Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
nature.com
nature.com
For anyone starting to second-guess their relationship to sleep and caffeine; do note that this is a small-sample study and that more research is needed before any conclusions can be drawn with regards to the population at large.
EDIT: I'm not a medical professional (i.e a Doctor), I'm simply an engineer with domain knowledge in medicine. I am accustomed to reading studies like this. If anyone needs help interpreting the study, I'm happy to assist.
I would not be surprised if routine consumption of caffeine was at least mildly detrimental to health.
I think some drugs have managed to gain a special place in our society . Advertising and lobbying warps our perception of these drugs.
I even saw a comment in this thread suggesting that if caffeine has a prolonged affect on you, then you have some unique genetics and it's essentially your problem, not the drug. Similar to the narrative about alcohol. It's interesting to compare that attitude to the way illegal drugs that can't advertise or lobby are viewed.
I’m not a heavy coffee drinker, but I do have a cup in the mornings some time between 6:30-8:00. This makes it easy to stop as needed; there are some days where I skip it out of necessity (too busy), and occasionally I’ll go a weekend without it just to keep my tolerance in check. During these periods, I never experience adverse effects.
The main benefit I glean from coffee is not feeling awake, but notably improved ability to focus. In my experience, my baseline ability is just not as good; there’s no “bounce back” after extended periods of going without, it just stays somewhere between bad and average indefinitely.
3 years ago I took a summer and then autumn off of caffeine; my intent was to quit and only use caffeine in "times of need". This would be an on-brand thing for me to do as a person, and something I wanted pretty bad. But after 4 full months without touching any caffeine, my mood/energy levels never returned or even really rebounded any further than they did after the first month. I'm just a different person with caffeine, even after I'm addicted/habituated/develop tolerance. Notably I have a lot more energy, and I'm not a high energy person to start with. This energy allows me to better take care of myself, exercise, and be social, all things that I struggle with in its absence.
From experience, I can function fine without caffeine, even under an acute withdrawal scenario. In fact, some of my greatest achievements were done without caffeine for one reason or another. Not having caffeine just makes those things more miserable in the moment, at least for me.
I found this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2096405/ which shows a consistent improvement in tests, but the performance increase was only 4%. I'd be willing to guess that the improvement would be higher when sleepy/fatigued (up to a point!) since it would increase the alertness of the user, but I have never seen anything that suggests cocaine boosts the ability to retain information.
1) they had access to really, really pure cocaine, and
2) they used it to study for tests.
If I recall correctly, they were only using cocaine for the studying, not the test taking, and that they had good recall on tests.
For people who lack confidence or an ego, this may very well be the same thing.
Just the urge to prove myself got me far in life. Sometimes I clearly struggle more than others, especially when surrounded by extremely smart people at university, but at the end of the day I've gotten much further than those who capitulated at the very beginning, claiming they're not smart enough.
At this point I've taught things considered hard to a fair number of people, and those who give up for no objective reason at all vastly outnumber those who really (probably) can't do it. You can tell someone "it will probably take you twenty hours to understand this", and they'll still throw their hands in the air after one hour and declare they can't do it or just silently quit.
Being a quitter is as bad as being stupid. Worse, because it's also a waste.
So maybe instead of doing drugs, try to scrounge up some arrogance, confidence, pride, whatever it takes to make you hang in there.
It’s so incredibly true that even if you tell someone something’s hard and it’ll take a while to get they’re still likely to give up too early and feel inferior for not ‘getting it’. This is why almost everyone (at least in the western world) thinks they “can’t do math”.
When I left university, I started a job writing Android apps that required high-performance and low-level stuff, at the start I couldn't imagine it ever being "easy", I struggled at first to understand it all, and often wondered if I'd ever be good at it; but over time as I learned more and more of it, it got easier, then a few short years later I was a team lead, teaching others.
10+ years before this, as a child, I couldn't imagine understanding how to compile a driver for Linux and the dependencies and so on, I was tinkering with distros and reverse engineering/cracking software as a young teen, fast forward to now, I run Linux exclusively, write software targeting it exclusively and teach others as team lead (different company, different team, different role, different software, no longer client-side)
These are just two major examples that have affected my every day life, both of these things put me through immense frustration and took years to develop to "expert".
There have been others, but my take away was that I've done it before, I can always do it again, it gets a bit harder and a bit slower with age, but I've more experience underpinning anything I do try to learn (tech or otherwise) and am better at learning.
