Last night, in the wee smalls, I threatened myself with that classic insomniac injunction: if you don’t sink immediately into reparative REM, tomorrow will be a useless disaster. (I know, not exactly a lullaby of self-talk.) But then a consoling thought popped up: there would be coffee. In other words, there was hope.
This was hardly the first time I’d outsourced what the French call élan de vie to a cortado. I recently caught a clip of Jerry Seinfeld telling Jimmy Fallon: “I think coffee is the most important part of a human’s life.” He explained, as Fallon convulsed in cackles, “coffee is the only thing in your life that is 100 per cent on your side. Every cup: come on, let’s go, me and you, we can do this!” Upon hearing these words — frankly Confucian in their wisdom — I felt the urge to stand up and applaud. Except that it was first thing in the morning and I was still mired in a state of un-caffeinated torpor. I had not yet had my coffee.
Which is why I was both fascinated and alarmed to hear about the “decaf-curious” movement; the daytime equivalent of the sober-curious revolution that sparked Dry January and the $17 mocktail. Just as gen Z and some millennials are trading cosmos for kombucha and hangovers for 6 a.m. sauna sessions, they’re also moving away from cappuccinos to low- or no-caf beverages made from dandelion roots, turmeric powder or dried mushrooms. As a gen Xer, all things decaf have struck me as vaguely depressing and deeply unchic, but coffee alternatives are now enjoying a fashionable rebrand alongside gen Z’s drive to raw dog life. Amid collective burnout and dysregulation, adulting without relying on the crutch of, say, caffeine is a kind of flex.
“Quitting coffee has been a 10-year process,” said Tonya Papanikolov, a holistic nutritionist and founder of Rainbo Mushrooms, a brand of non-psychoactive, adaptogenic mushroom tinctures. Coffee, she reflects gravely, was making her sick; leaving her jittery and anxious, giving her heart palpitations and digestive issues. “By the afternoon, I would just have to crash out on the couch, anxious and immobilized.” After phasing it out very, very slowly, she’s been coffee-free for 24 days.
The experience led Papanikolov to develop two Rainbo mushroom beverage blends: decaf Fungki and low-caf Fungki Coffee, each serving containing 3,000 milligrams of adaptogenic mushrooms and intended to give a boost without the crash. She kicked off the new year with “Unjittered January,” a month-long “guided reset” urging followers to go decaf and offering withdrawal support via emailed journal prompts and caffeine and cortisol education.
“Coffee is a plant that alters our consciousness, that changes our mood, that has psychoactive effects on our brains and our bodies,” she said over our video call, sipping water as I cradled my cup of Sam James Butter Knife espresso guiltily, as if I’d smuggled a margarita to an AA meeting.
It’s a dreary, steel-wool-skied day in Toronto, but Papanikolov is backlit in sunshine and seems at least half wood-sprite, as if she’d journeyed to her laptop via water lily or moonbeam. She’s from the GTA but recently moved to Topanga, a bohemian enclave of L.A., the sort of place where people do things like rebirthing workshops (Papanikolov did one before her fairy-themed wedding in Prince Edward County) and where mushroom lattes are as common as macchiatos.
Toronto is showing signs of following suit, though the hard stuff still rules. According to the Coffee Association of Canada, in 2024, 74 per cent of Canadians said they “drank a coffee yesterday” — ahead of tap water (71 per cent) and tea (43) — but 54 per cent said they are cutting back on purchasing coffee at cafés.
“I’ve never been into coffee and it was so frustrating, and severely disappointing, to go to a cafe for a tea and get a bag in a cup of hot water for $5,” said Angela Han, owner of Toronto’s Matcha Haus. Now, for about $2 more, you can get a customizable, hand-whisked matcha latte, matcha cortado or matchacano made with leaves sourced from a farm she works closely with in Nagasaki, Japan. Han spun this desire for hot drink alternatives into what’s clearly a winning formula: Matcha Haus is opening its third location in First Canadian Place this spring on the strength of Toronto’s love of the finely ground green tea and its low-caf sister drink, hojicha, a charcoal-roasted form. “Gen Z knows about matcha’s antioxidants and its catechin and its L-theanine,” Han mused. “They want a drink with benefits!”
“Coffee has benefits, too,” Papanikolov is careful to note. Indeed. A 2026 study showed two to three cups of coffee a day can slow cognitive decline and lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Drinking (caffeinated!) coffee has also been linked with lower risk of depression and enhanced mood in some groups; I feel my mood lift at the mere thought of it. Further benefits include pleasure and, I’ll speak for myself, consciousness.
“I’m not trying to say that coffee is bad!” said Papanikolov. “Inviting curiosity is my perspective.” Her mushroom journey began when she was a nutritional science student at Guelph University. She happened to meet David “Avocado” Wolfe, dubbed the Indiana Jones of superfoods and longevity, and accompanied him on “herb walks” outside of Nipissing, Ont. “It was awe inspiring. I can actually say: ‘I met this wizard, he lived in the forest in an incredible, magical hobbit hole, he took me out foraging and back to his cauldron,” Papanikolov said. “There is something ancestral, some sort of deep remembering that happens when you realize that there’s an intelligence to the plant world, how everything is working in reciprocity, how — though we can go out of balance in modern culture — there are beautiful antidotes.”
This sylvan apprenticeship inspired Papanikolov to found Rainbo in 2019. Meanwhile, the ideas of late American ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna inspired her to question coffee culture. I look up McKenna and happen upon a clip of one of his final interviews in which he’s sitting in the jungle, resembling Kermit the Frog perched on a log and singing “Rainbow Connection” in “The Muppet Movie.” At this point, I start to wonder whether I’m on mushrooms, and I don’t mean the adaptogenic variety.
“Terence called coffee the ‘drug of the dominator culture,’” Papanikolov said. “Coffee is a socially sanctioned drug, helping us to produce in a capitalistic culture.”
This makes me think of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”: “Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen/Pour myself a cup of ambition.” Coffee is drive, industry, function. Without it I fear a full-scale operating system breakdown.
Still, in the spirit of curiosity, I bravely decide to take a break from coffee, perhaps an ill-conceived plan given that it’s a time of crisis, which is to say February in Toronto. Our relationship has been so mapped with ups and downs — the arc of a true love affair — that quitting is too dramatic a proposition. I’d need to enlist “Couples Therapy” star Orna Guralnik to mediate the major life-quake. (I imagine sitting next to a cappuccino on a couch across from a compassionate, concerned Guralnik; a New Yorker cartoon waiting to happen.)
To replace my daily brews, I first try Rainbo’s Fungki coffee, which contains 44 mg of caffeine — a low dose, given a single shot of espresso contains about 65 mg — and is laced with vanilla and cinnamon, as well as Lion’s Mane and Reishi mushrooms, purported to enhance mental clarity and focus. A few days in, I go cold turkey with the caffeine-free version, which is made with chicory and tastes like a forest elixir you might sip under a well-dotted toadstool. By the afternoon I turn to matcha for support — energetic and emotional.
I mercifully don’t experience any headaches — a classic caffeine-withdrawal symptom — and I notice improved sleep and softened anxiety. But after a week, I start to feel some serious decaf-fatigue, by which I mean, fatigue. While my energy is less prone to spikes and crashes, it’s also at a reliable and problematic low, and I’m lacking a general — how to put this? — will to live. I have a deep remembering of what it feels like to be caffeinated. I consider forging on like this, raw dogging it and waiting for that heavens-splitting moment where I’ve achieved supreme cerebral clarity and a peaceful nervous system. But I lack the ambition. I decide to pour myself a cup.
