I'm not recommending this, but hypothetically, if you were to, like, smoke cigarettes for a few days and then stop, you're fine. I. Yeah, no problem. You're not going to have a headache the next day. But with caffeine, it is an incredibly powerful drug. And I think that's in part because it is often disrupting sleep architecture.