For me, it was all about proving myself, mostly to myself, and being unwilling to fail. These days, I pick and choose what it is if I don't believe I have the time or resources (or desire) to succeed, we don't have to be good at everything, just whats important; the aforementioned skills pay my bills, allow me and my family to live comfortably, etc. I could learn to play the piano (I still might), but I don't _need_ to.
High IQ correlations with life outcomes are usually pretty weak, but low IQ correlations with undesirable outcomes are very strong - I think smart people systematically underestimate how limiting it is to be not-smart.
Cocaine would be interesting too, although I've never searched for papers about it.
And what's "funny" for bankers is that the return on investment is clearly negative. It degrades your cognitive function over time, your nose if it is used by that route, your relations, etc
like every psychostimulant (caffeine as well and roughly to the same extent), short term low dose use has some positive cognitive impact, but it goes down with repeated use and/or increased doses.
in the end not really worth it if your objective is cognitive enhancement (and not talking about the societal impact in the zones of production, which at least with coffee you can control a little)
Also when you do the math on what a coke habit costs to maintain, its mind boggling. I think that in and of its self prevents a lot of would-be coke heads from establishing a habit.
For several months I took (extended release) dextroamphetamine and later lisdexamfetamine, because I was having a mental health crisis from a lifelong ignorance of ADHD(inattentive type), autism, and what was probably some sort of covid induced severe depression. This was in addition to Wellbutrin.
While I’ve not found them useful in regards to the ADHD, the amphetamines seemed to be highly effective antidepressants in my case.
The very first day I started, I felt something that wasn’t really euphoria, but more like a sense of wellbeing after months of daily spirals of passive suicidal ideation that would last for hours. But after that first day I basically felt no effects, other than not having depression. I didn’t feel good, I simply didn’t feel involuntarily bad anymore.
Other effects -I was able to find a small degree of self satisfaction after working out (with a trainer, or it would not have happened), rather than it being 100% suck during and after, with the only motivation being intellectual. It should be noted that working out had no observable benefit towards my depression. -I was somewhat more chatty if I had lapsed taking the pills and had started again. -I think it somewhat negatively affected late evening drowsiness and energy levels during the day (made me more prone to wanting naps around noon)
Eventually whatever was causing my underlying depression seemed to resolve, so I simply ceased taking the medications since there was simply no reason to continue. There is no desire to take my remaining pills, it’s just nice to have a tool known and available should I get another depression flare up. A blended mocha is far more tempting.
So I’m curious what amphetamine addiction feels like, what do they do for you that pulls at you?
It goes away quick though, and gets replaced by a cadre of horrible side effects, which makes me just want more. They also make my mind race with ideas which excites me. They are never good and never go anywhere but the racing thoughts are thrilling.
Honestly cant describe why I was so impulsive with them. Like I knew they made me feel horrible on a longer time scale but I still ate them like m&ms.
If someone gave me 2 pounds of gummi bears that were secretly caffeinated, I could see doing something similar to myself.
In occasional users this might be true, but is it true in regular users? Anecdotally, I hear far more people complaining about being completely unable to function (and I've often recognized that they're perceptibly out of it) until they've had their next cup of coffee than I have heard people talk about getting great productivity gains from it.
I don't use caffeine regularly in part to keep it available for when I really need it, and I have never once felt like I was lower functioning than my coworkers as a result—on the contrary, my energy levels seem to be far more stable throughout the workday.
Unable to function == 0 productivity. How is getting over that not effecting productivity gains?
If it's withdrawals then caffeine is creating the problem that it later solves, which means that consuming it regularly is not a net productivity gain over not using or using rarely.
The question is, does caffeine "clearly enhance" cognitive functions long-term.
For example, lots of DUI type accidents are blamed on alcohol, but it might actually be sleep deprivation that is the most fundamental cause of the accident.
In a similar way, I wonder if similar sleep-related accidents or incidents could more properly have caffeine as a root cause (after it has worn off)
Pretending caffeine is as detrimental to our society as e.g. fentanyl is prime intellectual dishonesty.
These are your words, not OP's. OP isn't claiming that caffeine is as bad as any other drug. They're claiming that it, like other drugs, is likely to have negative health effects that outweigh positive ones and that it's interesting that it gets a special place in our culture while other drugs get banned and shunned.
Nothing in that claim says that caffeine is as bad as the worst illegal drugs.
That alone is a strong and unsupported statement. Drugs frequently involve tradeoffs, but saying the negative out weighs the positive is not the same thing.
