Once upon a time, a cup of coffee gave you that boost you needed to get through a particularly challenging day. Then you got the taste for it, and you started to have a cup to get you going every day. Suddenly, you’re on 5 cups a day, right into the mid-afternoon. Caffeine is no longer a useful tool to get you through more tired days; its something you need simply to stay awake. It’s lost its effectiveness. When this happens, its time to look at your tolerance levels. First step is to test for food intolerance. With a test for food intolerance, you can find out, accurately, whether you’ve developed a caffeine intolerance from drinking too much.
If you’re experiencing headaches when you drink coffee, or you get jittery and anxious, you’re probably experiencing symptoms of caffeine intolerance and its time to test for food intolerance.
So, you’ve taken your test for food intolerance and bad news; you’ve built up an intolerance. How do you sort it out? It’s time for a rest. Here are the steps on how to do it.
There are two ways to go about doing this. You can either do a gradual reset or go cold turkey.
Gradual Reset
The easier of the two options, the gradual reset involves weaning yourself off caffeine slowly working towards zero caffeine. This method takes longer, but you limit the effects of the symptoms of withdrawal, which include insomnia, headaches, and mood swings.
Cold Turkey
This is going to be hardcore. Going cold turkey from caffeine will be difficult, to put it mildly. You can expect to experience symptoms such as insomnia, headaches, mood swings, constipation, severe fatigue, and anxiety. It’s not exactly a list of great experiences but, for some people, this is the way they prefer to reset caffeine tolerance due to how quickly you get the results you’re looking for.
Time frame
If you choose to do a gradual reset, you will half your caffeine intake on day one and a half it again each week until you reach zero caffeine. At this point, you should spend four weeks consuming no caffeine. If you’re going the cold turkey route, first of all, good luck, you should spend four weeks with very little to no caffeine. Both of these methods will allow your body to deplete its caffeine stores and give the receptors in the brain an opportunity to recover.
Reintroducing caffeine
When you first bring back caffeine, you should restrict it so as not to reaggravate the receptors immediately. You can then slowly build up to whatever level of caffeine consumption you desire, but consider that you may eventually find yourself back where you were before. This should be seen as an opportunity to overcome your dependence on caffeine and restore its status as an energy-boosting tool.
