Tuesday, ten past three

It's ten past three on a Tuesday afternoon. You've been looking at the same paragraph for a few minutes without reading it. Your eyes feel dry. There's a heaviness behind them and a slight fog in front of everything, and the meeting at four is going to need you sharp. So you get up and make a coffee, the third of the day, and stand by the kettle while it boils, and by twenty past you feel better. Not marvellous, but back. The paragraph makes sense again.

The day started at half past six with the alarm, and the first thing you did after switching it off was think about coffee. You had one at seven, standing up, before you could talk to anyone. You had a second at half past nine at your desk. If someone asked, you'd say you have two or three a day, and you wouldn't be counting the tea at eleven, or the cola with lunch.

At half past five, before the drive home, you have another, because the drive is forty minutes and you'd rather not do it foggy. In the evening you feel fine. At eleven you go to bed. At half past eleven you're still awake, not worried about anything in particular, just awake, with a mind that won't quite settle. You get to sleep at some point after midnight. At half past six the alarm goes and you're tired, and the first thing you think about is coffee.

You've noticed the shape of this. You may even have said it out loud. But the morning cup is the one thing in the day that works without fail, and giving it up, or even giving up the afternoon one, feels like choosing to be tired on purpose.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The level is how alert a person feels who doesn't drink caffeine at all, on an ordinary day after an ordinary night. It's the baseline. The shortfall is how far below the level you sit when the caffeine from your last cup has worn off. It's what you feel at half past six in the morning and at ten past three. The pick-up is what a cup gives you, which is the climb from the shortfall back towards the level. The slump is the afternoon low in particular, because it has more than one cause and it's worth its own name. The cut-off is the time of day after which you have no more caffeine. And the night is what you pay, which is the part of this you can't see.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

The first cup is described as a need and not a pleasure. "I can't function" is the sentence.

The count is lower than the truth. Tea, cola, the coffee-shop cup that's twice the size of a mug, the square of dark chocolate. None of them are in the number you'd give.

The pick-up feels like a gain. It feels as though you've been lifted above where you were. Chapter 3 will suggest that you've been lifted back to where you'd have been anyway.

You don't connect the evening cup with the night. The night is blamed on stress, or a busy mind, or being a bad sleeper.

And you'd describe yourself as a tired person. Someone who needs more sleep than they get and needs coffee to cover the gap. I think that description is the habit talking, and the book will come back to it.

Try one thing before reading on, and don't change anything yet. For a week, write down every drink or food with caffeine in it, and the time you had it. Every one, including tea, cola, energy drinks and chocolate. In the morning, write down roughly what time you fell asleep and how you feel out of ten. Don't change anything. You're finding out what's true.