I'm sure you're right too, but it's not a particularly convincing argument. I've definitely seen behaviors that horrify me from some of the caffeine addicts in my life. I bet caffeine prohibition would lead to a rise in domestic disputes, for starters, followed by Starbucks speakeasys and coffee cartels.
People would absolutely be burglarizing homes to feed their caffeine habit if caffeine wasn't dirt cheap due to the free market. If it were legal to produce meth your local meth-head would not be raiding your house for copper because it would be cheap enough that his minimum wage job could support his habit.'
And frankly I've showed up to important events absolutely fucking geeked on caffeine, feeling like complete dogshit, but because caffeine use is normalized no one bats an eye.
Those behaviors are not conducive to holding down most jobs. If our society did more work educating and supporting people in productively integrating their use of drugs into a functional lifestyle, maybe it would be less of a problem. Certainly there are some ways people could use meth that are positive. But I still think there's something about meth that makes it more likely to ruin lives than caffeine.
I've only ever been addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and while my withdrawal symptoms were terrible (almost-disabling headaches, anxiety, etc) I don't think they were ever so bad that it would make me violent.
As opposed to people I knew that were addicted to cocaine and meth which would go absolutely crazy for their next fix. In the particular case of the person that was addicted to cocaine, money was not an issue and would still become violent when the fix was not available, so I don't think it's necessarily a function of price or access to it.
Of course, my sample size is very small but given that I also know a ton of people that quit cigarettes and caffeine without becoming violent, I would say withdrawal symptoms are probably a strong component on how violent people get.
I'm about as caffeinated as most anyone else I know, and I would not. There are times where just putting on a pot of coffee is too much work for me to make my daily fix and I lazily skip it for the day.
I do get withdrawal headaches and probably behave a bit differently, but even then sometimes I don't make the effort to get it. I've been at conference and hotels where the only options were so badly made I skipped it for days and just took the headache.
240mg of caffeine for breakfast! Certainly!
Yes and no. I've been a fan of caffeine pills for years. They are very cheap, readily available (portable), and most importantly to me offer completely consistent dosing. With caffeine pills I'm able to ensure I stay below the FDA recommended maximum daily intake of 400 mg (worst case). Another fun bonus - when a physician asks you what your caffeine intake is and you respond in milligrams they look at you funny.
Otherwise I completely agree with you. Every time I'm at an airport, etc I marvel at how many caffeine addicts are standing in line at Starbucks for however long ready to drop $10 (or whatever it costs) for a beverage with a completely unknown and highly variable dose of what is fundamentally a drug. Doubly so for variations that have other negative things like adulterations and calories.
Caffeine is a drug and should be treated as such. If you were taking any other drug (over the counter or RX) would anyone tolerate "today it's 100 mg, tomorrow it's 400 mg"?
Caffeine pills are more like take a pill, wait X minutes, and then get the sensation of “oh, there it is” as it all “hits” at once.
There are more expensive time release variants but I don’t have much experience with them.
A quarter tab with a glass of cold water should hit slower than the same amount of caffeine pre-dissolved in an espresso. Likely matches up with a quickly downed coffee.
From time to time, I put a tab in a sodastream seltzer/sodawater (and wow does it make the bubbles release!)
In addition to your caffeine, you get a “healthy” dose of synthetic sugar (aka Sucralose) [1] and other crap added by the drink company to market it as “healthy”
Personally, I can’t stand those drinks. Every “0 calorie, 0 sugar” drink is nearly identical in ingredients. Some use different forms of synthetic sugar. The taste is off putting.
Sure, there _might_ not be a glycemic spike but at what cost that has not been studied?
- what’s the impact to gut microbiome?
- what’s the impact to other human physiology? (Increased cancer risk?)
I’ll take my risk with real sugar and just limit the consumption to very sparingly.
Have you considered that those people queuing outside Starbucks might be drinking coffee because they enjoy the whole experience? Caffeine pills are an absurdity to me because I only drink coffee for the taste. Why suffer the unwanted effects of a drug without the enjoyment that it’s supposed to come with?
these are literally toxic & you get a natural avoidance response the 1° time you try, with very rare cases of acceptance without repulse
Multiple tries of something can lead to different experiences by tweaking different factors.
In the end, some things we just don't like, but one try is not necessarily a good sample.
This applies to almost everything. Music is a good example, someone who has only grown up listening to folk music will likely find death metal incredibly hard to listen to, but they may find folk metal a little bit relatable.
Same goes for art, when the classical artists first came out with super realistic portraits, many people found them ugly and repulsive, because they were so different than what came before. Then when things got more abstract, the same reaction occurred.
