Kicking Caffeine

I'm currently trying to wean myself off of coffee. It got to the point where I'd get a headache if I didn't have at least my morning cup of iced (summertime) coffee, and usually a soda in the afternoon. I usually only have caffeine during the work week, but I started to get bad headachees if I didn't have my caffeine. I work from home on Mondays, so I'm not as likely to drink caffeine then. When I go into the office, I walk right past Starbucks and there's free soda in the kitchen.

I tried quitting cold-turkey a few months ago, and that resulted in seriously bad headaches which made it really hard to focus on work. So I got back into it. I sound like I'm talking about ritalin or something, but I seriously was addicted to caffeine. I didn't like the way I needed it all the time, so I decided to try a different approach and drink less of it to begin with, and go from there.

So now I'm only drinking a soda in the afternoon (less caffeine?) and skipping over my morning Starbucks run. Eventually, I'm hoping to not need the soda either, and no longer get headaches when I don't have my daily fix. Then I can actually enjoy a cup of iced coffee here and there when I really need it to wake me up, and I won't be sitting at my desk scratching at myself trying to keep myself from running down to Starbucks.

I blame my addiction to caffeine on the office life. It really drives you to drink. And Starbucks on every other corner, and free Starbucks gift cards from online surveys? Not helpful.

While I was still doing the iced-coffee bit, I tried shifting away from Starbucks, out of principle. They've just always bugged me. That's another story. But nothing else was quite the same. Actually, 2 out of 3 of the other places I tried for iced-coffee, were repulsive.

I tried this little breakfast cafe above the metro stop I go to--awful. Not even close to tasting like coffee. There's a reason I never see people going in there. Au Bon Pain's iced coffee--not actually iced, just an attempt at chilled coffee. Tasted just like I'd let my hot coffee sit there for an hour. Awful, but not as awful as the breakfast cafe. There was this other random coffee shop--not a big-namer I think it was called Wally's or something--was decent. But just didn't have the sugary, tasty kick that Starbucks did.

What will always surpass Starbucks in the iced-coffee field, and I truly wish I could somehow petition them to create a location near my office so I could probably just jump back on the caffeine wagon, is Dunkin Donuts. God I love Dunkin Donuts coffee. You can get it doused in sugar and creme, just the way it's meant to be.

Anyways. I'm hoping to get to that point where my head doesn't throb and I don't become useless without a dose of caffeine each day--so that I can go grab a cup of iced coffee for a reason other than to satisfy an addiction, cuz it tastes so darn good.