The painful way is pretty simple! Wait until you have a few days you can be "down" and just go cold turkey. I find I do OK the first couple of days, then get a pretty bad headache. When that's gone I'm back to normal.

This. The withdrawal symptoms of coffee usually last for about a week. The thing that is perhaps most surprising is that after that week you'll also feel less tired. Turns out that while most people consider coffee as a remedy to tiredness, it's the coffee itself that actually makes you more tired, so you need more and more of it, just like any other addictive drug.

I'd like to point out that gradually decreasing the amount of caffeine intake works very well and is a lot less painful.

Caffeine is a mild stimulant, but in the evening the main effect is probably blocking your adenosine reuptake sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Pharmacology You can probably get a similar effect by drinking a small amount of caffeine in the early afternoon instead of a large amount in the morning. I mentioned this in another comment, but slowly decreasing your caffeine intake over time lets your body adjust with pretty minimal symptoms.

green tea matcha is a good alternative. 1 cup of green tea matcha has 1/3 of caffeine as a coffee cup. Since it is packed with L-theanine, it will also delay ingestion of caffeine, and you will feel less the typical crash

Wrote a quick post about coffee alternatives https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/healthy-a...

Drink a lot more water, consistently throughout the day just before cutting and after. It won't stop the headaches completely but it will help.

It will suck a lot for a few days, bad headaches, might even throw up. For me, I was in slowmo for about a month. I normally work on stuff when I get home and for about a month I would go home and just sit around. After that I was over it and feel much better because of it. This was going from drinking 4+ of the Mexican Coca Cola bottles each day. That stuff is just a trap.

I gently titrated down by replacing coffee with a pre-workout drink (powder mixed in water). This allowed me to tightly control my caffeine intake and reduce it gently every few days until it was almost zero. I have been off of caffeine entirely for almost 15 months now. It has really improved my sleep.

Try cutting down gradually, eventually getting to a single cup in the morning. Supplement with decaf. Then just decaf. I've found I miss coffee more than cafeene now so I still drink decaf. Difference is I can sleep and don't feel the awful stress anymore.

I cut down my caffeine intake to one shot of espresso per day. (A single cup of coffee has quite a bit more caffeine than a shot.) Also, decaf helps!

As with any drug lower your dosage over time then quit.

Also, your morning fog may simply be early withdrawal symptoms.