Everyday for the past five years I have had a MTN DEW^® KICKSTART^™ energy drink in the morning. An average 16-ounce can has only 90 calories, but 92 milligrams of caffeine, which is apparently enough to cause a caffeine dependency that is rather uncomfortable. It is because of this that I decided (partly against my own will) to attempt a major lifestyle change: cutting out caffeine. Below details by far the most uncomfortable week of my life, of which I have had many.

Day 1

This was a Friday, by far the best day to try and go cold turkey. With school for the first half of the day, I would have no access to soda from 8:00 to 3:15. I had hoped that it would go well, and my ability to function normally would be unimpaired. I was wrong. Dead wrong. By 11:00, I had a raging migraine, with no relief from the pain that felt like someone stabbing me in the temple with an ice pick constantly. Not quite a lobotomy, but definitely no picnic anyway. By 3:30, I was laying in bed, curled up in a ball, making my girlfriend hold onto me while I gingerly drank a soda over the nausea. After a nap, I decided that going cold turkey was definitely not the way to go, especially because I just happened to have a couple more sodas that day to make my head feel better. Despite what 16 previous Thanksgivings have taught me, cold turkey is bad turkey.

Day 2

Day 2 is the only day I  would like to discuss. It worked better than the past day, as by this day I had adopted the method of slowly decreasing my consumption, so I took it down from 1 to 2 caffeinated beverages, to just one and some Cherry 7-Up to make up for it. I would call this day a success, as far as the other days are concerned, I felt pretty good about this one.

Day 3

Day 3 was a humiliating failure in the eyes of myself and probably anybody else that would be privy to the situation. It began with one soda, already a failure to take my intake down on that day, but later my parents came back to the store with generic soda, my metaphorical kryptonite. I had one of those, which was a step below my previous efforts, and an embarrassment to myself as well as whatever deity has decided to curse me with a weak will. That or my own apathy towards the situation, one of the two.

Day 4

Day 4. I don’t want to talk about day 4. Not even remotely. Just pretend day 5 is day 4, and let this only be here for a non-misleading article.

Day 5

Day 5 was by far my worst day. Goodness, I seemed to have just given up at this point. I don’t even know what the point of this was. To better myself? To help my overworked heart? Jokes on you world, heart disease runs in my family, so drinking caffeine won’t kill me before something else does. This habit is too deep set to change, and curse whomever wills me to try. In a good way. Because I love the people that pushed me to do it. But the sentiment remains.

In conclusion, this experiment was an utter failure. From migraines to low self-control, it was set up to fail from the very start. In the process, however, I learned a lot about myself and about chemical dependencies. This could have been accomplished from some light soul searching and a book written by an expert, but it’s the experience that matters, right? Though I could have gone without this and remained the same person I was at the start. Maybe I’ll look back at this in ten years thinking how much this profoundly affected me and how I live my life, but probably not.