142: Top 5 Signs You Might Be Using Caffeine as a Crutch (and How to Fix It)

Remember that feeling when your morning coffee stops working? When three cups barely get you through lunch, yet you still crash at 2:30 PM? That's not just fatigue—it's central nervous system burnout.

I know because I lived it. My morning ritual of coffee became a pot-a-day necessity just to function at a basic level. I was constantly wired yet paradoxically exhausted—what functional health practitioners call the "wired and tired" phenomenon. This wasn't sustainable energy; it was borrowed energy with compounding interest.

The science is clear: caffeine triggers stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) while blocking adenosine, your natural sleep signal. This creates a vicious cycle—artificial energy spikes, poor sleep, depleted natural energy, and an increasing dependency on caffeine. Eventually, your body's natural rhythm becomes completely inverted.

The good news? Your energy system can be rebuilt. Through functional lab testing that reveals your actual cortisol patterns, strategic sleep optimization, adrenal support with adaptogens like ashwagandha and rhodiola, and circadian anchoring practices like morning sunlight exposure, you can break free from caffeine dependency without giving up coffee entirely.

This episode walks you through the five telltale signs of caffeine dependency, explains the science of what's happening to your nervous system, and provides a practical three-step framework for rebuilding sustainable energy. Because true high performance isn't about pushing harder—it's about creating balance that allows your natural vitality to flourish.

Ready to stop borrowing tomorrow's energy to get through today? Track your energy at 7 AM, 2 PM, and 8 PM for three days and notice the patterns. Your body's trying to tell you something—are you ready to listen?

Chapters

• 0:00 The Caffeine Trap Signs
• 4:24 Science of Caffeine: Pros and Cons
• 6:41 Breaking the Caffeine Cycle
• 9:30 Rebuilding Your Natural Energy
• 14:25 Healthier Coffee Alternatives
• 15:56 Action Steps for Energy Audit

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What if the very thing you rely on for energy each morning is the reason you can't get through your day without it? Today, I'm sharing the five most common signs that caffeine might be a crutch, not a tool, in how you can rebuild your natural energy using a high-performance health approach that saved my life and my career. Let's go. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mort. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you're busy taking care of business, yet who's taking care of you? If you're ready to take your energy and performance to the next level in your life and your business, then this podcast is for you, because today you're going to start breaking boundaries of your mind, body and business with integrative health, and when you do that, your possibilities are limitless. I'm grateful you're here yes, always grateful for you joining me on the Breaking Boundaries podcast. You're going to love today's episode. And for those of you that enjoy sending me messages for the program, for ideas or questions, you can use the send a message feature in the show notes, and I want to share a little bit right now to get started in this episode a little personal story about the central nervous system burnout and caffeine trap that I was in, and there was a time maybe you've been here too where I couldn't even start my day without a strong cup of coffee in my hand and then one cup turned into three. Three turned into the entire pot of coffee. Turned into three, three turned into the entire pot of coffee. Morning coffee, an afternoon, pick me up a pre-workout caffeine shot, rinse and repeat.

Speaker 1: 1:52

But I was always tired. Well, I should say I was always wired from the caffeine, but weirdly tired. In the industry that I'm in in the health and wellness space, that is actually a thing that we call wired and tired. I don't want to call it syndrome, but I can't even call it a condition. We're so limited on the terminology that we can use in integrative health that doesn't, you know, infringe upon conventional medicine. But that's what I was. I was tired and wired. I couldn't sleep deeply at night. I couldn't wake up feeling refreshed. I thought I was burning the candle at both ends, but really I had no candle left. It wasn't just fatigue, it was central nervous system burnout. And coffee wasn't fixing it, it was masking it, if not making it worse. Now don't get me. Get me wrong. Caffeine isn't all bad, but using caffeine to replace real energy is like putting 200 mile an hour duct tape over your check engine light. Eventually your engine stalls.

Speaker 1: 3:00

So I want to give you the top five signs you might be using caffeine as a crutch. All right, here we go. Number five you're anxious, you're wired or irritable, but not productive. You feel on, but unfocused. That is central nervous system overload, not that flow state that you want, not that laser focus that you're looking for. Number four you wake up tired, even after seven to eight hours of sleep. This is a huge red flag. If you're sleeping but waking up exhausted, your cortisol is likely dysregulated. We're going to talk a little bit more about cortisol in a couple of minutes. Number three you use caffeine to push through workouts. You're not training with energy, you're forcing intensity from a nervous system that's already depleted. Number two you crash mid -afternoon every day. That 2.30 pm slump. It's not because you didn't sleep, it's because your body's adrenal rhythm is completely shot. And number one, the number one sign that you might be using caffeine as a crutch. You just can't function without it. Your brain doesn't boot up until that first cup Coffee equals survival mode, not performance mode. So let's bring a little bit of science into this as well.

