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Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline
Dthief writes "Bristol University researchers found that coffee drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them. 'Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal,' wrote the scientists, led by Peter Rogers of Bristol's department of experimental psychology."
Isn't that what everyone is trying to do with their entire life?
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So either I have to use Red Bull's oddball sugar-enriched BS for a charge (which I'll probably build up a tolerance to), or seek out alternatives like - METH (it's what's for breakfast! Yummy mmmmmeth!).
I never touch coffee - it's a vile habit, especially when abused. Now that that's out of the way, barkeep, another pilsner please.
I am officially gone from
Coffee reaches its full potential at the 100th cup.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
As a former caffeine addict, I would *love* to see some serious studies come out describing the long term consequences to long term caffeine use. Of course, we'll never see that because there's more money behind caffeine than alcohol and tobacco, combined.
I don't respond to AC's.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
There is another stimulating effect of caffeine that the article does not address.
Caffeine is a diuretic.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Guess I'm gonna have to get started on meth now.
sic transit gloria mundi
And if you stop drinking coffee your body will adapt to waking up on its own with no need for it. I used to drink tons of soda (even more caffeine than coffee) and always had to have a can in the morning to wake up, I stopped drinking it (well aside from about 2 cans worth a week) and suddenly it was significantly easier to get up in the morning, to the point where, going to sleep at the same time, I was waking up an hour earlier and feeling much better.
Caffeine is not a good way to start your day off, no matter what folgers may say. It's a useful drug for maintaining alertness every once in a while but used daily it reduces your overall alertness, which is bad.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Heroin addicts don't really get high like they used to, they just get well.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Cold, dead and still shaking hands, you mean? ;)
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
This study asked people to 'rate their levels of alertness' after being given either caffeine or a placebo. The people who normally consumed caffeine rated their alertness levels the same after receiving caffeine as the non-caffeine users rated their alertness levels after receiving a placebo.
Now this could mean a couple of things. One meaning could be what the study authors said; that caffeine addicts need their caffeine to be at the same level of alertness that non-caffeine users need. OR it could mean that the non-caffeine users aren't used to the higher levels of alertness that caffeine gives you, and therefore don't use the same scale to rate their alertness that caffeine users do. A caffeine user may think that the 'normal' (non-caffeinated) level of alertness is actually low (because they are used to being more alert from caffeine) even though they have the same 'actual' level of alertness. In other words, non-caffeinated people might not realize how un-alert they are.
A much better test would be to actually TEST their alertness, instead of relying on a subjective self-assessment. Make them do tasks that require alertness, and measure the differences. You might get different results.
I don't believe it. Next you'll be telling me that smoking a cigarette doesn't actually calm me down, it just reverses the effects of nicotine withdraw!
[citation needed]
How much soda were you drinking at one time?
From http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/caffeine/an01211
generic brewed coffee has (on the low end) 95 mg of caffeine in 8 oz. (200 mg on the high end)
Mountain dew has 54 mg for 12 oz. (Vault has 71 mg, but Mt. Dew is "well known" as having high caffeine, and besides Vault is the highest in the list shown on that page.)
So if you drank a lot of soda, over the course of the day you'd likely get more caffeine than one cup of coffee a day.. But IMHO, do typical coffee drinkers drink only one cup a day? I don't think so.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
"Baseline" is properly defined as the levels of mental alertness and physiological activation when mediated by an appropriately-high level of serum caffeine. People fall below baseline because they're caffeine-deprived.
Don't think of it as a drug. Think of it as a vital metabolic nutrient. "Caffeine addicts" are addicts the same exact way that "protein addicts" and "vitamin C addicts" are.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if I'm serious.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
At first I thought the headline said "Caffeine Addicts Get Additional Perks", but I haven't had my coffee yet.
A helpful subject for further research would be to determine how much caffeine a person can consume without becoming addicted and thus losing the benefits.
I limit myself to two cups of coffee a week, along with a few sodas, and I don't experience withdrawal symptoms. I could probably have more without running into diminishing returns, but it's hard to know.
Unfortunately the ideal dosage probably varies widely among people due to all sorts of physiological factors. Perhaps what we need is a procedure for testing when we're approaching the point of addiction, without actually reaching it.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
The one we haven't heard about:
"Read the new book, Diuretics, by L. Ron Hubbard! It will change your life..."
Not having coffee results in the same amount of wakefulness, only without the money spent on coffee.
But without the joy of starting the morning with a rich, complex, and delicious brew. When you consider how much flavor you get out of it, a bag of coffee beans is really inexpensive. You could spend $5 on a bar of gourmet chocolate or a bit of fancy cheese and it will be gone in a few days. Spend the same $5 on a half pound of coffee beans and it will last for 2 weeks.
There's really no downside to being addicted to something that's so cheap and plentiful. It's low in calories, inexpensive, and really fucking delicious. Why quit?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Caffeine is not a good way to start your day off, no matter what folgers may say.
This is so true.
There are many potheads that are all about "wake and bake". Yeah pot is fun and right away in the morning it feels awesome initially but the burnout is terrible.
There are many drinkers that go out for bloody marys the next day. "Hair of the dog that bit ya'". And then you feel worse an hour after you stop drinking and go back to sleep.
