3 months caffeine free. My brain refuses to work properly, or - at all.

Here's a little report from my caffeine-free journey. Hopefully it will comfort some similarly disturbed.

I'm 35M. Been on some sort of caffeine most my life. Black tea in childhood and adolescence and 1-4 coffees (it varied) a day throughout the last 15 or so years. And lots of dark chocolate. Like a 100g bar a day, even. I'm lean and eat healthily. No other psychoactive substance use.

I’m three months in, zero caffeine at all. Sleep is still mostly crap. It was like that from the second week on. Can’t fall asleep for the first hour in bed, at least, even though I’m tired. Then I wake up a couple times throughout the night and then, finally - very early in the morning, like 5-6ish. I just can't sleep anymore even though it's something I crave the most at that point and I can afford to sleep late. Most nights I manage to get 6-7 hours of this scattered bed-time max. There are some good nights, though, with lots of vivid dreams like I remember I had in childhood. It all goes in waves but I definitely feel my brain recalibrating.

These last few days I felt like my brain had zero dopamine. I had no motivation to do anything. Even watching TV seemed like a chore and I didn't enjoy it at all. Don't feel like socializing and want to isolate myself from people.

Right now my biggest concern is the focus and memory issues, both short- and long-term. I feel like a 5-second memory buffer is making me forget the point of what I was about to say or do just a moment ago. I can't remember stuff from my long term memory either most days... Feel like someone erased my hard drive. Hugely annoying verbal expression problems, like tip-of-the-tongue feeling when you cannot remember the right word, which happens even a few times within the same sentence. Feeling like an illiterate idiot a lot of the time and trying to limit my social interactions because of that (apart from the aforementioned dopamine related isolation). My vocabulary seems really narrow to me, and I always had an ease of expressing myself in a vivid, colorful manner... I just started talking and my brain generated infinite cascade of words. Now when I try to do that, I just crash and burn after half a sentence. As if my brain ran out of gas...

So overall - a bit dementia-vibes over here, somewhat scary and irritating too, but that might be caused or at least exacerbated by the sleep deficit. Kind of a vicious circle thing.

To sum up - it’s a shit-show, but I’m gonna ride it out and never going back to caffeine.

Any similar horror stories? Those brain-related issues are really scary, as I always cherished my good memory, vocabulary and creativity. It's all in the toilet right now and I wonder if I'll ever be "good" again. There's something heavy at play, that's for sure, so I'm quite hopeful, but I'd appreciate similar stories to lift my spirits.