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In this episode of "A Changed Mind", our host, David Bayer, explores the unexpected impact of coffee on mental well-being and productivity. David shares his personal journey of quitting caffeine, revealing profound improvements in sleep, clarity, and overall peace. David challenges the glorification of coffee culture, especially among high performers, and discusses how excessive caffeine intake can lead to nervous system dysregulation.

David breaks down the science behind caffeine's effects, debunking common misconceptions about its energy-boosting properties. The episode offers a compelling invitation to listeners: a 7-day caffeine reset to rediscover their natural baseline.

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What We Explored This Episode

5:07 Rediscovering peace after quitting coffee

10:13 How caffeine affects the nervous system

15:23 Invitation to try a 7-day caffeine reset

Memorable Quotes

"Caffeine doesn't give you energy. It blocks adenosine, the chemical that signals your brain that it's tired. And it triggers your adrenal system to release adrenaline and cortisol. That's why you feel alert. But it's not true energy. It's a stress response."

"We start living in a buzz, basically, and we forget what stillness even feels like. Coffee culture has become identity, it's hustle fuel, it's grind set aesthetic."

"I'm finding that peace, that grounded clarity - it wasn't just nice. It's necessary. We've turned a tool into a baseline, and we've taken a stimulant and made it the core of our day."

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We all say we want more peace, less overwhelm, fewer racing thoughts, a little more stillness in the middle of everything we're building. But here's what I've come to believe, and I don't say this lightly. I think I found the number one driver of nervous system dysregulation in high performers, entrepreneurs, creators, visionaries, and honestly, almost everyone I know who's trying to do something meaningful in the world. It's not your trauma. It's not social media. It's not your inbox. It's coffee. The thing we glorify, the thing we ritualize, the thing we reach for the moment we feel even a hint of fatigue. I quit it twice, and what happened both times shocked me. I felt something I didn't think I'd felt in years, peace. Not just calm, not numbed out, but physiological peace. A quiet body, a still mind, a kind of clarity that didn't require effort. And today I want to show you what I discovered because I think it could change the way you live, the way you work, and the way you feel forever. Hey, it's David. Welcome to A Changed Mind, a sanctuary for your spirit, a place where each and every episode, I remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I'm your friend, your host, your guide, David Baer. And today we're going to talk about how coffee may be the number one thing that is keeping most of us revved, stressed, feeling burnt out. Now, before you write me off, hear me out.

Coffee is my love language. Recently, I told a friend of mine, And I said, listen, take away any food, take away any beverage, fried foods, sweet foods. Just don't take away my coffee. And you know what? Be careful what you say, because three days later, I started getting the worst gastritis I had had in my entire life. I mean, I was burning from my throat in my chest to my stomach 24 hours a day, and I did everything but give up coffee. I even asked ChatGPT. I said, how could I go from feeling fine, feeling fine my whole life, not really having any gastrointestinal issues to level 11 discomfort going from my mouth down to my stomach? And I said, well, you know, your stomach ignores a lot of signals. That way you can eat spicy foods and you don't freak out. So by the time you actually get signals and you feel something, it really means that the mucosal lining of your stomach has gotten so low that the nerves are now exposed. And guess what? Level 11 pain and it takes a while to heal. So finally, I was in so much discomfort. I was like, all right, coffee, you got to go. And what happened really blew me away. Now, what's interesting is at the same time for the last several weeks or months, even I've been praying for peace because my mindset is good in a lot of areas of my life, but I still suffer. I still stress. I still have anxiety. I am a chronic worrier and it's gotten much, much, much, much better. but I was on a trip to the Dominican Republic. Carol, Gabriel and I, my son, my wife, we were on vacation and I'm seven days into this beach vacation and I'm sitting on the beach. It's an extraordinary resort. Sun is shining, nothing to do. And I'm still thinking. And I'm like, I cannot stop thinking. God just bring me peace.

