It would be no surprise to hear that I am a heavy caffeine tea addict.
Nearly every morning I have a matcha, then I have a grandpa tea session before lunch. In the afternoon until my cut off at 5pm (so I can actually sleep), I’ll have at least one, sometimes up to four gongfu small sessions. My body is used to a monthly tea bender from tea festivals, expos, and tea parties that I’ll drink 4-6+ tea drunk gongfu session or drink tea nearly nonstop all day up to 9pm.
In 2019 my average gram per day tea consumption was 17.8 grams. To put it into perspective, a typical tea bag is 1-2 grams. I have the “don’t talk to me until I had my morning matcha” every day, as well as wicked headaches if I don’t have tea by 2 or 3pm.
So after battling Endometriosis and Adenomyosis for years and failing, I am up for surgery again. I was informed to lower or cut caffeine before surgery so it is one less horrible thing to deal with post-op. By the magic of WordPress scheduling, by the time this is posted I’m high as a kite post-op.
As the title states, I did lower and cut caffeine. My caffeine cut was gradual, instead of cutting cold turkey 3 days prior to surgery which would have resulted in DOOOOOOM! This is how my tea addicted self cut caffeine successfully over a month and a half.
Track Pre-Caffeine Cut Consumption
Since 2015 I’ve been tracking how much tea I drink a day. I weigh all teas anyway as it is more consistent brewing.
I found my drinking data interesting to see my trends throughout the year – point out the month I was stressed out and drank more. In theory, I did the tracking for an attempt to buy less tea as I know how much I would go through in a month.
In the end, this tracking of tea drinking helped me put a number on how much to cut down in order to make a plan.
Plan Target Tea Consumption / How This Tea Addict Cut Caffeine
Now that you have data, you know how much you drink. Plan a target date to be off caffeine, and taper down from there. The longer time frame you have, the easier it will be.
Due to my tea tracking, I had the data in the last 3 months I was doing 18 grams of tea a day. Once I knew I needed to cut down and had a couple of months to do it, I immediately dropped down to 13-15 grams of tea per day for the first couple of weeks. Then the next cut was 12-15 grams (around 2 gongfu sessions a day).
To be honest, I thought I had 3 months to cut back, but my surgery got moved up, so once I knew I had 2 weeks left I did a sharp taper with no issues. Quickly, I dropped to one grandpa session and one 60ml gongfu session (around 9 grams a day), then to a single grandpa tea session (3-4 grams of tea) before moving into zero caffeinated teas.
In that 1.5 month time period, I went from crabby, “Don’t talk to me unless I had matcha,” mornings and headache central when I don’t have tea – to not that specific type of cranky (I’m still irritable due to world stresses) and no withdrawal headaches.
On the way to no caffeine, every little success counts. You might have drunk more water today or ordered some swanky herbal teas. Maybe you learned that session of golden bud black tea got you way wired so you’ll make a smaller session next time. There were a few days in my journey I drank more than I set myself for (blog business or holy F it’s 3 pm and I’m falling asleep), but I just went on with the plan the next day.
In the next post, I will be covering what Caffeine Cutting Tips that worked for me. One can cut down tea, but what else is there to drink?!
