How long does caffeine withdrawal last?

It usually starts 12 to 24 hours after your last caffeine, is worst somewhere between 20 and 51 hours, and lasts 2 to 9 days. In experiments, about half of people got a headache. Those numbers come from a 2004 review of 57 experiments and 9 surveys.

Withdrawal sounds like something that happens to people who drink a pot a day. In that review, stopping as little as 100 mg a day, about one 8 oz coffee, was enough to bring on symptoms. If you drink one cup a day, you may have felt it without knowing what it was, on a busy morning when the coffee didn’t happen.

We’d step down instead of stopping. Cut about a quarter every 3 days, latest drink first, so each drop is small (how to quit caffeine without a headache).

The timeline

Say your last coffee is at 3pm on Sunday and you have none after that.

The step-down planner puts your own dates on this, from the day you’d stop.

What it feels like

The review settled on ten symptoms that held up in the studies: headache, tiredness, low energy, feeling less alert, drowsiness, feeling less content, low mood, trouble concentrating, irritability and feeling foggy. Headache is the best known, and it showed up in about half of people in the experiments.

Why it happens

Your body adjusts to a daily dose of caffeine, so a normal day starts to depend on it being there. When the dose suddenly isn’t there, you feel the gap until your body adjusts back, which is what the 2 to 9 days are.

Why stepping down helps

The worst of withdrawal comes 20 to 51 hours after a drop. If each cut is small and you wait 3 days before the next one, each small dip passes its worst point before the next one starts. Nobody has run a trial that tests a step-down schedule, so the pace in our planner is our design, built on that timeline.

When the headache hits

A headache in the first two days after cutting back is very likely withdrawal. If it’s too much, go back up a step for a few days and then cut by less. Any headache that’s severe, sudden or comes with other symptoms needs a doctor, whatever you drank.