This is also why people may not like a new song until they have heard it a bunch of times, then it can become one of their favorites! It lights up the "I know this thing" pathways in the brain.
Well food is the same. People from cultures that don't eat cheese are not likely to enjoy a super stinky cheese to start with, but you can likely give them a mozzarella or a super mild Brie and they'll be fine with it (possibly after trying it a few times). Then after their brain gets used to "this is brie cheese, and it is pretty good" they may end up enjoying a slightly more aged/funkier brie cheese, and after a few years down that path they can be eating a wide variety of soft cheeses.
This is why trying food again is worthwhile.
Let me give an example.
My wife used to hate lamb. An American style lamb roast[1] was atrocious to her.
Then one day at a friends house we had super thin cut highly seasoned grilled cumin lamb. It is a completely different taste than a lamb roast. She liked it.
So after a few times of having that dish, that she was open to trying some other lamb dishes, but always highly seasoned and cut into small chunks. These other dishes she did not like before, but now she found that she did.
Her brain had adopted the idea that "small pieces of highly seasoned lamb taste good".
> I don’t like it and will never again knowingly try it.
There is plenty of horrible cabbage out there. Like, awful stuff that I would not want to eat.
But a Korean kimchi cabbage is a lot different than a Vietnamese pickled cabbage which is a lot different than sauerkraut which is a lot different that cabbage fried in bacon fat.
Seriously if you are a person who likes bacon, try some thin sliced cabbage fried in bacon fat. I know people who hate sauerkraut, but who love crispy fried cabbage.
It also depends on the type of cabbage, and there are lots of types. Different types of cabbage are as different as grapefruits are to oranges, if someone hates grapefruit they should still give oranges a try. And if someone hates lemon juice they should still try orange popsicles! (and maybe that person hates all citrus fruits equally, but they won't know until they try more than 1!)
But I also have food that I just cannot eat w/o puking it right back out. Mushrooms are my weakness, but only certain types of mushrooms. Pretty much every type of mushroom used in western cuisine makes me sick, but I am fine eating enoki mushrooms or wood ear mushrooms, and I'm glad I gave both a try despite my vomiting reaction to button/portobello mushrooms!
[1] TBF American style lamb roasts are a waste of a perfectly good lamb.
1. Some % of the time, my first experience will not be like the others.
2. I will not be the same person the next time I try something.
If your strategy works for you and you don't feel limited, that's great! Many people do feel limited if they only ate things they liked the first time. I am very happy that I eat bell peppers, onions, yoghurt, coffee, and (less happy due to calories) beer. If I only ate what I liked when I first tried it as a kid, I would be eating a lot of cheese pizza, candy, soda, and ice cream.
For me, the biggest example is sushi. I didn't like it all the first time mostly because of the texture of the raw fish. Eating it with somebody who knew a lot about it changed everything for me. Now going to a great sushi restaurant is one of my very favorite things to do.
If you only try each thing once and give up, you’ll get stuck in a local flavour maximum.
Basically, what I’m saying is: it’s perfectly possible that the best experiences you can have are those that require a certain amount of less-pleasant experiences preceding them. You can stick with the medium-level experiences and you’ll never try anything bad twice, but you’ll also never discover things that might change your life.
Just because you don’t like something one time doesn’t mean you wouldn’t in the future. You’d miss out on many great experiences this way.
Alcohol is a little different. Beer I loved from my first sip when I was probably 5 or 6. Whisky, gin, vodka, etc... I mostly didn't like until I learned a little bit more about the drinks and the flavors that alcohol can carry (it's why cooking with alcohol can be amazing).
My life with vegetables is similar. As a kid I thought there was nothing more vile than broccoli and brussel sprouts. I thought tomatoes were gross and grapefruit was pure poison. As an adult, I've learned to love all that stuff.
Palates change.
but yeah, palate differs when you grow up; now if it's because social influence or effects from the substance, i dunno? but on taste & food (which for me it's different than a toxic substance); bitter/sour is rarely pleasurable for first timers and i can't deny that i'm in love with right after starting to ferment my stuff :)
Not the OP, but to respond to your question I think that Starbucks is actually hitting its customers with a triple-whammy of caffeine, sugar, and fat that most brains can't resist addiction to. Are you sure they actually enjoy Starbucks coffee and not its addictive components?
That's the same thing. Enjoying the components of something is basically the definition of enjoying something.
