“I could never give up coffee”
If this phrase has graced your lips towards a non-coffee consumer, you’re not alone. In fact, approximately 64% of North Americans consume coffee habitually. In the wake of increasing anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and suicide, we’ve come to blame everything BUT our little guilty pleasure. Things like social media, generational disenfranchisement, global pandemics, and the economy typically make the top of that list.
Just to be clear, this isn’t meant to scare anyone. There is nothing inherently wrong with coffee. There is, however, something wrong with our consumption, addiction, and dosing of its main ingredient caffeine. If you can figure out dosing, then you have nothing to worry about. But, if you’re one of those that think you have it under control, think again. The effects of even a little too much caffeine can compound into more global physiological issues.
But maybe there is something else at play? Maybe, it’s something we are choosing to ignore
The beginning of a journey
In January 2017, I decided I was going to say goodbye to nicotine. Incidentally, I realized I had a difficult time successfully quitting one habit without reducing its seductive counterpart—Coffee.
What I discovered changed my perception
Over the coming months I would continue to battle my nicotine habit. Despite that, I had fully stopped having coffee.
Why?
For years, like many of us, I had been battling a base line “low level” anxious feeling; that unsettling feeling that persists in the background. The fan buzzing in the room on a hot summer’s night. This “feeling” had become “normal”. This could be triggered from a deadline, or a strange social interaction, or just a thought about something in the past. A lot of the science states that anxiety is a learned feature of our evolution. It can be further reinforced by more anxiety. So why was it when I didn’t have anything in particular to be anxious about, the feeling persisted?
I started meditating in 2013. Since then I have built up a consistent daily practice that has helped me immensely. But after a few weeks in January, to my surprise (and horror), I realized I had been stunting my progress.
It was as if every time I brought my head out of the water for some air, this giant boot would push it back down. Sure, I was getting air. But I could never get out of the lake.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t in the water. I was on the dock. And that boot that was pushing me down was coffee.
Well, not necessarily coffee… but caffeine, it’s super psychoactive component. It is ubiquitous with western culture. You don’t ask someone on a first date by saying “do you want to grab a water?” or schedule a meeting at your local Culliigan retailer. If you want access to caffeine, you can get it pretty much in any urban centre in North America within 2-3 minutes. It is all pervasive in society.
But what we love to forget is that caffeine (and coffee) is a powerful drug.
As Dr. Matthew Walker, the world’s leading sleep doctor, states:
“Caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world…The consumption of caffeine represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race, perhaps rivalled only by alcohol, and it continues to this day.”
Had coffee been the problem?
For me, it was. Without going too deeply into the science of caffeine, I’ve learned that when dealing with any kind of anxiousness stimulants are a big “no no”.
Stimulants generate mind activity, which in turn generates compulsive thinking, which in turn can trigger your sympathetic nervous system. These thoughts can produce negative physiological responses—for example, the release of epinephrine and cortisol into the body. The key to finding relaxation in my mind and body was quieting the compulsive thinking that would trigger some of these negative emotions. Meditation was the answer, but eliminating my coffee consumption was part and parcel with seeing progress.
It wasn’t until I took a break that I saw the difference.
But what about your energy?
The most shocking thing about this little factoid is that sans café, I found MORE energy.
According to Dr. Walker’s book, “Why We Sleep” caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine in the brain. Adenosine is released in your brain from the minute you wake up, until you fall asleep. It is what makes you sleepy at the end of the day—the sand in the hour glass counting you down to a good night’s rest.
Once caffeine occupies certain receptors, it has the opposite effect. Caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. It’s the equivalent of, as Dr. Walker puts it:
“Sticking your fingers in your ears to shut out a sound”
Dr. Matthew Walker
Caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal normally communicated to the brain by adenosine. The main, and most desired outcome: caffeine tricks you into feeling alert and awake, despite the high levels of adenosine that would otherwise seduce you into sleep.
The downside to this delay?
What is problematic is the persistence of caffeine in your system. Coffee has a “half-life.”
This simply refers to the length of time it takes for the body to remove 50% of caffeine’s concentration.
Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours.
Throughout all of this adenosine is quietly being released. That’s why you experience a “crash” when the caffeine starts to wear off. The only problem is that it takes a REALLY long time to wear off. Far more than you expect. And even if you have stopped feeling that “buzz,” it could affect your ability to sleep, which in turn will affect your energy.
This creates a vicious cycle—or negative feedback loop—where you are battling your chronic (but minor) sleep deprivation with the “black gold” that gets you up and out of bed. Lack of sleep can have a cascade of deleterious effects on your mental and physical wellbeing.
Are there alternatives?
The problem with caffeine in its coffee form is largely dosing. Green tea and matcha are great alternatives. It’s often difficult to undue the amount of the drug you consume, so taking less is a better approach. Coffee, in my opinion (and trust me I tried because I loved the stuff) is just TOO hard to dose and titrate. One (or two) cups in the morning, another at lunch. The amount of caffeine in coffee varies drastically and is extremely high (one cup is around 95 mg of the stuff, according to Healthline). Green tea, however, hovers around one third of that amount (20-30 mg).
This doesn’t mean you can’t over do it with green tea. It just means that you’re more in control of your dosage. There are a number of reasons why green tea and matcha, while containing caffeine, do not have the same deleterious effects as coffee. I discuss them as an alternative here.
I slept better. I had more energy. I had eliminated that anxious feeling. And, most importantly, I no longer felt dependant (or enslaved) to the drug and feeling.
It was as if my body had hit the reset and was operating how it was designed to.
Because of this radical change, I began to ask myself a few questions
Are we missing something in the global conversation about mental health? Could the increase in coffee consumption and dependence over the last 50 years be correlated to the increase in anxiety, suicide, and depression? That might be a far cry, but further investigation can’t hurt.
Dr. Walker, in his book, “Why We Sleep”, posits a correlation between lack of sleep and depression and anxiety—which, in turn, could be tied to coffee consumption. It can become quite a circular argument on both sides of the debate.
Dr. Walker distills the chicken and the egg conundrum as:
Do we suffer from mental illness and then lack of sleep or do we lack sleep and then suffer from mental illness?
Either way, coffee can be a catalyst for a lot of the underlying issues of chronic sleep deprivation. If you are struggling with anxiety, depression, or just want to try something new, maybe second think that liquid energy you’ve come love. Coffee might just be the source of your pain.
In the end, understanding the effects of coffee is the first step to maybe addressing other underlying issues. The same issues I thought were totally unrelated turned out to be largely the product of too much caffeine.
Just because society has given coffee its stamp of approval, doesn’t mean its harmless.
Al holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Ottawa, and a Bachelor of Arts Double Major in Linguistics & Political Studies from the University of Manitoba. He is currently working in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Al has a passion for language, meditation, health, travelling, business and tech. Al is one of the co-founders of ThoughtNotion. You can connect with him on his personal site or on LinkedIn.
