Abstinence and habit-breaking

I was doing so well with many days of abstinence on the tally and then it all fell apart. Well...when I say days the total number of them may not amount to as many as you might think. It was four days all up, not a record by any stretch of the imagination but I abstained from my habit for those days and I'll take the win.

I'm talking about coffee, abstaining from coffee, as I'd made the decision several days ago to stop drinking it for a variety of reasons I'll not bore you with at this stage. I didn't think it would be difficult, I had thought I'd be able to abstain easily; a fact that rang true until today during a client meeting where my client went ahead and ordered me a coffee prior to me arriving - she knows how I have my coffee so she got it right. What was I to do, refuse the kind gesture of coffee she'd already paid for? Of course not, so I drank it and just like that my tally went from four right back to zero.

Maybe this coffee-abstinence habit-breaking thing would be more difficult than I'd envisaged.

Over the years I've conducted business over coffee on so many occasions either at corporate offices or cafés and have been successful at both; it seems to act like oil in the cogs of business and negotiation. I prefer meetings to take place at cafés, depending what it is of course, mainly because it's somewhat disarming (even if it's with internal personnel), neutral ground so to speak, and people tend to be more relaxed there. It opens the opportunity to extend the meeting if it's going well and show quality through paying the bill or offering to order food or more coffee to make the meeting go a little more nicely but it means drinking coffee, or other such beverages which, as I mention above, ruined my no-coffee-streak of four entire days.

I came to the realisation that giving up coffee would mean I'd have to abandon my café-meeting strategy as I simply can't control the situation and swapping coffee for tea doesn't help as it still has caffeine in it - I could drink decaffeinated coffee of course, but I'd rather not, it's not that good. It's tripped up the process for sure.

I still plan to abstain from coffee generally, as I'd like to break my habit of it - I drink far too much - but am going to apply some logic and permit myself to drink some (when required such as cases like today), without adding a feeling of guilt in certain circumstances. It seems like a good balance.

Have you ever tried to give up coffee; did you succeed or fail and how easy or difficult was it. What about other things like alcohol, foods, cigarettes or other habitual activities you've had? What methods did you use to break the habit and what challenges did you face? Feel free to share in the comments section if you'd like.