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Coffee does not give you energy, it just borrows what you will pay for later
- ianai 4y agoIt’s sugar that actually gives energy. I’ve done a personal test with road trips in the past. Sugar will actually keep me going and alert for the trip. Caffeine not so much.
- yetihehe 4y agoWe all have different metabolisms. I don't get any energy from sugar, but my wife does. If she doesn't eat enough, she will have crash. Feeling hungry makes me more alert. I drink caffeine constantly (small sips with only small breaks to make new coffee) until about 16 and don't have crashes until I eat something big. Also I do "cold turkey" for two weeks every year and don't notice anything strange, the only problem is I can't really code without coffee, but those are my "no computer" breaks anyway. With alcohol it's the same - I can drink 0.5L of vodka and next day don't have hangover and I'm blowing 0.1 promiles before breakfast (already could drive where I live, but I know myself enough that I don't try). When I start drinking, I feel effect of alcohol very soon, after one beer I feel I'm not able to drive or code.
- trynewideas 4y agoGood. Thanks, coffee. Thoffee.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y agoThanks, Hanks. Thanks.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoBless you, trynewideas. Blynewideas.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoRare "Look Around You" reference.
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoI'll be drinking it on my death bed so I won't have to pay it all back.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoSo make sure to put sugar and cream in it, to fuel the burst! Problem solved.
- klyrs 4y agoI drink coffee in the morning so I won't feel bad about my nap after lunch. Sue me.
- bigbluedots 4y agoOk, all we have to do is find a way to break down the adenosine before it binds to the adenosine receptors. I'll be awake forever!
- rowanG077 4y agoGreat! Later I can go to sleep faster. THX coffee.
- hgsgm 4y agoCoffee doesn't have calories, so of course it can't give you energy.
- patrulek 4y agoIt increase activity of your nervous system. So despite it doesn't give you energy, it helps you to use/leech off more energy from your body.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoDuh, the trick is to never stop drinking coffee and thus never having to pay back the energy plus interest. Everybody knows that.
- aliswe 4y agoSometimes there really is no coffee to find, though.
- amalgamated_inc 4y agoThat's why you bring your own
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThis is supposedly also a trick for maintaining hydration while drinking diuretic beverages. (So I’ve heard about certain Belgian monks during Lent, but it’s dangerous for hopefully obvious reasons. Please do not do this!)
- Tagbert 4y agoFrom what I’ve read, drinking caffeinated beverages still will give you a net positive hydration, there is some diuretic effect but it is not strong enough to offset the water in the drink.
- dilawar 4y agoHuh!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGtKGX8B9hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGtKGX8B9hU
- kornhole 4y agoAnd drinking alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Today is my payback day, and it sucks.
- grugagag 4y agoYeah, as you get older the payback is in more headache or brainfog or some kind of weakness that goes away eventually but would make life better if the cause is avoided altogether
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoOnly if you overdo it on the booze I think. 1 or 2 is enough to give me a light buzz with no hangover/regret.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoGood for you but there's a lot of us out there who need a bit more. It'd been nice to have a less harmful substitute a la vaping replacing smoking. Coincidentally, I had some ativan the other day for a dental procedure and the after effect was near ideal. Too bad it can't be taken so lightly.
- phendrenad2 4y agoThe trick is to not need it more.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoA bit more to get buzzed or too enjoy yourself? You shouldn't feel sick if it's quality beer and you stop before you get plastered. And you drink enough water. I hear "gummies" are a good alternative. I think that's a different kind of feeling but I wouldn't know.
- courgette 4y agoNo, that’s MDMA. Alcohol would be pure raw joy from tomorrow.
- pixl97 4y agoIf I have no energy at 8 am but lots at 11am, I'll gladly borrow from lunch to make it thru the first meeting of the day.
- navjack27 4y agoI toyed with my adenosine receptors enough in my early twenties I don't need to be doing it anymore and I don't do it anymore. Mainly because any amount of coffee that I drink now immediately gives me a panic attack.