I think for a lot of people buying a "special" coffee/thing at Starbucks squeezes that "I'm treating myself" gland just right.
For decades I only drank decaf and only in the past few years I have replaced my morning cup with regular coffee because it's so much easier (and cheaper!) to find good beans.
In other words, there are good reasons to consume caffeinated coffee besides an addiction to caffeine.
a) Go through a process of making espresso (yay coffee toys^Wtools)
b) Just want to drink some coffee because of its taste
I eye-ball how much caffeine I consume and cut-off myself waaaay before the guideline and 10 hours before target bedtime. Given that caffeine half life is about 5 hours it works out perfectly. However, if still want coffee due to any of the reasons above - I make decaff.
One of them is reading this comment right now and thinking about adding "appreciate coffee" to their calendar.
I totally agree about opening times! Starbucks is often the only place open after 5 or so.
hard to get good decaf though, it seems to me like trying to buy diet donuts.
The problem isn’t really the removal of compounds, as far as I can tell, but moreso the change to the bean composition itself. Because the porosity increases so much roasting the decaf beans is much more difficult. Additionally, beans grind differently due to their porosity and brittleness.
Basically, this means both the roaster and the grinder of the beans (and preparer of the coffee) need to change their behaviors slightly.
Then, at the end of it, the coffee stales much faster so it’ll go bad faster.
But at the same time sometimes it is a little bit like that - some might like the consistency of caffeine pills, they sure were helpful for me. Others just won't like the taste of coffee that much, I know that I usually go for something with lactose free milk and sugar, otherwise it's a bit unpalatable and too bitter. I don't necessarily have a good taste in coffee anyways, the instant stuff is good enough for me.
Similarly, I'd like to replace maybe 10-20% of my food intake or something with powdered fibre and protein (or something else) to hopefully feel a little less hungry without resorting to high calorie options, because right now I'm getting fat and the hunger I feel is straight up stronger than my willpower at times. Vegetables alone or other healthy snacks do absolutely nothing for that, sucks to have to deal with that. Years ago I had no problem with "starving" myself when needed and maintaining whatever weight felt good, now I no longer have that ability as much.
On the other hand, calling people who enjoy the taste or the experience of getting a fancy drink "caffeine addicts" is unkind and we'd do perfectly fine without belittling others. If they like their fancy drinks, that's cool!
I started drinking coffee at 26 because I got so tired after lunch that I almost passed out on my keyboard at work. This disappeared with the coffee intake. After years (I’m 42) I still don’t like the taste and don’t drink it at night or on weekends/holidays.
In fact, once you find a nice quality brand, it’s actually a delicious coffee replacement.
Not really the same taste (but a nice one too) but it sounds like the likeliness of the color and of the bitterness does the job of tricking my brain into considering it’s the same thing, at least "emotionally".
Now I just like them both and I can swap them when I want.
That's how drugs work, they throw a kind of spell on you, so that, from your trippy perspective, you think that you're not addicted.
If I'm going to a coffee shop to drop $7, it's not because I'm an addict, it's because I want to splurge on a sweet dessert.
I also sometimes buy ice cream at the grocery, for the same reason.
I'm assuming you eat nothing but bread and water, unadulterated by anything that makes food delicious.
So do you take them to maintain alertness as anyone else would with coffee, to boost nootropics, or none of the above? Sorry for being nosey but this is interesting to me, because if I'm away from my machine and going to an unknown place then I take my portable handheld espresso machine and already ground beans, but a simple tablet sounds WAY more convenient!!
afaik melatonin. Not super happy about it but it is what it is, giving it up has a high cost too.
I believe Starbucks is selling sugar under the guise of caffeine.
I like coffee because it's a warm beverage, it tastes nice and of course there is the added benefit of the caffeine in the morning. That's about it.
There's no way I would be getting close to 400mg of caffeine and doing so by pills is something I marvel at.
I would say the majority of people drinking a normal cup of coffee (standard latte) a couple of times a day aren't getting anywhere near 400mg of caffeine. One shot of espresso is lucky to have 80mg of caffeine in it.
You mean, sugar ?
A vast majority of the "coffee" drinkers you witness are consuming something that is indistinguishable from an ice-cream sunday.
Would that they were just consuming caffeine ... they would be much, much better off.
Both black coffee and tea have several well documented health benefits.
Even caffeine in isolation can probably have benefits when used correctly.
More like, our own preference and enjoyment of the drugs compared to their detriments constructs our perception of these drugs.
Coffee, alcohol, pain killers, etc. These are all drugs that give the user enjoyment with very little down sides. This means that society has reserved a place for them.
