5 Coffee Habit Stacks to Improve Your Health
Each year around this time people create unrealistic expectations for themselves and then suffer from low self-esteem when they don’t pull it off. It’s a negative reinforcement loop: creating unattainable goals and then confirming your low self-worth when you fail.
Let’s just stop doing it, okay?
Learn to set a few reasonable expectations, and work on them every day. Like, two or three things. Then, in a month or so, when you’re feeling good about having made this small progress, add one more thing to your list and build that new habit.
Small, simple steps over time lead to great success.
These habits will change your morning routine and improve your overall energy flow.
If you’re not a coffee drinker, feel free to skip this post. If you’re a tea drinker, it still applies.
Drink a glass of still water while you’re waiting for the coffee to brew. Not ice water, not bubble water, just regular still water.
Commit to only drinking organic coffee. Coffee beans are very high on the list of questionable farming practices and chemical exposures, so making this edit reduces your morning dose of poison.
Switch to half-caff. Yes, you can do it, and what you'll notice is your energy is more stable throughout the day and you have less afternoon crash when the buzz wears off. I buy my favorite organic blend plus an organic, chemical-free, decaffeinated blend separately. I mix the two together myself. If you start this way you can reduce your ratios each week, making a gradual decrease if you’re not up to leaping all at once.
Decrease the size of your coffee cup. If you’re a big-gulp coffee kind of girl, go down one level to a large-sized cup. Then next week go down to a normal-sized cup. Aim for shrinking all the way down to a 1900’s sized cup and you’re back in the range of healthy. Seriously, watch an episode of The Gilded Age or Downton Abbey and notice the size of the coffee and teacups, we are definitely in a Super Size Me range.
Limit your coffee to two cups in the morning, of the shrinking size. This gradual shift makes a HUGE difference in how much caffeine you get each day, while still feeling satisfying. Your eyes and your body’s requirements will adjust and you’ll be surprised at how little coffee you need after all.
Coffee uses your adrenal glands to provide the boost you’re looking for, and reducing your caffeine load allows your adrenal glands to stop working so hard and have more time for rest and repair. In our coffee-all-day culture, we burn ourselves up at a young age and then coffee doesn't have much impact anymore.
Focus on high quality, not high quantity. Savor the brew and then move on. Get your energy from other sources like good food and movement.
