The Coffee Talk
“Through drowsiness, your body is telling you that you need to rest. By drinking a caffeinated drink, you are telling it to go to hell.”
Alright.
The time has come to get this conversation out of our chests, we need to have an eye-to-eye, adult talk about coffee. Some people can’t do without it, they claim it to be their life source, other people think it’s unhealthy.
So we will explore the different attributes and effects of coffee in our systems.
Is coffee good or bad? Are you drinking too much of it? How does it keep you awake and what are the possible side-effects?
Just to be clear, when I’m talking about coffee, I’m really talking about caffeine. Coffee is just a drink, but caffeine can also be found in other sources of beverage and foods, although often in minor doses. Sodas, tea, and dark chocolate, are just a few examples.
Caffeine is defined as a stimulant, it increases the activity of the Central Nervous System, and it is one of the few classified legal drugs. By itself, caffeine doesn’t have any flavor or nutritional value, but it helps you temporarily boost your awareness and alertness, releasing noradrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin into your system.
How does it do all of this?
Caffeine really acts as a substitute for the neurotransmitter adenosine. When we are awake and functioning, a molecule called adenosine starts to slowly build up in the brain and connect with the related receptors in the neurons. Adenosine acts as an inhibitor on the neuron itself, slowing down its firing and as a consequence our level of activity, until, by the end of the day, we feel tired and ready to go to sleep.
While we sleep, our brain cleans up those receptors from the adenosine, so that when you wake up you are (hopefully) ready and alert to start another day.
Caffeine has a similar molecular structure to adenosine, so it binds with the same receptors in the brain, but by not having the same inhibitory effects, you don’t feel tired. On top of that, it occupies the space where usually adenosine binds with the neurons, caffeine acts as a blocker to adenosine.
It’s important to note that due to its lack of nutritional value, caffeine doesn’t provide you with the extra energy you perceive, it simply resorts to masking the stimulus of tiredness.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:10_caffeine_knowing-neurons.jpg
Knowing Neurons / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
But is coffee or caffeine all that bad?
It really depends on the circumstances and the person.
On low doses, coffee and caffeine can actually improve your mood and boost your productivity, but caffeine can become addictive, remember that it is still a drug after all. Your body is constantly changing and evolving to keep up to what we stress it with. As we keep absorbing caffeine, our brain will also adapt, slowly starting to create new adenosine receptors. This means that you get tired faster, and you also might need to add more coffee to reach the same buzz you got in the beginning. You slowly build up your tolerance to caffeine over time, leading to a possible (although rare) caffeine dependency. Excessive uses of caffeine can often show themselves through an irritable mood, anxiety, and insomnia. But, for the majority of people, the main danger of caffeine is that it can mess up your sleep.
Caffeine has its own life cycle when it enters the body. It reaches its peak of activation in your blood on average in 30-60 minutes after you consume it, so it acts relatively fast. But its half-life duration is of 5-7 hours, this means that after 5 hours half of the caffeine you consumed is still circulating in your system. A quarter of that caffeine can stay in your body for another 5-6 hours. If you get a cup of coffee at 2 pm, by 7 pm half of that caffeine is still active in your brain, at midnight, a quarter of that is still active, and so on. Large quantities of caffeine consumed too close to bedtime can disrupt the quantity and quality of your sleep. Considering how much your sleep cycle influences our well-being, avoiding assuming caffeine in the late afternoon/evening is usually good health advice. Even for those who claim that they can fall asleep no problem with a cup of coffee after dinner, it’s good to point out that just falling asleep isn’t enough to have quality restoration. Even if we fall asleep, caffeine can disrupt your sleep cycle, blocking your deep sleep, degrading the quality of it, and making you feel grumpy and tired when you wake up in the morning.
Caffeine is definitively also not compensation for poor sleep.
As a general guideline, for the majority of people who simply enjoy their coffee in the morning, as long as everything else is physically speaking on track, I don’t see any particular reason not to enjoy it. When analyzing our eating behavior, we also have to consider that preparing coffee in the morning is a ritual that gets your day started. So the mental benefits of preparing a cup of coffee can sometimes outweigh the small side effects.
If you ever reach a point where you need coffee to get you started, then it might be worth instead taking a look at some other aspect of your life: the quality of sleep, nutrition, stress, etc…
Drinking big quantities of coffee later in the day for long periods of time is a habit that can create issues on all of the above. Masking the symptoms of tiredness can work occasionally, but it is not a sustainable long term solution.
If coffee is creating issues, experimenting for a couple of weeks by cutting or eliminating it from your routines can be an option. When we make a change like this, we are trying to see if the thing we are cutting is the source of our discomfort. We test a hypothesis and get feedback to see if anything changes or we feel different. Everybody reacts to the same stimulus in a different way, but by experimenting you always get personalized feedback that is tailored to your body. Cutting coffee can lead to a period of tiredness for everybody, while your brain receptors are adjusting and scaling back towards a more natural state, but as with always, we’ll eventually adapt to the new routine.
Remember that my goal here is simply to share some knowledge, you can choose however you decide this to be useful for you.
With the knowledge of the previous posts put together, I would like to cover why we tend to anticipate actions. Why does going backward help us move forward, why does going down help us go up, and how does this counterintuitive idea of going in the opposite direction make us move more efficiently?