What I don't like is that it has encouraged the grind of people working far longer and harder than they should for no reason except economic gain which is fundamnetally unsustainable. When people feel tired, they should take a break, and not develop a habit of drinking caffeine every day to keeep going. It's an unhealthy society and reinforces the message that economic gain is important above all else.
I don’t think people should have to sell their labor for a wage in order to live. I wonder what happens to your opinions about caffeine in a society where owners have little to no leverage over workers, or where the workers are generally also the owners.
To illustrate that large-scale freedom, ownership, and autonomy do not result in labor camps, I provided Mondragon as a productive counter-example.
Mondragon is a federation of worker-owned cooperatives that netted €593 million on €11 billion in revenue in 2023, and which did not make use of a forced labor camp or prison system to achieve these results. Instead, they use widely distributed equity ownership and democratic control of the workplace to create a good work environment and a healthy culture.
Since the comment I was replying to did not invest any words in supporting their comparison of worker ownership with a system of forced labor camps, I responded in spirit, inviting them with a minimum of words and effort to investigate possible counter-examples to their mental model.
We should give those who choose not to sell their labor the ability to go and live without buying and consuming the labor of others.
Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_coffee_crisis
Some people swear by drinking a shot of espresso right after dinner, claiming that they can "sleep just fine" (or that it even calms them). It's not whether you can or cannot fall asleep, it's how deep and restorative your sleep is that is important here.
And if I do, I actually prefer it since it allows me to go on for days without a break discovering solutions to very hard problems.
They should. The relationship between caffeine and mood disorders like anxiety is incompletely understood. Caffeine may help some, particularly at lower doses [1]. However some studies find that the effect on anxiety is minimal or doesn’t occur [2]. Caffeine seems to improve psychological well-being at a minimum [3]. There may be a self-medication element between ADHD and caffeine too, though the data isn’t good [3]. The interactions with medications is also complex and hard to control for due to the large number of caffeine users.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38362247/
I honestly can't tell at this point if the coffee is helping me focus and I have ADD or if I am just lazy(or depressed) and the coffee is helping get me motivated.
I was using caffeine to mask my burnout. Needless to say, it only exacerbated the total feeling of burnout, and "helped" only short-term. It took me a long time to get out of the burnout, and I'm still feeling the effects. It would have been much healthier to not mask the burnout, but deal with it right there and then.
But what if that's not possible? What if you're in the middle of getting a degree or need to financially support your family and can't take a break from work. Any insight into what "dealing with it" means for you?
Ill change the last bit -- "or if I am just tired and the coffee solves my cold start problem"
As I have experienced when regularly (but not often) working a 36-hour day, I wouldn't do it if it wasn't proven to be well within reach, but it's no breeze if you are the least bit tired and not fully prepared beforehand, especially when it comes to nutrition and not having anything toxic in your system.
This is completely different than regularly losing sleep every night in a habitual way, which could also be considered somewhat along the lines of everyday exposure to toxic materials, whether toxins enter the body intentionally or not.
Don't ask me how I know what it feels like when exposure to different milligrams of different pure industrial chemicals having known toxicity occurs in spite of state-of-the art workplace controls and PPE. I've been working these truly chemical labs all my life. Eventually I felt like I was guinea-pigging caffeine too, and it's old as the hills.
The default in many cultures is to be born into a caffeine-addicted society, steeped in excess habitual ritual in a way which encourages never-ending tradition. This is over and above the physical & emotional habit-forming nature of the drug itself.
Anyway, culture can be real strong, and I enjoyed being a caffeine addict. It actually takes quite a bit of effort if you want to completely withdraw from its pervasive and widespread exposure, whether commercial influence is involved or not. It's everywhere.
With everyday use you build up a tolerance like anything else, and in the long run it really doesn't make a difference whether you lose an hour of sleep every night or get an extra hour, you always feel the same and have the same energy so it must be working, right? Maybe that's supposed to be a red flag.
Now when you're actually a pretty good addict, you never overdo it, you're never jittery or considered extreme like a 20-cup-a-day habit which can't be that bad either when so many of them seem to do just fine.
But way below any extreme consumption, you can still end up with a fairly late-night dose which actually relaxes you and then you drop off to sleep like you habitually do. Actually without it you might be a little anxious otherwise. It's just your body calling out for what it needs to be normal, due to the current level of tolerance you have built up.
Hey wait a minute, wasn't I enjoying this to begin with for it's stimulant effect?
