Day 47. I haven’t slept in 31 hours.

My heart is doing something weird. Not painful, exactly. Just… unusual. Rhythmic in a way that doesn’t feel rhythmic. Like when a song is technically on beat but something is off about it. My Galaxy Watch just flagged my heart rate as “elevated.”

I check the timestamp: 3:47 AM. Of course it is.

I’m 40 years old and I’ve discovered something deeply problematic about myself: I can’t do anything in moderation.

Not fitness (I broke a rib doing home workouts). Not optimizing (I have spreadsheets to track my spreadsheets). And definitely not coffee.

The Beginning of the Spiral

Fourty-seven days ago, I decided to track my coffee consumption. A simple experiment. Chart my daily intake, measure the correlation with my Xiaomi scale readings, my sleep quality, my productivity. Get the data. Make decisions.

Day 1 was fine. Two cups. Baseline morning routine, 195-degree water, 21.6 grams of beans. Documented. Filed.

Day 3 I added a third cup at 2 PM.

Day 7 I was up to four.

Day 12 I stopped counting and started buying in bulk.

Now, on Day 47, I’m at my local coffee shop three times a day. I know the owner’s kids’ names. I think the barista might be concerned.

The Denial Phase

I told myself this was research. Data collection. That I was investigating the relationship between caffeine intake and various biomarkers. That there was a scientific reason.

But here’s the truth I finally admitted at 2 AM today: I’m addicted.

Not to coffee. I’m addicted to the feeling of being hooked on something I can measure and track and optimize. I’m addicted to the excuse to buy new equipment (I now own four different brewing methods). I’m addicted to the ritual and the control and the tangible number at the end of the day.

My Xiaomi scale shows I’ve lost 8 pounds in 47 days. My Galaxy Watch says my resting heart rate is up 23 beats per minute. My productivity spreadsheet has a concerning blank space labeled “sleep.”

But my coffee tracking spreadsheet is immaculate. Color coded. With trend lines.

The Breakdown

Something broke three days ago.

I was at day 44 and I realized I’d been to the coffee shop that morning but had zero memory of what I drank or when. My watch said I’d consumed 680 mg of caffeine (2.8 times the recommended daily amount) but I couldn’t account for it.

I had a gap in my data.

I had a gap in my time.

For two hours on Day 44, I was just… somewhere. Not at work. Not at home. My wife found me in the garage staring at the wall.

I told her I was fine. I was definitely not fine.

The Morning After

Day 45 I quit cold turkey.

That was a mistake.

The withdrawal started at hour 8. Headache. Nausea. Anxiety. My body was screaming for something my brain had apparently decided I didn’t need.

By hour 16 I couldn’t focus. By hour 20 I was shaking.

At hour 24 I did something I hadn’t done in years: I called my doctor. Not because I was concerned for my health. Because I was concerned I was losing my mind.

She asked about my caffeine intake. I told her the number honestly. She went quiet. Then she said, “That’s… a lot.”

Not reassuring.

The Current Situation

So here I am on Day 47, back to drinking coffee but in smaller amounts. Trying to find a sustainable middle ground between absolute abstinence (which makes my body rebel) and complete spiral (which makes me lose time).

I’ve restarted my tracking spreadsheet with modified parameters. Instead of optimization, I’m calling it “harm reduction.” That feels better. More honest.

My wife asked me why I can’t just drink coffee like a normal person.

I told her it’s because I’m not a normal person. I’m a person who measures things. I’m a person who finds patterns and then becomes obsessed with manipulating those patterns. I’m a person who turns hobbies into data projects and data projects into personality traits.

I’m a person who looks at something with risk factors and thinks, “But what if I could perfect it?”

Spoiler alert: You can’t.

Why I’m Writing This

Because somebody out there is like me. Somebody is tracking something they shouldn’t be tracking quite so intensely. Somebody has turned a simple habit into a research project that’s slowly consuming their life.

Somebody is telling themselves that data is control. That measurement is mastery. That if they just get the spreadsheet right, everything will work out.

It won’t. The spreadsheet is never right. There’s always another variable to track, another column to add, another trend to analyze.

The real data, the important data, is the stuff you can’t quantify: sleep quality, not hours slept. Happiness, not heart rate. Balance, not optimization.

I’m on Day 47 of what was supposed to be a simple coffee tracking experiment.

I’m on Day 2 of trying to figure out how to be a person who just drinks coffee sometimes, without turning it into an obsession.

The data is still coming in.

I’m not sure what it will say yet.