What Caffeine Really Does to Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

What Caffeine Really Does to Your Brain

forbes.com

63 pointsiProject51 comments

One thing that a lot of these kinds of articles don't mention is that tolerance effects in drugs tend to be at least somewhat dosage dependent, and there is some evidence that this is the case with caffeine[1]. Look at amphetamines, for example; at large doses they have a large tolerance effect and are highly addictive. At small doses the tolerance effect is smaller, and they are non-addictive, yet still therapeutic against disorders like ADHD.

It's reasonable, therefore, to suppose that there should be a "sweet spot" for caffeine use, where the tolerance you build is small, but the effects are still significant.

It's also worth mentioning that "tolerance" is not an all or nothing thing. With nicotine and amphetamines, there is a tolerance effect, but some of the effects of those drugs actually become stronger with regular use (and this is believed to play a role in the formation of addictions to those substances)[2]. So while tolerance and withdrawal are real problems, it is a myth that addicts merely return to the baseline in all respects when exposed to the drug they're addicted to.

In any case, if you are bothered by caffeine side effects, you might want to get some theanine. It's cheap, relatively flavorless, and when used in a 2:1 ratio with caffeine, it's been shown to reduce the side effects of caffeine[3], while adding some other cognitive benefits besides what you get from caffeine alone[3][4].

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00913057889...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14592678

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18006208

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18681988

I second Theanine. Personally I've been taking it before my morning coffee and I notice that I am less jittery and less stressful, while still having that caffeine high. I will even take it alone sometimes before a high stress situations and it helps with the nerves.

I oftentimes choose to consume Green Tea or Matcha as they contain a varying amount of natural Theanine.

That said these are anecdotal and could very likely be the placebo effect.

Absolutely agreed. I've been drinking coffee for about 3-4 years now on and off, but for long periods. One cup of coffee has always been enough to have me wired for quite a while.

The importance and effectiveness of caffeine has a lot to do with your job and lifestyle. If you are a mostly sedentary computer worker, the lack of blood circulation from sitting all day is going to make you super tired and slow your brain down. If you're a more active person, either from daily exercise, standing up at work, or a more physically strenuous job you're going to have more maintained energy levels as your body consumes and uses food and pumps blood harder.

Caffeine in either of these situations is going to enable your body to squeeze out more energy but for the person with more active blood flow and metabolism it's probably going to be overkill and they'll be able to get through the day without constant yawning. On the other hand, if you sit for 8 hours you're going to feel almost extreme tiredness towards the end of the day especially if you over consume for lunch.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to have a good energetic, drug free day, you should be taking steps to eat well and keep your blood flow up.

Also, when considering the effects of drugs on your body, all anecdotal evidence, like this comment, should really be regarded with extreme scrutiny if not disregarded all together. A good place to begin learning about caffeine would be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Health_effects

Another anecdote, this is mine:

I made a change in my lifestyle and I can work faster and for about three times the hours I was working before that.

My lifestyle change is not related to caffeine, I stopped eating lots of carbs and now I follow a keto diet.

YMMV, etc.

This is interesting, but the article just explains the benefits of coffee. What are the downsides? I would like to hear why he quit.

Exactly. The conclusion seems to be: Caffeine does not directly give you energy, so don't abuse it with the hope of having an endless supply of energy.

Okay.

Dr. Andrew Weil says, "On the down side are coffee's well-documented side effects: anxiety, insomnia, tremor and irregular heartbeat. It can also irritate the digestive system, bladder and prostate."

http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400146/Is-Coffee-Good-For-You...

I realized as soon as I posted that I could just google it. But the guy did a good job explaining the underlying science between caffeine highs, I would have liked him to explain the negatives as well.

There's also a lot of interesting data coming up mildly positive on Caffeine health benefits in the literature.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=caffeine%20cancer http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21907331 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19581722

Moderate caffeine intake is on track to be firmly in the green for most people. However, not everyone metabolizes and reacts to it identically, so the author of the article in question may be one of those people who does not get a lot of benefits.

But there is this funny idea floating around that caffeine is carcinogenic and long-term use may cause cognitive impairment, and there is very little evidence for that.