Too late, that effect has left the building.
This is the part that leads studies like this to less-conclusive results.
For me with nothing in the bloodstream almost ever any more (and after all the dust has settled), there's only slightly more energy than being a mainstream addict. I attribute it to the relatively small amount of toxic pressure exerted by the less-than-gram quantities of caffeine I was metabolizing. Yes, I have more energy without it in my system but it's not a miracle and I'm sure many people would not think it's worth it. It's not that toxic, believe me so many things are much worse.
But when I need to go another 12 hours, one cup of coffee will do it.
Never could be a consideration back when I had a tolerance, stronger stimulants wouldn't even help.
Real sleep is the only answer then, you just can't push to the max whenever you really want when you're already strung out.
One of the things that makes the 48-hour study more conclusive about usefulness best practices.
This was their reference 3:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?&title=Randomized%2...
I encourage anyone to give it a try a few weeks and see how they feel. You may not realize what you thought is your baseline is in fact caused by caffeine sensitivity. I heard of some people being sensitive to caffeine but I never thought it would affect me, after all I did not have that bad of a reaction but it really built up and I had gotten used to it.
I drank coffee for years and don't think it had an impact, but at some point, I noticed it and the impact was very real when not drinking it.
In summary, my conclusion is that I prefer drinking coffee (max 2-3 small cups daily, in the morning) than not.
Still, I'd like to try the experiment again in the future and stop caffeine for a longer period this time (3 months?).
Edit: I'm a slow metabolizer (rs762551 = AC).
A genome sequence shows I'm a slow metaboliser (I expect more will show up with more research).
I feel terrific now.
I need to cap at 2 espressos per day before noon at most, or I start suffering side effects like poor sleep quality. People really need to reframe their coffee consumption from food to drug and understand their own usage and effects of said drug.
I strongly recommend Barleycup as an alternative morning cuppa.
Alternatively, you might be prone to migraines, and thus are sensitive to headaches of all kinds. That's me, I truly hope that's not you (wouldn't wish that upon anyone).
The headaches are reliably cured within maybe 20-40 minutes by application of more caffeine, so I don't think they are migraines.
This study hints that it specifically doesn't benefit gray matter volume during periods of sleep restriction, at least in the short term.
I wonder if substances like Ashwagandha extract or Magnesium L-threonate could mitigate gray matter loss during short term sleep restriction among caffeine drinkers.
I’m curious why you asked about Ashwagandha ahd magnesium? They seem to be THE supplements du jour, which is a pretty weird concept. There is a lot of grift going on, and little recognition of the potential negative health impacts of both.
I take magnesium daily, including the regular dose of Magnesium L-threonate, and my last CMP showed serum levels within range.
Maybe super large medical doses beyond even those used for eclampsia would affect heart conduction, or those who take way more than what supplement bottles recommend.
I'm not sure what studies have conclusively shown Ashwagandha to be safe only up to 3 months. I get most of my herbal data from Examine.com (PhD academics that analyze data), where they say:
"Some case reports have suggested adverse effects such as rash or thyroid dysregulation may occur with ashwagandha use, but the same has not yet been observed by safety studies with larger samples.[38][39][35] Several case reports have also raised concerns regarding the rare occurrence of liver toxicity with ashwagandha use, but similarly, toxicity has not been observed in clinical safety trials. In the reports, liver toxicity was usually reported within 2–12 weeks of ashwagandha use, and liver function returned to normal in all but one case following medical support and ashwagandha discontinuation.[40][41][42][43][44][45] An in vitro study suggested that withanone (one type of withanolide in ashwagandha), may have toxic effects in the context of low levels of the cellular antioxidant glutathione (GSH), which is involved in drug detoxification.[46] However, this research is far from conclusive and the mechanisms underlying this possible adverse effect are unclear."
Sleep is similar. We speak of "night owls" and such, but most discussion around the varied needs of sleep are age targeted. With most discussion on how we should let kids sleep longer.
I have this super weird thing where I'm hyper-sensitive to caffeine, and its effects will hit me sometimes 6+ hours later.
If I have a cup of coffee in the late morning, it will keep me up most of the night, and a single cup of coffee will make me manic-ish.
People have (doctors included) told me that what I was experiencing was impossible, that caffeine in metabolized in a certain way and completely out of your system quickly.
Turns out, that's true with most people, unless you have a variant in the CYP1A2 gene, which can cause the effects I experience.