So I get this gastritis, right? Nothing seems to work. I give up coffee. First few days were tough. I'm not going to lie. I had headaches the first day and a half. It was my ritual. I felt lost. I was like wandering around trying to figure out what I should do with myself and my life because I didn't have my coffee. Next few days, I was like, okay, I can do this. And by day seven, I told my wife, I said, I feel more peaceful than I think I felt in the last decade. I said, you cannot believe this. And then my sleep improved. And I've talked about this on other episodes. Like I struggle with my sleep. I didn't sleep for four years, five years, ended up taking sleep medication. I slept through the night waking up at one time, seven days into no coffee. And the other really wild thing is I'm calm in the storms of my life and business. Things show up, I have to deal with them, but I'm not dealing with them from a place of a caffeinated David, I'm literally feeling unshaken. And so I do what anyone who finds this kind of peace, the kind of peace that we've been looking for our entire life, I found it. I did what anybody would do, which is what? I started drinking coffee again. Like, I'm just going to have a morning cup of coffee. I had my morning cup of coffee. Then it turned into two cups of coffee in the morning over the course of a couple of weeks. Then I'm like, well, it's the afternoon now. I love my cold brew coffee. Let me just do my cold brew. And now I'm back to my normal schedule. And guess what's gone? Peace and serenity. The urgency crept back in. I couldn't sleep as well. Feeling that tightness in my chest, my racing thoughts, that subtle stress, that anxiety. And really what it was, I've realized is it's too much signal and not enough space. Because now that I'm experiencing the serenity, and man, I've been drinking coffee for a solid 15 years. I think when I met my wife, I had been off of coffee for six months and we did it for a few months together and then it crept back in.

But it was so long ago, I don't even really remember. If you're a high performer, at least in my experience, there's too much signal already coming through and you lay caffeine on top of that. There's no space. There's no peace. There's no serenity. Five days later, guess who came back? Peace. Guess what improved? Sleep. Now, my normal coffee routine looks something like this, just so you can match yours up against mine. Maybe you drink more coffee. Maybe you drink less coffee. Maybe your routine is very similar. I'll have two cups of coffee in the morning, but a cup of coffee is not six ounces of coffee. It's not eight ounces of coffee. Truth be told, it's probably around 12 to 14 ounces of coffee in my big coffee mug. Sometimes I don't finish the whole thing. And so I justify my second cup of coffee. It gets cold. I give myself a refill. But if I really look at it, I'm probably having around 20 ounces of coffee in the morning. And then I get to the afternoon and I love me my cold brews. And so if I have a grande cold brew or the equivalent of from Starbucks, that's another 16 grams of cold brew. And so when I asked my new summer of love, ChatGPT, hey, this is my coffee routine. How much caffeine am I intaking? The answer was close to 500 milligrams of caffeine, more than the recommended FDA limit. Now, if you know anything about the FDA, they seem to be really loose with their limits. I mean, you can go pretty far with the things that you can do. If you ask a functional medicine doctor, they have a very different answer usually than the FDA. Even the FDA says don't have more than 400 milligrams of caffeine. Now, for full disclosure, I'm what's called a slow caffeine metabolizer. So genetically, my liver clears caffeine much more slowly than most people. So it stays in my system longer, hits harder, impacts me more deeply. So sure, you could say, you know, maybe this only happens to David. But here's the thing. Even if you're a fast metabolizer, the amount of caffeine we're drinking today is way beyond what our nervous systems were designed to handle. And most people don't even realize how much they're consuming. Let me show you what I mean.