From a sheet I used to keep:

Caffeine:

Stimulant/Vasoconstrictor/dopaminergic

half-life: ~5 hours

Fat + water soluble

Ideal dosage < 200mg; 50-100mg per day

Benefits: boosts working memory, reduces re-uptake and increases production of dopamine, improves alertness, attention span, memory retrieval, acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

Downside: increased blood pressure and sustained high levels of heart rate, adesonine reuptake inhibitor and mildly addictive through dopaminegic pathways, acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

Synergistic with: theanine, sulbutiamine

Possibly: antioxidant effect+, MAO A and B inhibitor+ , protective vs Parkinson's+, damaging to hippocampus- , damaging to short term retrieval of unrelated tasks-

Decision: Minimize usage to less than weekly.

A few years ago I traded being permanently sleep deprived and drinking tons of coffee (which I love) for always sleeping 8 hours per night. My productivity has been very consistent and stronger than ever since. No more boom and bust cycles.

This has nothing to do with coffee and much more to do with regular sleep.

Neither of which are mutually exclusive.

Caffeine can certainly interfere with one's ability to maintain a consistent sleep cycle.

Yep. I used to have very vivid dreams (indicative of light sleep) and wake up often. Ever since I stopped drinking caffeine (coffee, energy drinks, and to a lesser extent, tea), my sleep has been deep and uninterrupted.

True, and I believe partly because people underestimate some time-related aspects. They seem to vary a lot person to person, but a few bits:

1. Peak blood caffeine levels come about an hour after ingestion, at least for coffee. So a 3pm coffee, for example, is really hitting its peak closer to 4pm.

2. Biological half-life is anywhere from 3 to 6 hours, and that's counting from peak blood levels, so it's more like 4-7 hours considering #1. So if you have two cups of coffee at 3pm, you might still have a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine in the blood stream well into the evening. Much worse if you had 3 or 4 cups in the afternoon.

My guess is that there will be less sleep disruption if you stick to no more than 2 cups of coffee, no later than mid-morning, which should give enough time for most of it to be eliminated by evening. But not aware of whether there's good evidence on that.

Also some people, such as myself, metabolize caffeine at a slower rate due to genetics. SNP rs762551

Recently I switched work schedules from overnight to mornings and held my coffee consumption constant (at about 5 cups a day, gotta love the MS Starbucks machine). My productivity has since gone up, I sleep better, and my moods have improved.

Wouldn't you rather have the best of both worlds? Coffee and a regular sleep cycle?

That's what I do. It's always funny to me how a lot of people want to jump from drinking tons of coffee to no coffee. There's a happy medium in-between. I drink a lot of coffee but I do ramp down my caffeine over the course of a day. Start with full caff, then down to half in the afternoon, finally to decaf in the evening though sometimes I just skip it entirely. I feel very alert consistently throughout the day except for a short period in the afternoon before I've had some half-caff. I'm asleep within about 5 minutes of my head hitting the pillow.

A better article, IMO: http://lifehacker.com/5585217/what-caffeine-actually-does-to...

I gave up caffeine a few years ago. I get far fewer headaches, and I've noticed while soldering my hand is now rock solid, no trembling.

For me at least caffeine wasn't giving me any kind of boost, just fighting off the withdrawal symptoms.

I think that's a problem for most people, they think coffee is giving them a boost, but really it's just that they feel relatively better because without it they are suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Interesting, my hands are more precise when I'm on caffeine, and it also increases my ability to think logically + dulls my emotions (which helps when dealing with anything non-creative every day)...

The author makes it seem as if you have two choices: "tolerance and dependence" or "kick the habit". Maybe acting like caffeine is methamphetamine bumps up the pageviews, I don't know.

But I do know that caffeine once or twice a week for a burst of energy won't see you developing a tolerance - so you can continue to benefit.

There's also quite a bit of range between people who drink two cups of mild coffee a day, people who drink soda and people who chug down espressi.

It depends on the quantity too. We drink espresso, but only 1-2 oz of coffee per cup, which has less caffeine than one of the buckets of diluted coffee from e.g. Starbucks.

Yeah, really. I can drunk a "shot" of Turkish coffee and not feel anything like the jittery hit I get from a full mug of normal filter-coffee.

I've seen heroin addicts say that caffeine withrawal is worse than the one caused by opiates.

The headaches are unimaginable. The energy levels are lower than being hung-over.

Short-term memory works in a state siimiliar to that when you have 70% packet loss in multiplayer video games. Everything is annoying and you just want to disintegrate people.

