Endurance athletes love caffeine and their heart rates are still in “Either this man’s dead or my watch has stopped” territory so exercise must be a bigger factor. No idea if there’s a tipping point, where you need to run ultramarathons to cancel out your Balzac-level caffeine intake.
That does sound scary.
Devon Price (author of Laziness Does Not Exist and *Unmasking Autism) with a long post about the decaf experience:
I drink 12-24 cups of coffee a day. My resting heart rate is high (maybe 90?) but my blood pressure has always been textbook normal. Studies show (for example) that blood pressure spikes from caffeine are temporary, so more of something to look out for in people with already-high blood pressure rather than something to worry about from people who don’t have it.
Good luck! If you need some quitting-smoking comedy to tide you over, the first chapter of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience is a classic memoir of the narrator’s many last cigarettes.
Since at least 411 BCE