Speaker 1: 4:24

We're going to cover some of the pros and cons of caffeine on the central nervous system. As I said, caffeine is not all that bad. It's not the enemy. A couple of the pros for caffeine yes, it boosts dopamine and alertness. Short term. It also enhances physical performance. That's why a lot of athletes use a caffeinated supplement before or during a workout. And it also increases reaction time and mental clarity, but only in short bursts. Now the cons of caffeine it stimulates the adrenal glands, especially producing cortisol and adrenaline. That's what caffeine does. That's where you get that boost in energy. It also blocks adenosine. This is your body's natural sleep signal. Some more cons from caffeine it depletes magnesium and B vitamins. We're going to talk a little bit more about those in just a moment. But these are needed for calm and recovery.

Speaker 1: 5:28

Caffeine also disrupts sleep quality and diurnal rhythm. This is your. You think of it as circadian rhythm, your natural rhythm of nature, really, for the human body. And then it also leads to tolerance and dependence in some cases. So you know it can be a cycle that keeps you stuck. And the caffeine cycle that keeps you stuck is caffeine leads to an artificial cortisol spike, leads to poor sleep, leads to low morning energy, which leads to more caffeine, can you see how this cycle can keep you stuck? And then, when you repeat it daily, that equals HPA access dysfunction. Hpa stands for hypothalamus pituitary adrenal, talking about the glands of your body, the hypothalamus gland, the pituitary gland, the adrenal gland. They all operate in an axis. There's also the HPG axis, the HP um O-access. There's several, but we're talking about the adrenals here and the dysfunction that repeating that caffeine cycle on a daily basis creates. This is also known as burnout in disguise. So the more you push, the more you borrow energy that you don't actually have and the debt builds until your body has to pay the tax with interest.

Speaker 1: 6:54

But I do want to say there is hope and I'm going to share with you how I rebuilt my energy. Naturally it wasn't overnight, but here's what worked. I stopped chasing energy and started rebuilding my natural rhythm. And the secret was testing, not guessing. So rebuilding the diurnal rhythm with high performance health.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Step number one functional lab testing. This can be done right at home with a simple saliva cortisol test. We use four-point saliva testing because it tracks your real cortisol rhythm throughout the day. Blood tests miss this pattern. Saliva shows what your body's doing, not just what is present. A saliva test reveals morning cortisol peak or lack thereof. Your cortisol is supposed to be elevated in the morning, that waking morning cortisol. That's where your natural energy comes from, and when your diurnal rhythm is inverted, we usually see on this cortisol test that morning energy is low, then afternoon drops or spikes. This could go either way. People that are completely burnt out, they just are low cortisol all day. It's actually called Addison's disease and that is when there's just the adrenals cannot produce cortisol any longer and so we can look at afternoon drops or spikes. A lot of people, before they are completely depleted, is they're producing way too much cortisol in the afternoon, and caffeine can lead to that. That's the whole point of today's conversation.

Speaker 1: 8:34

We can also look at evening crashes or false bedtime second winds. People say, oh, I got a second wind. What that is is your body's diverting from its natural rhythm of wanting to have lower cortisol at night to saying, all right, the mind is pushing the body to its limits. We must need this for survival. I'm going to produce more cortisol and that's where that second wind comes from. Usually comes around 9 pm 10 pm, when you know you're just refusing to stop working or get away from the screens, or having a stressful you know, stressful event in your life screens, or having a stressful uh, you know, stressful event in your life. That's where these second wins come from. And then we can also look at total, a total cortisol output, and this tells us whether we are dealing with burnout versus overload, versus, you know, optimization. So that brings us to step number two.

Speaker 1: 9:30

We want to optimize sleep for hormone and central nervous system reset. What does this look like? This looks like magnesium and natural melatonin support not synthetic, not synthetic. We want to use nature to be able to rebalance and optimize the body. This can also look like a digital sunset. What's that mean? No blue light 90 minutes before bed, very, very important.