Oh yeah, it sucks after using a lot of it over the course of 1+ months. However, I found that I can significantly reduce the withdrawal time (to 3-5 days) and alleviate the symptoms by using piracetam - 2.4 grams every day, no headaches and near-normal energy levels...

There are two more aspects of how coffe works that the author did not cover. Caffeine also affects your blood vessels and adrenaline levels. http://science.howstuffworks.com/caffeine.htm

The Oatmeal said it before and better: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee

This article doesn't address any downsides of drinking caffeine. It does happen to be a retrograde neuroinhibitor for adenosine, but to date, there's no evidence that this has negative long term health effects...

Not a comment on the article as such, but a pet peeve about the way it is displayed. There is a "floating" header on top which covers the text. If one hits the space bar to scroll a full screen worth, some unread text is covered up by that header. The same would be the case for the footer but, that one at least, can be collapsed. This is not the only site guilty of this (in fact it seems to be a growing trend) and I am surprised that no more people comment negatively about this.

I have never drunk a cup of coffe in my life. I don't care for the taste. I was just now considering forcing myself to drink it because of it's supposed good effects. Guess I won't

I keep switching between tea and coffee. I like tea more at the moment (green, white, black, pu-erh, sometimes herbal).

There just seems to be a wider variety of teas that I can switch between. I don't do it for alertness or withdrawal symptoms as much as I do it for the taste. Coffee to me, while tasting good, more or less seems similar (short of changes in roasting levels).

Coffee has as much variety as tea. Any good roaster can show you the difference between, say, a Kenyan and a Costa Rican. There's also more variety in coffee preparation with varying results. Tea steeping is a lot more 1-dimensional.

But what Tea has in quantity is L-theanine, which has additional stimulative effects on top of caffeine. A lot of people prefer it to coffee for stimulative effects because of this added kick.

Fwiw, tea doesn't contain any caffeine - it has it's own methylzanthine, with similar but slightly differenr effects. (It also contains l-theanine).

I drink one cup of coffee each morning just because I like it. It doesn't do anything to me. It just tastes good.

I used to say the same thing. Then I had kids, and went from an irregular sleep schedule where at least twice a week I was getting 8+ hours to one where every night I get 6.5-7, with few excursions in either direction.

Coffee suddenly has a much more significant effect.

I'll probably be downvoted for saying so, but there have been an awful lot of Forbes articles on HN of late. They cover topics that should be interesting to HN, but are fluffier than the norm I'd expect here.

I de-caffinate for about 2 to 3 months per year. It's 2 weeks of hell followed by refreshment.

I also abstain from alcohol for 4-5 months per year in order to keep myself a cheap drunk.

Obviously, those two time groupings never overlap.

4-5 months to reset your tolerance? How many times / how much per week do you drink in the following 7-8 months? That seems like quite a long time.

The Forbes site now holds the title of "Most Annoying to Read on a Mobile Browser. "

Thank goodness for Pocket.

But then I find out article wasn't even worth the hassle.

You guys are all probably on adderall anyway :P

Sadly, no :-)

I find an empty stomach, similar to alcohol, allows it to work to full effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coffee

From that we learn that coffe is linked to increased levels of smoking and lack of exercise -- AND:

A May 2012 study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that, during the course of their study, coffee drinkers "who drank at least two or three cups a day were about 10 percent or 15 percent less likely to die for any reason during the 13 years of the study."

That combination seems to imply that coffee in itself is healthy.

Besides, we Scandinavians drink the most coffee on the planet and we are are are are healthy as He He He Hell, but a bit twitchy. It is a totally false rumor that we die if our blood turn red.

Edit: I should add that no chemical is good for everyone, not even caffeine.

"Edit: I should add that no chemical is good for everyone, not even caffeine."

I don't think it's the caffeine that causes all these benefits. (Though, being an avid hacker myself, I of course can think of a few benefits of that particular chemical.)

Also, 'water' falsifies your statement. ;)

You should not give someone water if they have washed their salt out, at least not on its own..

> Edit: I should add that no chemical is good for everyone, not even caffeine.

Obviously false. It is hard to live without chemicals like oxygen and water (though too much of either can be toxic).

Same goes for proteins, fats, sugars and vitamins. I meant drug, I was writing from a pub listening to Irish music. Sorry about being inexact.

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