Although caffeine is generally considered safe, consuming as little as milligrams per day can increase your risk of negative side effects, including:.
The more caffeine you consume, the more likely you are to experience negative side effects , including neurologic and cardiac issues and even death. And even people who are drinking safe amounts of caffeine may be doing so for unhealthy reasons. Before you make moves to quit, assess your current caffeine intake: How much are you actually having each day?
Figure out how much caffeine is in the beverages you drink each day, then think about where you can cut back. Caffeine also lurks in foods such as chocolate and coffee-flavored ice cream, as well as in many pre-workout powders, protein drinks, water flavor enhancers, and even medications. Caffeine withdrawal is exactly what it sounds like — withdrawal from a substance.
Caffeine is a vasodilator, which can help relieve headache pain, making it an ingredient in many over-the-counter pain relievers. Taking a caffeine-laden painkiller for your caffeine withdrawal headache, then, will help your pain but will only continue your caffeine dependence.
Another key to beating caffeine withdrawal symptoms is water, water, water. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections — all of which can nourish creativity. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.
The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.
What coffee did for clerks and intellectuals, tea would soon do for the English working class. Indeed, it was tea from the East Indies — heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies — that fuelled the Industrial Revolution.
We think of England as a tea culture, but coffee, initially the cheaper beverage by far, dominated at first. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in was by consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker.
To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony , into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese.
This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune , disguised as a mandarin ; seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam where tea grew wild , and then forcing the farmers into servitude , picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk.
The introduction of tea to the west was all about exploitation — the extraction of surplus value from labour, not only in its production in India, but in its consumption by the British as well. Tea allowed the British working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in it became a crucial source of calories.
From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer. The caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the machine.
It is difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it. S o how exactly does coffee, and caffeine more generally, make us more energetic, efficient and faster? How could this little molecule possibly supply the human body energy without calories? Could caffeine be the proverbial free lunch, or do we pay a price for the mental and physical energy — the alertness, focus and stamina — that caffeine gives us?
Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job — and keeping us feeling alert. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back. For as long as people have been drinking coffee and tea, medical authorities have warned about the dangers of caffeine.
But until now, caffeine has been cleared of the most serious charges against it. Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and rates of suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day. My review of the medical literature on coffee and tea made me wonder if my abstention might be compromising not only my mental function but my physical health, as well. However, that was before I spoke to Matt Walker. An English neuroscientist on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, Walker, author of Why We Sleep , is single-minded in his mission: to alert the world to an invisible public-health crisis, which is that we are not getting nearly enough sleep, the sleep we are getting is of poor quality, and a principal culprit in this crime against body and mind is caffeine.
Walker grew up in England drinking copious amounts of black tea, morning, noon and night. He no longer consumes caffeine, save for the small amounts in his occasional cup of decaf. In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine. That could well be enough to completely wreck your deep sleep. I thought of myself as a pretty good sleeper before I met Walker. At lunch he probed me about my sleep habits.
I told him I usually get a solid seven hours, fall asleep easily, dream most nights. He nodded gravely. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity.
But it seems that deep sleep is just as important to our health, and the amount we get tends to decline with age. Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep , pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep.
Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes — which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.
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Lower blood pressure. Balanced brain chemistry. Fewer headaches. A healthy digestion. You may age better. Who should avoid caffeine? Swap It: Coffee Free Fix. Read this next. The Effects of Caffeine on Your Body.
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