A venti latte from Starbucks, three shots, has 225 milligrams of caffeine in it. Most people don't just have one a day. A venti Pike Place brewed coffee, just regular brewed coffee, has 410 milligrams of caffeine. That's more than the FDA's recommended entire daily limit of 400 milligrams. And a lot of people drink two of those. Add a Monster, 160 milligrams. Add a five-hour energy, another 200 milligrams. It's not unusual for high performers to be running around with 600 to 800 milligrams of caffeine in their bodies every single day. We've normalized that level of stimulation and no one's talking about the nervous system cost. And here's what's also difficult. You don't realize it until you get off of it. You don't realize that you're operating at a new base reality called caffeinated. And here's what's really going on under the hood. Caffeine doesn't give you energy. Let me repeat that. Caffeine does not give you energy. And if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know how important energy is. Reality is energy, energy is everything. And so really, if you were to simplify the game of life, making more money, growing your business, discovering your purpose, becoming more spiritually connected, down-regulating your nervous system, what we're talking about is increasing your energy. Caffeine doesn't give you energy. It blocks adenosine, the chemical that signals your brain that it's tired. So think about how much that screws you up because when you're actually tired, that signal is being blocked. I told my wife the other day, got to about 730 at night and I was like, wow, I'm really tired. I said, but this is a different kind of tired. I remember now. I'm genuinely tired. I'm not at the end of my day feeling burned out, frazzled, on edge, exhausted because I've been pushing too hard in a caffeinated body. I'm just tired. It actually felt really, really good. And so my sleep is improving. Caffeine doesn't give you energy. It blocks adenosine, the chemical that signals your brain that it's tired, and it triggers your adrenal system to release adrenaline and cortisol. That's what it does. That's why you feel alert, but it's not true energy. It's a stress response. You are literally inducing a mild fight or flight state every time you drink it. Again, don't hate on me. I love coffee. It's my love language. I'm just telling you the way that it works. And when that state becomes chronic, things happen. Your HRV drops, your sleep becomes lighter, your parasympathetic tone, the rest, digest, and heal mode of your nervous system starts shutting down. And over time, we start mistaking speed for clarity, urgency for importance, and tension for productivity. So there are a lot of people out there that take great pride in the fact that they're multitaskers, but they're actually...

Not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying that it is. And I want you to check yourself. Does Gary Vee seem like a guy who's downregulated? I've had the opportunity to meet him. Seems amazing. But there's a frenetic energy that occurs with us when we're over-caffeinated, right? There are t-shirts that say, but first, coffee. And I know there are influencers whose entire brand is tied to their morning latte. I love coffee. My favorite coffee is Life Boost Coffee. And I'm going to tell you how I'm still able to drink it a few times a week and not get jacked up here at the end of this episode. I'm a huge fan. My buddy, Dave Asprey, created Bulletproof Coffee, then went on to create Danger Coffee, right? It's a culture. It's a cult. Starbucks has 34,000 stores. That's more than McDonald's. But what is coffee doing to our spiritual clarity? What is it doing to our emotional regulation? What is it doing to our marriages, our kids, or do you even know? Because it's been so long that you've been using coffee that you don't remember what it's like to be off of it. And it's so normal, right? It becomes so normal that we don't even see where it might be creating dysfunction anymore. And I'm telling you, as much as we talk about screens or social media and dopamine hits, this is the point of this episode. Nobody's really talking about what I believe is the elephant in the room and the thing we actually can disconnect ourselves from without disconnecting from the online world, and that's coffee. People come into our community because they want to learn how to be more at peace I'm saying to you that I believe it's highly possible If not probable that the greatest disruption to your peace is not actually your trauma. It's caffeine, And when I finally broke the loop, what I felt was not a downgrade, that I was an underperformer or didn't have the energy, it was a return. I wasn't tired. I was rested. I wasn't dull. I was clear. I could sit with my son and just be without feeling like I needed to do something. I could write without forcing it. Think without rushing. Feel without having to buffer myself. It's like my body remembered how to generate real energy through sleep, breath, movement, and food, not adrenaline. And by the way, make no mistake, I also practice my breath work, my meditation, my cold plunging, but now it's different. And the only thing that changed was caffeine. And that peace, that grounded clarity, it wasn't just nice. I'm finding that it's necessary. So let me be clear. I'm not here to demonize coffee. I'm not saying no one should ever drink it. There's actually research that shows caffeine used in small strategic doses can improve performance, endurance, alertness, even mood.