- karmakaze 4y agoI've gone back and forth on my coffee and caffeine consumption over the years having also given it up for many months at a time--to later decide that wasn't preferable on the whole. Positives: Enjoy the taste and ritual, I still sometimes drink good decaf if I can get it. It's a dial I can use to shift/balance energy/focus at different times of day. Sometimes useful to stay up longer than you naturally would. Precautions: Start gentle--for me green tea in the AM. Have with food. Drink water to compensate for dehydration. At Starbucks I'll sometimes order 1/3 or 2/3 decaf americano (a grande has 3 shots) depending on time of day or need/want.
- jalino23 4y agoI read somewhere how coffee increased productivity of humans since the industrial revolution into the modern world.
- paradox242 4y agoIt's important for people to understand this, but it's not exactly new.
- phendrenad2 4y agoAm I the only one who finds that this doesn't actually match reality? Caffeine gives me energy/awakeness and I don't find that I am "paying" for it later. Maybe (to keep torturing this dubious analogy) it's a negative interest rate, so in other words, I'm paying for it later, but it's not noticeable compared to the benefits of caffeine?
- _trackno5 4y agoCaffeine increases levels of alertness. It works by binding to the adenosine receptors and inhibits adenosine absorption. Eventually the caffeine wears out and all the adenosine you didn’t absorb because of the caffeine will hit you later and can cause you to “crash”/feel really tired later in the day. Overall I agree with you, caffeine is doesn’t seem to have no downsides (in moderation) Andrew Huberman has some great episodes on caffeine and I totally recommend listening to those if you want to understands the effects and how to leverage them
- albert-thomas 4y agoI think if they end up "paying for it later", they were running on empty. The only time I've had that happen is when I hadn't eaten enough and my blood sugar dropped afterwards as a result.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoWhat I’ve read and heard recently is that if caffeine is consumed after adenosine is mostly flushed out after waking (90 minutes or so after a good rest), it seems as though it doesn’t interrupt sleep for most people that night. This is not true if you continue consuming caffeine past late morning, or early afternoon at the very latest. This causes your adenosine to be useless as caffeine will still be plugging receptors by bed time. That doesn’t mean it can’t have negative side effects and generally make you jittery or wired; that’s a price some people seem to pay regardless. Outside of that though it seems like some strategies can negate energy and wakefulness issues. But the main thing is ensuring your adenosine isn’t blocked from being processed out of your system by consuming caffeine as soon as you wake. If you do, the night’s remaining adenosine will just hang around until receptors are freed up (when caffeine is metabolized), and you’ll experience a relative “crash”, going from alert to sleepy very suddenly in the early afternoon. I can’t confirm that this works, but people a lot smarter than I am seem to believe this is legitimate science, such as Andrew Huberman on his Huberman Lab podcast. I don’t experience crashes anymore so it seems alright to me, but I’m just one person reading and hearing things from the internet. This could all be GPT-generated and I wouldn’t know any better, haha.
- rngname22 4y agoTo clarify, are you saying that you -do- need to wait a bit (90 min) after waking up before drinking it? Like - don't do it immediately? Or bad things happen? I already know about the 'stop drinking it as early as possible' rule.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoYes, that was very poorly worded but you got it right. By waiting 90 minutes or so, adenosine will reach a reasonable baseline for daytime wakefulness. As I understand it, adenosine will inevitably build up during the day to some degree while caffeine is occupying receptors, but not enough to really matter. However if it’s combined with remnants from the night before, or you had a ton of it when you woke up and drank coffee, you wind up getting hit with enough to actually trigger your brain to try to go to sleep. That’s why sometimes you’ll suddenly be overwhelmed with sleepiness and might even start nodding off at your desk if you had a bad sleep. In my experience it feeds into severely inattentive mental states, even if I slept really well. It kind of ruins my work day by around 2pm.
- LoganDark 4y agoAre there really people who need caffeine to function, or are they just addicted?
- Llamamoe 4y agoThere absolutely are, generalized fatigue is one of the most common and least treated health problems. Undiagnosed sleep apnea and UARS are in particular extremely common.
- unstatusthequo 4y agoFirst technical debt, now caffeine debt?
- benbojangles 4y agoI am neuro-compromised and a while ago I learned about the effects of coffee on such people with Multiple Sclerosis for example. It seems that coffee has a neuro toxic effect upon the HPA axis and nerve pathways often causing fatique, tiredness, or nerve pain. I switched to decaf and the nerve pain after coffee went away for me, but I still get fatigue after drinking even decaf.