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I believe there's a cost to everything in life, generally, and the cost is always harder to see. With caffeine, and with the culture specifically in business, I could even see it taking hold in my own life. With this topic of caffeine, people never talk about the cost of it, as if it's the super drug we take that just sends us aside, no fallout. Exactly right. I started thinking, with anxiety on the rise, is there a risk that this tampering with our emotional state is going to ruin the system that regulates us naturally? Okay, fine, we take caffeine and we go up, but then the down, like every other drug such as heroin and cocaine, is going to be equally destructive.
Yes. You're talking about the law of compensation, which Ralph Waldo Emerson called it. I love that. There is always some compensating thing; there is no free lunch. That was a real issue as people were trying to understand how caffeine worked, because it seemed to be a free lunch. Here was something with zero calories that gave you more energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of a neurotransmitter, technically called a neuromodulator, named adenosine. It's a chemical we all have in our bodies. Over the course of the day, the levels rise, and it plugs into a certain receptor in the brain. That receptor is all over the brain, and I think it's in other parts of the body too. Adenosine is your body's signal to slow down and get ready for sleep. It builds sleep pressure. What caffeine does is fit exactly into the same receptor and hijack it, blocking adenosine from getting to that receptor. The adenosine is still in your body, but it isn't acting on your brain because it can't get into those receptors. When the caffeine leaves your system, which takes a while, all that adenosine that has been building up comes in, so you're more tired than you were before. You have this kind of rebound exhaustion. You're really borrowing that energy from the future rather than creating new energy out of nothing. It's still very useful under certain circumstances. I'm not a critic of caffeine. It might be my favorite drug. I've tried a whole bunch, and it was immersive journalism. In this case, I had to stop doing something rather than doing something. In How to Change Your Mind, I tried LSD, psilocybin, five-MeO-DMT, and other things that were really scary and hard for me, but this was harder. Giving up caffeine for three months really was a stretch, but it was a really interesting experiment, and it taught me that there's great value in giving things up temporarily just to understand your relationship to them and your dependence on them.
What was hardest about it? There was the withdrawal, which took a few days and was very unpleasant. I felt muzzy-headed. I felt like a veil had fallen between me and reality. Things seemed less fresh and less immediate. I didn't have the headaches that some people report, and I didn't have the flu-like symptoms, but I didn't feel myself. I was sluggish and couldn't concentrate. I couldn't write for the first week. I said in the book that I felt like an unsharpened pencil; I just didn't have it. It takes a certain amount of ego strength to launch into a writing project, or to launch into it every day, and I just didn't have that. I thought, I don't know if I can do this for three months. After the first week or so, I found my way back, and I could work, but I still didn't feel myself. It began to occur to me how curious that was, because what does it say if I feel more normal on this drug than off it? I was through the withdrawal period, but I came to see that my normal default consciousness was caffeinated consciousness, as it is for a great many of us. About 90 percent of people on earth have a daily relationship with caffeine, whether it's in tea, coffee, soda, chocolate, or many other things. You meet people who say, "I can't talk to you until I've had a cup of coffee," or "I'm not civil, I can only read the paper." People just don't enter into social relations until they've had a cup of coffee. The reason is they're going through withdrawal, they're cranky, and they know it. In this room right now, there are probably no more than twelve people in this building, and probably about twelve of them have had that drug today.
Yes. With this society, as you've said, people say they can't function and can't have a conversation until they've had a coffee. What is the cost of this, though? I can tell you the cost of doing heroin every day, or pretty much anything. This is subtler, even than sugar. I can tell you the cost of having huge amounts of sugar every day, but no one can seem to tell me the cost of having three cups of coffee a day.
Well, the cost depends on how it agrees with you. For some people, three cups a day makes them pretty jittery, and it passes from a very positive feeling to a nervous feeling, and that's a cost. I think the larger cost is to our identity as animals. We were designed, I think, to have rhythms, as animals do. You wake up when the sun comes up and start going to sleep when it gets dark. We were tied into these natural cycles dictated by light, and caffeine broke that connection, that temporal connection. So there may be some cost as a species, and we struggle with sleep. Sleep is a huge deal. You need sleep to be healthy, and you need it for your mental health, and coffee does damage your sleep. I put a little asterisk next to that, because if you stop drinking it after that morning cup, you'll have very little in your system when you go to sleep. But a cup of coffee you drink at noon will still have a quarter of that caffeine circulating at midnight, so it takes a while to get out of your system. Most of the caffeine researchers I interviewed do not drink coffee or tea. That's interesting. These are people who understand sleep and the importance of sleep. One of the benefits of being off coffee, which I didn't mention, is that I slept like a teenager. It was fantastic. I had some great sleeps. My logical mind, when it understands how other drugs impact us and the withdrawals, and how they impact our natural rhythms, even thinks of testosterone: if you take too much of it, your body stops producing it. If you have too many sleeping pills, your body struggles to sleep without them. So I reflect on coffee and think, surely, I'm an idiot, so don't take this as truth, but surely if I have coffee every day, I'm going to struggle to self-regulate my ups and downs. If I'm forcing my body to go up, my body will come down even further than it would ordinarily, or you'll take something else to make it come down.
Yes, and then you'll have to take a sleeping pill, or alcohol. Yes. People do get into these cycles of coffee and alcohol, or tea and alcohol. So yes, there's always a cost. But historically, I would say the benefits have outweighed the costs, compared to other drugs. We've gained a lot, and there's the whole social aspect of coffee. The coffeehouse scene in London was so vibrant. The insurance market at Lloyd's of London began in a coffeehouse, and the London Stock Exchange began in a coffeehouse. English literature was changed by the rhythms of conversation in the coffeehouse, and it was a place where the classes could mix in a way they couldn't in the tavern or anywhere else. You can make a case, and I try to in the book, that the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason owed a lot to caffeine. It had a really positive effect in that it got people who were inebriated on alcohol all the time to think clearly. That was a big deal, because I don't think people realize how much alcohol people drank before 1650. It was the safest thing you could drink, because the water was contaminated with disease. People understood that's how you got plagued: using the wrong water pump and things like that. Fermentation and the alcohol itself disinfected water to some extent, but not as effectively as boiling it. With coffee and tea, the first time we boiled water to drink, the countries that embraced coffee and tea suddenly had much improved public health and much lower rates of disease. That was also a boon. So there are a lot of positives.