Beans quest12/15/2023 ![]() Sure, my coffee habit is withering my hypothalamus and enervating my adrenal glands, forcing me to take in ever more caffeine as the years go by. I’m at peace with the long-term effects of my devotion to coffee. “Why don’t we just live apart for a year so it feels more like it did when we were first married?” An overreaction? I think not. “Here’s an idea,” I replied, heart rate soaring. The very suggestion made me fly into a rage. My wife is one of them: Recently, noticing the increases in my consumption over the years, she innocently proposed that I “take a little break” from coffee. Some people believe that the solution to tolerance is to hit the reset button. Read: The case for drinking as much coffee as you like However, this “problem” is really just an opportunity to enjoy more coffee. This leads to a state of tolerance, in which caffeine has a smaller effect after chronic use. As you consume more caffeine over time, adenosine receptors upregulate, increasing in number to accommodate the caffeine molecules and take in their intended guests as well. Faced with the holy power of the Bean, adenosine’s malevolent forces fight back. So don’t be an ungrateful wretch: If you like electricity, running water, and lifesaving medicines, give thanks for the miracle of caffeine. If it weren’t for coffee, you would probably spend your days shivering in a dark cave, and die after getting a splinter. As Michael Pollan argues in his audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World, caffeine’s arrival into the European diet in the 17th century transformed the economy through enhanced productivity, innovation, and safety. It is no exaggeration to say that caffeine is a boon to humanity. ![]() Remember this as you head out in traffic: The life your coffee saves could be your own. Combined with exercise, it can improve cognitive performance (that means it makes you smarter, in case you haven’t had your coffee yet), and if you’ve been sleeping less than optimally, it can enhance your reaction time and logical reasoning abilities. Read: The coffee alternative Americans just can’t get behindĬaffeine is a gift in ways besides happiness. Warburton observed what I could have told him without writing a study: A low dose of caffeine can lead to a “significant increase in … happiness and calmness and decreases in tenseness.” He also noted that, among the study participants, these effects did not come from alleviating a craving from a caffeine addiction the effect was true, pure, and wonderful. Writing in the journal Psychopharmacology, the researcher David M. To get to what really matters, though: Coffee makes you happy. Consume enough caffeine, and you’ll have almost no adenosine plugging into your receptors at all, so you’ll feel wired and jittery. (That “first sip feeling” Starbucks advertises on the side of its cups sounds a lot more appealing than “blocking morning adenosine,” but that’s what’s really happening.) In truth, caffeine doesn’t pep you up-it simply prevents you from feeling lethargic. The adenosine can’t park where it’s supposed to, because caffeine is already sitting in its parking spots. It is shaped very similarly to the adenosine molecule, so it fits into the receptors. Throughout the day, you produce a lot of it to make you eventually relax neurons shoot it out, and then a receptor, perfectly sized to the adenosine molecule, binds to it, receiving the message that bedtime is approaching.įrom the April 2020 issue: Capitalism’s favorite drug One of adenosine’s most important jobs is to make you feel tired. (I can only assume that the other 15 percent have no quality of life whatsoever.) The reason is this: When caffeine is ingested, it quickly enters the brain, where it competes with a chemical called adenosine. But that doesn’t explain why about 85 percent of Americans consume it in some form each day. I’ve also come to understand how and why coffee captivates me.Ĭaffeine evolved in certain plants-including coffee shrubs, tea trees, cocoa beans, and kola nuts-as a naturally occurring pesticide to discourage insects from eating them. Bleeding profusely, I marveled at how intense the stars were.įorty-five years later, not a day has gone by that I haven’t renewed my vows with the Bean. In the process, I cut a gash in my stomach on his gutter. Feeling fully alive and inspired to get closer to the universe, I climbed onto the roof of his house. The neighbor kid and I bought a pound of coffee and had about eight espressos each. There was just one Starbucks in the world back then, and as luck had it, we lived within walking distance. A neighbor kid’s parents had bought an espresso machine-an exotic gadget in those days, even in Seattle. The year was 1977, and I was 12 years old. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. ![]() “ How to Build a Life ” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
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