Speaker 1: 9:56

Now here's a point that a lot of people miss is high protein and high um. Well, high protein and a complex carbohydrate mixed dinner, and you also want that healthy fat in there as well, and what this does is it helps to support serotonin and sleep hormones, and you want that dinner at least three hours before bed. You don't want to be putting in a difficult to break down meal when your body should be shifting to rest rather than using its energy for digestion. So rest and restore rather than processing and digesting food. So, three hours before bedtime, no food absolutely a game changer for you. And having, when I say high protein, I'm talking about a quality, easy to digest protein. Some examples would be pasture-raised chicken, wild-caught salmon those would be excellent high-protein, some omega-3s in there, some steamed vegetables for your carbohydrates that would be amazing. And then tracking your deep sleep using an Oura Ring, an Apple Watch, a Garmin device or a WhoopStrap would be absolutely amazing to track that deep sleep.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Now that moves us into step three. Step three is to support the adrenals. Naturally, that looks like adaptogens, things like ashwagandha, rhodiola, aluthero. These are all absolutely amazing adaptogens to help support the adrenals. And then vitamins, specifically B vitamins, b5, b6 especially, and B12 as methylcobalamin, absolutely essential for supporting the adrenals. And then vitamins like vitamin C and mineral yeah, vitamin C and a mineral called magnesium Absolutely amazing Magnesium, glycinate, magnesium, threonate. We also use a full spectrum magnesium. And why do we use this? Well, because these are things that coffee depletes. When coffee robs us of those minerals, then our body can't go through the enzymatic process, uh, processing enzymes, um, for the systems that the body needs. All of these b vitamins and vitamin c and magnesium, very, very important and then supporting the adrenals naturally through things like breath work and parasympathetic nervous system training. What this does is it boosts your HRV, your heart rate variability. Absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1: 12:36

To do some resonance breathing, three to five minutes of resonance breathing after dinner or before bedtime to calm that nervous system and put it into that parasympathetic state and then start the process all over again the next day by getting morning sunlight and, for some people, gradual cold exposure. That could look like in a wintertime, getting out in the cold, fresh air. It could look like Putting your face in ice-cold water in a sink full of ice-cold water or a cold shower or a full-on cold immersion. If the central nervous system is not taxed, we want to balance central nervous system before we get into that cold exposure for that circadian anchoring. But a great way to do the anchoring for your circadian rhythm is that morning sunlight 15 or 20 minutes upon waking Absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1: 13:31

Now you might be thinking is he telling us to give up coffee? Is he telling us not to give up coffee? Let me be completely clear. You can still love your coffee. I do too. I have it probably every other day, maybe every three days. The goal is to stop depending on it. And if you're ready to level up your morning cup, then you can try our daily high-performance coffee blend.

Speaker 1: 13:54

It's formulated to support and not stress your adrenals and your central nervous system, and this means that the coffee that we recommend in our private wellness practice is organic, it's mold-free and it's pesticide-free free beans, which is very important. We don't want to be putting those toxins into the body. In addition, it's also very high in antioxidants, so it is a health supplement when used properly or when processed properly. And then, for the decaffeinated version, it is swiss water processed and that means that it's decaffeinated version. It is Swiss water processed and that means that it's decaffeinated through a very specific water process. That was it began in Switzerland. And the other alternatives are usually chemical-based decaffeinated processing because it's honestly less expensive. So the lesser quality brands are decaffeinating their coffee using petroleum products, to be completely honest with you, which is not healthy to put that in your body.

Speaker 1: 14:58

And then if you want to use a caffeinated version, then I can recommend maybe you explore using a supplement called L-theanine to be able to smooth that caffeine curve. You can often find coffee that includes L-theanine with it, or adaptogens, as we talked about, to be able to balance out that. Cortisol Elevated levels of cortisol could certainly be helpful, and another option is to use functional mushrooms for brain fuel. That could absolutely enhance your high-quality coffee. And another option is to use functional mushrooms for brain fuel. That could absolutely enhance your high-quality coffee. So I will link up the coffee that I recommend in the show notes. You're absolutely going to love that and try it out and let me know you can use the send us a message feature after you try out some of this coffee and let me know. Use it for three to five days. Let me know how it is.

Speaker 1: 15:50

Now I want to give you an action step. This week's action step is to audit your energy. We're all about the data. At High Performance Health and in our private wellness practice, the data really drives the results. So how do you audit your energy? Journal your energy levels 7 am, 2 pm, 8 pm, do this for three days, set an alarm on your phone for those times 7 am, 2 pm, 8 pm and then use a scale of 1 to 10 for your energy levels 10 being amazing, energy 1 being completely depleted I have no energy and then journal those for three days and kind of evaluate that, audit your energy and also track your sleep quality and your caffeine intake and then notice the patterns.

Speaker 1: 16:39

And if you're tired of being tired, even with coffee, absolutely I recommend booking a nervous system recovery call with me, completely free. I will give you a recommendation for the tests that we use for your rhythm. Build you a custom plan and stop borrowing energy. So, wrapping things up here with a closing thought, I thought I needed more caffeine. What I really needed was more balance. Energy isn't something you buy. It, it's something that you build, and when you do it right, you become naturally fueled with high performance health. I will see you in the next episode. Keep breaking those boundaries, everybody. Bye-bye.