The guide

Cutting down without the headache

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20267 sources

Caffeine withdrawal usually starts 12 to 24 hours after your last dose, is worst at 20 to 51 hours, and is gone in 2 to 9 days. About half of people get a headache. You can skip most of it by stepping down instead of stopping, cutting about a quarter every 3 days and starting with the latest cup of the day.

Why do people think they’re not hooked?

Most people who drink coffee every day don’t feel dependent. They like it, they could skip it, and on the days they do skip it they put the headache down to a bad night or a busy day.

In 1992 a team at Johns Hopkins tested that. They recruited 62 ordinary adults who drank a low to moderate amount, 235 mg a day on average, about two and a half cups of coffee. For two days at a time everyone ate a caffeine-free diet and swallowed capsules. Some days the capsules held their usual caffeine and some days they held nothing, and nobody knew which.

On the days without caffeine, 52% had a moderate or severe headache, against 6% on the caffeine days. About one in ten had depression scores high enough to count as abnormal. And 13% took medicine for their symptoms that the study hadn’t allowed, against 2% when they had their caffeine. None of them were heavy users.

The whole thing in one picture

Stopping all at once is jumping off the landing. Stepping down is taking the stairs. You end up at the same place, but each step is small enough that your legs barely notice it.

Your body has adjusted to a certain amount of caffeine every day. Take it all away and you feel the whole drop at once. Take a quarter away and you feel a quarter of it, and by the time you take the next step, that one has passed.

What withdrawal feels like

In 2004 two researchers went through 57 experiments and 9 surveys on caffeine withdrawal, a literature with reports going back more than 170 years. Ten symptoms held up.

1. Headache, in about half of people in the experiments.
2. Tiredness, drowsiness, low energy and feeling less alert.
3. Low mood and feeling less content.
4. Trouble concentrating, irritability and feeling foggy.

Flu-like feelings, nausea and stiff muscles were likely parts of it too. In 13% of people in the experiments it was bad enough to cause real distress or get in the way of work or daily life. The more caffeine people had been having, the more often and the worse they got symptoms. Even stopping 100 mg a day, about one cup of coffee, produced them.

When it starts, peaks and ends

Say your last cup is at 3pm on Sunday. The headache would most likely start between 3am and 3pm on Monday, be at its worst somewhere from about 11am Monday to 6pm Tuesday, and be gone by sometime between Tuesday afternoon and the following week. In a 2021 study in Basel, men who had been on 450 mg a day felt their withdrawal most at the last check, 31 hours after their last dose.

The step-down

Each step comes from a swap, always starting with the latest drink of the day. The last 16 oz coffee becomes an 8 oz, a coffee becomes a tea, a tea becomes a green tea or a decaf. Starting from 400 mg and cutting about a quarter every 3 days gets you to about 95 mg by day 13. Starting from 300 it takes about 10 days, and from 200 about a week. The step-down planner dates it from your own number and picks a swap for each step.

Nobody has run a trial of a taper schedule, and none of the 57 experiments in the review tested one, so this pace comes from the timing of withdrawal itself. Three days a step gives each small dip time to pass its 20 to 51 hour peak before the next one starts, and a quarter at a time keeps each dip small.

Why the late cups go first

Taking caffeine off the end of the day does two jobs at once. It cuts your total, and it cuts what’s left in you at bedtime. An 8 oz coffee at 4pm leaves about 40 mg at 11pm on a 5 hour half-life, and one at 8am leaves about 13. Drop the 4pm one first and your nights get the benefit from the first step, while the morning cup that gets you going stays until last.

Do you need to quit at all?

Most people don’t. Under 400 mg a day, with the big cups in the morning, is a normal habit for a healthy adult. Cutting down makes sense if you’re pregnant, if your sleep is bad and the afternoon cups are the suspect, if caffeine makes you anxious or jittery, or if you hate needing it.

Scientists still argue about how much tolerance people build to caffeine, but the Basel study found that men on 450 mg a day for 10 days slept much like they did on placebo, with one brain wave band lower that the researchers thought might be early overnight withdrawal. There’s more on whether you get used to it.

Decaf isn’t zero

The FDA says an 8 oz decaf typically has 2 to 15 mg. In a 2006 lab test, decafs from 10 different shops held 0 to 13.9 mg per 16 oz. That’s a tenth of a regular coffee or less, and it keeps the habit of the cup.

Your turn

Put your daily milligrams into the step-down planner for a dated plan, and it marks the day the headache would peak if you stopped tomorrow instead. The quiz, Is my coffee keeping me up?, builds the plan into your personal guide if skipping a day gives you a headache.