Abstract:
> Evidence has shown that both sleep loss and daily caffeine intake can induce changes in grey matter (GM). Caffeine is frequently used to combat sleepiness and impaired performance caused by insufficient sleep. It is unclear (1) whether daily use of caffeine could prevent or exacerbate the GM alterations induced by 5-day sleep restriction (i.e. chronic sleep restriction, CSR), and (2) whether the potential impact on GM plasticity depends on individual differences in the availability of adenosine receptors, which are involved in mediating effects of caffeine on sleep and waking function. Thirty-six healthy adults participated in this double-blind, randomized, controlled study (age = 28.9 ± 5.2 y/; F:M = 15:21; habitual level of caffeine intake < 450 mg; 29 homozygous C/C allele carriers of rs5751876 of ADORA2A, an A2A adenosine receptor gene variant). Each participant underwent a 9-day laboratory visit consisting of one adaptation day, 2 baseline days (BL), 5-day sleep restriction (5 h time-in-bed), and a recovery day (REC) after an 8-h sleep opportunity. Nineteen participants received 300 mg caffeine in coffee through the 5 days of CSR (CAFF group), while 17 matched participants received decaffeinated coffee (DECAF group). We examined GM changes on the 2nd BL Day, 5th CSR Day, and REC Day using magnetic resonance imaging and voxel-based morphometry. Moreover, we used positron emission tomography with [18F]-CPFPX to quantify the baseline availability of A1 adenosine receptors (A1R) and its relation to the GM plasticity. The results from the voxel-wise multimodal whole-brain analysis on the Jacobian-modulated T1-weighted images controlled for variances of cerebral blood flow indicated a significant interaction effect between caffeine and CSR in four brain regions: (a) right temporal-occipital region, (b) right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DmPFC), (c) left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and (d) right thalamus. The post-hoc analyses on the signal intensity of these GM clusters indicated that, compared to BL, GM on the CSR day was increased in the DECAF group in all clusters but decreased in the thalamus, DmPFC, and DLPFC in the CAFF group. Furthermore, lower baseline subcortical A1R availability predicted a larger GM reduction in the CAFF group after CSR of all brain regions except for the thalamus. In conclusion, our data suggest an adaptive GM upregulation after 5-day CSR, while concomitant use of caffeine instead leads to a GM reduction. The lack of consistent association with individual A1R availability may suggest that CSR and caffeine affect thalamic GM plasticity predominantly by a different mechanism. Future studies on the role of adenosine A2A receptors in CSR-induced GM plasticity are warranted.
Perhaps it serves an important protective or regulatory purpose which we haven't yet identified, because we still know so little about sleep and consciousness.
An analogy: There are lots of systems in your body that try to prevent and deter you from casually walking on a damaged leg, and we can override some of them with various external drugs, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.
Maybe with chronic deprivation + caffeine habit, you're weakening your cognitive function - repeatedly using a misfiring neuron. At least, with no caffeine, you'd feel your memory is hazy and hard to recall, go to sleep.
I love my work from home because i started sleeping in on wednesday if i had a shitty night.
For nearly a decade i was super tired after wednesday
Ever since I've adopted this strategy, I find myself avoiding a mid-morning crash, and generally feeling more alert in the mornings. I wonder if the deleterious impact on grey matter could be mitigated in part by delaying consumption until fully awake.
Know Your Limits: Everyone’s different when it comes to coffee tolerance. This study found that how your brain reacts to caffeine can depend on your genes—specifically, something about adenosine receptors. So, pay attention to how much caffeine you can handle, especially when you’re short on shut-eye.
Catch Those Zs: Don’t skimp on recovery sleep. After a brutal week, make sure to get some solid, uninterrupted sleep to bounce back. It helps counteract the rough effects of those sleepless nights and may even undo some of the caffeine-induced brain changes.
Was this a vacation? Was this study done at a resort? During push times I aspire to 5-hour sleep times. Talk to anyone in any branch of the military. During any sort of active operation, 5-hours in bed is total luxury. Or fishers. Or cops. Or food service workers. Or doctors.
The average expresso doesn't do much.
Also if you are already feeling well, it's unlikely you will feel a big difference unless you consume a high dosage of caffeine, which can also cause you some anxiety.
Caffeine is great when we are feeling low energy or sleepy.
> In conclusion, our data suggest an adaptive GM upregulation after 5-day CSR, while concomitant use of caffeine instead leads to a GM reduction.
I'm not sure what to take away from that. It sounds bad, though.
The study was on 5 days of 5-hr sleep only. How does caffeine affect 8-hrs sleep?