Quitting Coffee For Good? Here Are Other Healthier, Warm Drink Ideas For Chilly Days

Most people can’t and won’t function without a cup of coffee to start the day. This has been an age-long tradition which transcends age, cultures, and circumstances. Whether it’s 3-in-1 coffee, your own pour-over, or a fancy takeout from your favorite café, caffeine is essential.

But even though drinking coffee has been a large part of our everyday, there are many people who avoid coffee for many reasons. Some do it for health reasons, such as those who experience acid reflux. Some say it’s more a lifestyle thing. But while coffee has its benefits (eg. keeping you awake and alert, it tastes good, etc.), there are also benefits to skipping that cup of coffee in the morning.

The benefits and pitfalls of caffeine

To understand coffee better, let’s look at what caffeine does to our body.

Caffeine’s wonders are largely due to its ability to block adenosine, a sleep-inducing molecule that tells your brain it’s time to sleep. Because caffeine blocks adenosine, the result is that you feel more awake and alert, allowing you to accomplish the task at hand.

Caffeine also makes you more sensitive to dopamine, known as the “happy hormone” because it is responsible for letting you feel happiness. Because of this phenomenon, caffeine also has the ability to make you feel happy.

But while all of these benefits of caffeine sound great and well, the problem is that our bodies develop a tolerance to caffeine. This means that as time goes, you will have to consume more to experience the benefits of caffeine.

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Caffeine withdrawal and cravings will make you more susceptible to feeling down, unhappy, or just generally tired. The Sleep Foundation also found that consuming too much caffeine can impact the onset of sleep, and reduce sleep time and quality. Therefore, caffeine-interrupted sleep can lead to sleep deprivation the following day, which can make you feel more fatigued and encounter problems with learning, memory, and emotion regulation.

So, if you feel like you’re losing sleep quality, drinking much more coffee than you want, or feeling slower and slower each day, then you might have to cut back on your caffeine intake.

Abstaining from coffee

We’re not really saying you have to remove caffeine from your life to function properly. In fact, the reality is that most beverages actually contain caffeine.

However, coffee, unarguably, contains the most caffeine per cup. One grande cup of brewed coffee from Starbucks, for example, contains at least 360 mg of caffeine. Compare that to one Lipton black tea bag which averages at 55 mg or a hot Swiss Miss drink at 1-3 mg.

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While it’s easy to tell yourself “just cut back on coffee,” caffeine withdrawal can be quite of a bummer. Couple that with chilly days thanks to the rainy season, and you’ll be reaching for that cup of coffee quicker than you can stop yourself.

Thankfully, there are many alternatives that you can turn to which can help you quit coffee or maybe just cut back on your caffeine. Swipe through the gallery below for our list of healthier low-caffeine and caffeine-free hot drinks and where to buy them: