It’s Southern Hemisphere winter now, and the nights are longer and colder and the days are shorter and darker. There are a lot of stressed people around, trying to squeeze too much day out of too little energy. And one of the strategies they’re using, of course, is to drink a lot of coffee.
photo credit: SuperFantastic
I’ve never been a coffee drinker. I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t even like the smell of coffee, so the current fashion for drinking fancy coffees has passed me by completely. Nor do I like substances that change my mental state. I prefer to do that for myself.
So what do I do when I want to be more alert? How can I possibly get through a busy day without a cup of coffee?
Before I answer that, I’d like to discuss the findings of a study just published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Peter J. Rogers and colleagues. What they did was take 162 people who consumed little or no caffeine and 217 people who were medium/high caffeine consumers. They told them not to consume caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either two doses of caffeine 90 minutes apart, or two doses of a neutral placebo.
The participants gave a self-rating of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after the first dose and after the second dose.
Before I discuss the results, let’s briefly talk about how caffeine works. The study refers to it as an “adenosine A1 and A2A receptor antagonist”, which just means that it’s about the same shape as a signalling chemical in your brain called adenosine, and it can fit into the receptors for adenosine and block adenosine itself from connecting there and giving the brain its signal. And what adenosine signals is that you’re getting tired. It’s a product of processes in your body which lead to fatigue.
So caffeine blocks off the signal from your body to your brain that tells you you’re getting tired. It doesn’t give you any extra energy; it just hides from you the fact that you’re running low. It’s a bit like disconnecting the lead from your fuel tank to your fuel gauge. It doesn’t give you more fuel. It just prevents you from realising that you don’t have much left.
Back to the results of the study. The scientists already knew that a particular genetic variation in the receptors for adenosine (the signalling chemical I just mentioned) increases the anxiety-producing side effect of caffeine. What the scientists were actually trying to find out was whether this genetic factor also affected the amount of caffeine people would habitually drink, and whether drinking it regularly would reduce the anxiety-producing effect.
What they discovered was that drinking more caffeine reduced the anxiety effect for everyone, regardless of genetics (the brain presumably adjusts itself after a while). But it’s their other conclusion that is receiving press coverage. They found no increase in alertness from caffeine. The no-or-low consumption group didn’t become more alert, and the medium-to-high group went from being less alert because of caffeine withdrawal effects to being as alert as they would have been if they hadn’t been coffee drinkers.
So, let’s sum up. Caffeine isn’t increasing your energy, it’s just hiding from you the fact that you’re low on energy – disconnecting your mind from your body, which in my personal view is one of the biggest problems of the modern West, but I’ll forcibly restrain myself from that rant for now. Ahem.
It’s not increasing your energy, and it’s not increasing your alertness. It only feels like it’s increasing your alertness because the withdrawal symptoms make you less alert, and having the caffeine takes you back to where you would have been without it.
So “caffeine to wake you up and give you more energy and alertness” is a big con, an illusion. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why people drink it – for the taste, for the social connection, for the break, even for the warmth. But if you’re drinking coffee (or tea) for increased energy and alertness, the news is all bad.
I said I’d tell you what I do instead, didn’t I? I’ve just started a new practice in the mornings. What I do is set my alarm a little bit earlier, and spend 10 minutes doing a concentration meditation. All I do is use my simple meditation method, but tweak it by focussing strongly on the word that I say with each outbreath – paying attention to it, and returning to it if I find my mind wandering off at all.
This wakes my mind up and focusses it. Then throughout the day, and especially at the end of the day, I practice letting go of tension, stress and anxiety – all the things that eat my energy if I let them. The answer to “I don’t have enough energy” isn’t “let’s pretend I do” but “what can I do to waste less?”
I don’t have time to go into the letting-go techniques in depth here, but there’s a lot more in my upcoming Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. By following that link I just gave you, you can get in on my special Beat The Rush List – meaning you’ll be among the first to know when it’s available and you’ll be eligible for a substantial discount before it gets released to the general public. It’s fashionable to compare the price of things to cups of coffee – if you’re on the Beat The Rush list, the price of the Toolkit will be not very many cups of coffee at all.
Technorati Tags: caffeine, coffee, energy, alertness, concentration, meditation, anxiety
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