Caffeine

Maybe the very first sentence isn't the best place to admit this, at the very moment you are deciding whether to lend me an hour or two of your attention. But halfway through the research for this story, I suffered a crisis of confidence that caused me to doubt the subject was of any interest at all, even to me, whose supposedly bright idea it was. I began seriously to doubt a long piece on caffeine was worth the time and effort it would take to report and write it, and to wonder why I had ever thought otherwise. I was in trouble. We were in trouble. Though you have an option I do not. You at least can stop right here. Before this crisis, I had been chugging merrily along, conducting interviews, reading countless books of science—it turns out caffeine is one of the most studied psychoactive compounds there is—and history, the course of which was shifted decisively in the West by caffeine, traveling to South America to visit a coffee finca, tasting all manner of caffeinated beverages, and suddenly, like the roadrunner in the cartoon, I chanced to glance down and realized there was no more road underfoot, just a vast, empty expanse of pointlessness as far as I could see. What in the world was I doing? Or perhaps it would be more accurate to ask, what was I not doing? Because something was going on with me just then that almost certainly accounts for this project's sudden loss of cabin pressure. I had stopped using caffeine, abruptly and completely. After years of a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea through the day, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I had quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested I really couldn't understand the role of caffeine in my life, its invisible yet pervasive power, without getting off it, and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world's leading researchers on mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of caffeine withdrawal included in the DSM-5, the Bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn't begun to understand his own relationship to caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same. The idea here is that you can't possibly describe the vehicle you're driving without first stopping, getting out, and taking a good look at it from outside. This is probably the case with all psychoactive drugs, but is especially true of caffeine, since the particular quality of consciousness it sponsors in the regular user feels not so much altered or distorted as normal and transparent. Indeed, for most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children, commonly in the form of soda. It's so pervasive that it's easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness, but in fact is an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible. So I decided that for the good of the peace, that is to say for you, dear listener, I would conduct a self-experiment in abstention. What had never occurred to me when I began this experiment is that, by giving up caffeine, I would be undermining my ability to tell the story of caffeine, a knot I wasn't at all sure how to untie.