Caffeine, Friend or Foe?


One thing's for sure: Americans love their coffee. According to the National Coffee Association, we drink an average of 3.1 cups a day and spend a total of 40 billion dollars every year on it. We depend on our caffeine, for that boost in the morning or for an after-lunch second wind.

What you might not know is that the buzz you feel after slamming a latte is not actually the caffeine.

Adenosine, the circadian rhythm hormone that helps usher in sleep, starts as a slow trickle when you wake up in the morning and slowly builds in your system so that by nightfall, you're ready for a little shut-eye. Caffeine is adenosine's doppelgänger, essentially mimicking its shape and grabbing up all the adenosine receptors when it hits your brain.

Once the adenosine supply is cut off, the naturally occurring stimulants dopamine and glutamate act like a couple of kids with mom and dad on vacation, which is to say: it's party time. That surge of energy is just your dopamine and glutamate going wild.

Caffeine hits your adenosine receptors within fifteen minutes of ingestion and remains in the bloodstream for a full 24 hours. It has what's called a six-hour half life, which means a cup of coffee after lunch will still retain half its potency by bedtime. Although it might give you a temporary pick-me-up, enough of it can greatly disrupt your REM cycle sleep, leaving you emotionally spent the next morning. Your solution? Another cup of coffee.

Once your brain catches onto the pattern, it starts producing more and more adenosine receptors to offset the caffeine. This means you have to keep ratcheting up your intake to get the same high. You are now in a mini arms race of escalation, doing battle with your own brain.

It's like any other addictive drug. In "Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Emotional Intelligence", Travis Bradberry explains what happens when people try to quit: "The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating.  Some people report feeling flu-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety after reducing intake by as little as one cup a day."

When it comes to sleep, caffeine is not your pal.

But stop the presses. As Gary L. Wenk writes in Your Brain on Food, coffee itself is an excellent source of phenols, substances that function as both anti-oxidants and anti-carcinogens. He cites preliminary studies that suggest drinking 3 to 5 cups a day (decaf counts) has a positive effect on Parkinson's disease and prostrate disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Two or three espressos can also get the job done, he notes. Of course, two or three espressos can also keep you up all night, smoking cigarettes and ordering truckloads of ShamWow.

In the end, it looks like coffee might be a much better friend than caffeine alone will ever be, and decaf might actually be your BFF.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more