But what we've done is different. We've turned a tool into a baseline and we've taken a stimulant and made it the core of our day. Every single day we wake up and we drink it before we even check to see how we feel. In fact, we can't know how we feel until we have a cup of coffee. We use it to override emotional signals, spiritual whispers, and the body's call for rest. Coffee was interesting for me because it was something that I would have if I was celebrating. It was something that I would have if I was feeling stressed out or something happened that I didn't expect that wasn't a positive thing in my life. Very much the same way I used marijuana. Very much the same way that I used alcohol, right? No matter what was going on in my life, there was a reason to have a coffee. And then we wonder why we're anxious, why we can't focus, why our meditations feel shallow and we've got monkey mind and our sleep feels restless. And I just don't think we can have a real conversation about nervous system regulation without also talking about caffeine. So here's my invitation. Try it for yourself. Not forever, seven days. Seven days with no caffeine, no coffee, no matcha, no energy drinks, no black tea, no dark chocolate. Let the withdrawal symptoms come, or if you need to, ease into it. You might feel tired for a few days, moody, foggy, that's okay. Because on the other side of that detox, your nervous system might reveal something you haven't felt in a long time, which is your true baseline, your natural state and frequency. And when that happens, I'm telling you, your whole life will be different, more peaceful, more stable, more you. What am I doing now? So I told you, I love Life Boost Coffee. It was created by Dr. Charles. Dr. Charles created Life Boost Coffee. It is no mold. It is no pesticides. It is no metals. It is organic. And I don't know about you, but if you care about those things and you've ever tried organic coffee, most of the time it doesn't taste very good. I love my Life Boost. Well, they have all kinds of different types of coffees, right? They've got their medium. They've got their bold. They've got their cognition, which is their mushroom blend. They've got hazelnut, which is my favorite, but they also have a Swiss decaf coffee with close to zero caffeine. And Swiss decaf is the process by which they make the decaffeinated beans that isn't harmful to you. They're not bleaching beans. And so what I'm planning on doing is cold brewing it and I make it something special that I do two or three times a week. Cold brew is also less acid. It's already a low acid coffee anyway. Tastes great. It's Swiss decaf. So again, it's not harmful. I'm able to still enjoy my coffee without the caffeine. Because to be honest, now that I've gotten off caffeine, I don't want caffeine. I don't want it back. But I do want to enjoy my coffee. And now I get the best of both worlds. And let's be clear, giving up coffee, giving up the way I used to do coffee is really a small price to pay for the return of peace, right? I know it may not seem like it. It wasn't like that for me at first glance. But once I got seven days in, and then And once I lost it again, I'm like, shame on me. I'm not gonna let this happen again. And I'll reach out to Dr. Charles, see if he can give us a promo code or something. If he can, I'll drop it into the link in the show notes for you to get some discounted Life Boost coffee. This is not a promo for them. They're not paying me to do it. I just love Life Boost. What I'm really encouraging you to do is try the seven-day reset and let me know how it goes in the comments. You can come back, find the video, drop it in the comments. Let me know how it went. If you did it, maybe we'll do a seven-day challenge on my Instagram. I try to read every one of the comments. And if this landed, share it with someone who lives on caffeine, but feels like they've lost their edge or they're living on the edge, not because they're broken, but because they're overstimulated, right? We weren't meant to live in a buzz. We were meant to be clear. So if you love this episode, do me a favor. Number one, share it with somebody you care about. Number two, if you're following along on YouTube, subscribe, hit that bell icon. So you get notifications, leave me a comment. Let me know what you think. I think this is a controversial episode for a lot of you. So I'm open to all your feedback. If you're listening on the audio platforms. Also subscribe and leave me a review or a rating if you haven't yet. I love waking up in the morning now without my coffee with my chamomile lavender tea and reading your reviews. And I will plan on seeing you in the next episode.