Don't do it.

Last week, I did something that I thought I’d never do. I switched to decaf. The point of the exercise was to control my blood pressure, which according to my doctor, is creeping above normal. I never used coffee for medicinal purposes. Some people routinely cite a list of things they simply cannot do before they’ve had their morning coffee. I’m not like that. However, I always found the taste of regular coffee more satisfying than that of decaf.

Now that I’m into week two of the decaf experiment, the caffeine withdrawal headaches have disappeared, and though I enjoy coffee a little less, I’m feeling better. I hadn’t realized how amped up I’d become. Since I’m generally the excitable sort, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing.

Perhaps I thought I couldn’t drink decaf because coffee, as I would say, was my only vice. I don’t smoke or drink or abuse my brain with chemicals. More probably, I had become stuck. People get stuck all the time. For some reason, there’s a psychological barrier that prevents some people from making a change in their lives that might do them some good. They complain and can list in detail all of the reasons why they’re trapped in the situation or the behavior.
There’s a Henny Youngman joke that Woody Allen quoted in his 2003 film Anything Else:

“A guy goes to his doctor and says, ‘Doc, it hurts when I do this.’ So the doctor says, ‘Don’t do it!’”

It seems like a very simple remedy, but it’s often the hardest behavior change of all. I was in a marriage that was very unfulfilling with a woman I had been with since I was in high school. The concept of leaving the relationship occurred to me time and time again throughout my teens and twenties. I never thought I could. I stuck it out, because I believed it was what I was supposed to do. I missed so much of the enjoyment of those years because I was convinced that it would be impossible to change my situation. I couldn’t get divorced. People like me don’t do that. I made a decision and when I do that I stand by it. What would it say about me if I admitted that I was wrong?

What would it say? That I was smart enough to make changes when I was miserable. So that’s what I did. Years later, I’m married to someone else and much more able to look myself in the eye. I’m much happier. I’ve applied that Henny Youngman reasoning to all kinds of problems: jobs, poisonous friendships, musicians I’ve worked with. It has yet to fail me. It’s harder to stop doing what makes you miserable at first. In the beginning, it’s easier to stay comfortable in your misery. But if you choose to stay the course after you’ve realized it’s making you miserable, it gets even more difficult to endure. You may not even understand what you’re feeling, but it’s actually the misery killing you. I always try to climb the hill with the downhill coast on the other side. It’s almost never a cliff.