Coffee, the trigger

I love coffee. I love coffee houses, especially the ones in book shops.  How cool,  lounging around in the middle of the day when millions of other people are at work. Drinking coffee, classical music, reading the newspaper... aahh.  Living the life!

Bummer when I discovered that coffee is my new trigger!

What is a trigger?  A trigger is the thing in one's life that starts a chain reaction of unusual, destructive and undesirable behaviour.



Let's go with undesirable for a moment.  I have noticed that when I leave home with personality A and go out for a coffee, I have flown back in on my broomstick with pesonality "Kak Attitude". 

If I start my day with a a green juice, smoothie or such, my day is generally full of fairly concious and sensible behaviour.
If I start my day with a coffee, it is generally not.

Coffee also messes with my food choices.

I like the feeling of having a light system.  So coffee for breakfast ticks a whole bunch of boxes for me.  Quick, easy, delicious, flying high, woohooo, just what everyone is looking for to start the day.  I then tend to launch full tilt into my activites for the day with great gusto, much like a dog being fed.  By lunch time I am crawling the walls, and here's the thing.  I'm almost always OUT!  So I head off to the nearest convenience shop which supplies my favourite snack.  Woolies sandwich bar.  I know I am not suppose to like pre-sliced white bread, but I LOVE it.  I buy two sandwiches and eat one while I am standing in the queue.

This is the beginning of the end.  Sometimes I even leave the queue to pick up something else like, I don't know, a custard slice.  That's for the car on the way home.

See what I mean about junkie mentality?  These are not the choices made by concious switched-on people.  This is addiction.  With an agenda!

We all need to find our triggers if we want to change behaviour (and by this I also mean choices around what we put into our bodies).  I thought I had dealt with that when I kicked the booze.  Not.  

You can imagine my resistance.  I LOVE my coffee.  MY coffee.  Such an attachment!  A 30 year relationship coming to an end? 

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about my life.  It is my birthday in  few days and I often contemplate around this time.  What percentage of my life have I already lived?  I hope it's only a third.  But if it is only a third, I need to make sure that this vessel can carry me around for another 80 years.  So me saying anything like "I could never give that up" is out of place now.

Mmmmmm.