Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? Former Addicts Say Yes.

Petty Officer Second Class Marcus Bivens stood before a panel of U.S. Navy officers, hands cuffed behind his back, facing charges of an unauthorized absence.

For his first fifteen years of service, Bivens had been considered a “squared-away sailor”—orderly, competent, conscientious. A sailor officers could rely on. But he had been missing work lately, sometimes for weeks at a time, and now he was standing in front of an ad hoc disciplinary tribunal investigating his rapid and seemingly inexplicable decline in job performance. Bivens could no longer physically complete his work tasks, even though it was an administrative job.

Several weeks prior, Bivens was driving home on I-15 from the Coronado naval base in San Diego when his eyesight suddenly went double. “It was terrifying,” he recalls. “I literally drove home with one eye closed.” Bivens made it to his house safely but immediately collapsed into bed, clothes still on, and slept for eleven hours. When he woke up, the double vision was worse.

Bivens’s condition worsened over the next four months. He suffered tremors, sensitivity to light, aches throughout his body, and twitchy eyes. He slept just three to five hours a night. A self-described gym rat, Bivens lost his strength; he couldn’t do a single push-up. Doctors performed MRIs and MRAs and conducted more blood work. They wondered if Bivens had lesions on his brain. They prescribed him Ambien, Zoloft, Xanax, and Cafergot, a caffeine stimulant used to treat headaches. He was given an eye patch to alleviate the double vision. None of the tests revealed any abnormalities, and none of the doctors he saw could give him a satisfactory explanation for his bizarre array of symptoms.

Bivens now believes the source of his medical issues was neither a disease nor a mental illness. Rather, he attributes his health decline to caffeine, the most commonly used, socially acceptable psychoactive substance in the world. For years, Bivens had been consuming close to 1,000 milligrams of caffeine per day, two and a half times the daily recommended limit and the equivalent of more than ten cups of coffee. The habit had wreaked havoc on his central nervous system and in turn caused myriad physical and psychological problems.

There is perhaps no mind-altering substance as tightly woven into the fabric of daily life than caffeine. Nearly 80 percent of adults in the U.S. consume caffeine, in some form, every day. Coffee is the primary caffeine-delivery mechanism for many people—two thirds of American adults drink it every day—and many consider it an indispensable part of daily life. T-shirts and, naturally, coffee mugs exclaim, “Not before I’ve had my coffee” or “But first, coffee,” as if the travails of everyday living are impossible without a morning cup of joe. For some, coffee even serves as a handy substitute for having a personality. Whether it’s new mothers who think they should have a priority line at Starbucks; snobs who traffic exclusively in organic, sustainably grown fair-trade beans; or Zoomers sharing their insane coffee concoctions on TikTok, conspicuous coffee consumption is a cultural signifier. Entire human interactions—the coffee date, the coffee break at work, the post-dinner mug—revolve around its ingestion.