Eat a good breakfast, with protein, grain, carbs, sugar, salt, water or juice, and take a shit.
You'll feel good no matter what.
There should be a warning. I drink soda. Lots and lots of soda. It's like sipping coffee for 16 hours straight. Well, sipping 16+ cups of coffee over 16 hours.
I was at work late one night. I ran out of soda, and I had no change for the vending machine. The coffee machine was sitting there saying "You can drink me. Come on, you know you need the fix. Just turn me on, and brew yourself a pot."
Apparently I'm no good at brewing coffee. I drank 4 cups of very strong coffee in an hour, and then I was finished my work for the night. I drove home with my eyes jittering so bad I could barely see straight. I spent the following few hours bouncing off the walls like a speed junkie. I got another week's worth of work done that night, plus cleaned the whole house.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sorry to disillusion you, but let me lay out the possibilities:
A. Your uncle had an incredibly, unbelievably unusual metabolism toward alcohol OR
B. He had been consistently lying about the amount of his alcohol consumption. This is extremely common behavior in alcoholics. The rest of his family supporting his story and generally being in denial is also very common.
For one week, I switched the coffee in our lab coffee club to decaf... nobody noticed. The one "proud" coffee addict even asked one day if I was making it stronger, while putting on an act of being over-stimulated.
There are ~10 people who use that machine. Seriously. Not one of them noticed they were drinking decaf for a week.
*sigh
It speeds the heart and increases blood pressure, but does not raise mental awareness. Simple, simple, simple.
Hell yeah, much simpler than all that nonsense cranked out by the experimental and cognitive psychologists, physiologists, pharmacologists and the like when they did all that complicated science. Especially since it said the opposite from what you did. After dozens of designs and replications. For decades. What were we thinking? What a fucking waste.
Are there any other fields of inquiry to which you have full and correct knowledge of, making it unnecessary to waste time and money pursuing ever more incorrect knowledge despite scientific backing?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That’s true for every drug. It’s the definition of the whole thing.
It’s why they raise the dosage all the time. (Often it’s impossible to raise it fast enough to not get down to zero anyway.)
Seriously: News at 11.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I drink two pints first thing in the morning. 32oz * 3.5mg = 112mg. Then about 12oz/hr after that throughout the work day, and back to pint glasses when I get home.
Stop.
No, seriously, stop drinking that much Dr. Pepper. Ingesting that many calories from one source is a Really Bad Idea. Even if it's actually their diet version, ingesting that much of any one food source is a Really Bad Idea. It leads to all sorts of health issues, not the least of which will be vitamin deficiency. Seriously, this is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Taper down, quit cold turkey, whatever, but cut down on your intake and do it soon. If you're ingesting that much sugar, you are on a short bee-line to diabetes, and a long list of Very Bad Diseases to follow. If you're ingesting that much synthetic crap by drinking the diet version instead, the diseases are not as readily identifiable, but I'd put good money down are going to be at least as bad.
Seriously, stop. Anyone else here on Slashdot that is ingesting that much surgared soda, stop. Now. Diabetes, which is the most likely outcome (if not death from congestive heart failure) is a seriously bad disease, with complications like glaucoma that leads to blindness, chronic foot ulcers, gangrene, foot amputation, kidney failure, etc. Did you see that "blindness" part? Not joking. Preventing it is easy: stop drinking soda.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
US TV shows can't resist putting in the effects of sugar on kids. And nobody ever noticed that anywhere else in the world. Maybe because IT IS NOT TRUE. Yes you can energy from sugar but the human body has plenty of sugar all the time on a normal diet. It isn't going to hyper because you add more fuel to it, you just get fatter because the body can now store fat for later instead of burning it as it should.
Clinical trials have shown that kids have no sugar rush UNLESS the parent who thinks kids get a sugar rush are present and then the kids do indeed become hyper active. So over-sensitive parents cause hyper-active children. Not sugar. (That parents infleuence the actions of they child is well known, simple experiment: put a baby who can crawl on a surface and let it crawl over a gap covered by a glass plate. The baby will have no reaction of its own to the height below it. If the mother shows delight then the baby will show it, and cross happily. If the mother shows horror, the baby will react in fear trying to determine what danger it is in. This is how we learn, how all animals with parents learn. But we can learn wrong if the input is wrong. Over-protective parents cause over-sensitive children. Yes, sometimes kids just need to walk it off and funnily enough, they do. Watch a child playing on its own. It falls, nobody panics, it continues.)
Same with coffee. Some writer probably thought it was funny and now everyone believes sitcom rules apply to the real world. Yes, cafine is different from sugar in that it is a drug and does have an effect but you need to be the kind who drinks energy drinks as if they were water, with no water. Not just a cup of coffee. Even half a dozen.
It think part of it is that people act the way they think they are supposed to act. And yes, that would be very intresting to study more because it might have a serious effect on health care. For instance the use of medication when it ain't needed. If you think you need a pill for everything, you will need a pill for everything and indeed get a pill for everything. The US is the most medicated nation on the planet and yet they aren't any healthier. What is all the non-needed drugs doing? Not just to health but to the health care costs? If media is causing people to think they have to behave in a bad way, perhaps it can be reversed as well. Less pill swallowing for every ailment in popular media content could perhaps translate to lower medicine costs?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.