I decided to cover something a little different today, so forgive me if you don’t like this article – hell, what am I saying? I don’t care what you think!

Anyway, this was inspired by the fact I’m on my second 3rd cup of caffeine (1 coffee, 2 teas) and its its only 10 am. This reminded me of a video cast I saw on Current TV, which was pretty enlightening. We all know that caffeine is a drug, and that it makes us feel alert, awake, and can prolong those evenings and get us through some tough coding sessions, but do you actually know what caffeine does and the nature of our addiction?

Ok I’ll start by describing that happens in the video. The person, who’s name escapes me, who does the podcast, has a pretty hardcore coffee addiction, I think she said 5 cups per day. But she decides to go without coffee and have a brain scan. They do the scan, then she goes and has her coffee fix, and then returns for a second brain scan.

The scan’s show how much blood is in the brain, with dark blue’s and reds showing low’s and highs of blood in the brain.

Now you can probably guess where this is going. Without caffeine, the blood levels in the brain are low, and with caffeine they are higher. Hence our coffee addiction…

They then go on to show scans of brains of people who do NOT drink caffeine. They compare to the scans of the girl AFTER she drunk caffeine.

Basically to explain it simply, the girl had the same level of blood in her brain WITH caffeine, as someone who does not drink caffeine at all.

The effects of caffeine withdraw are tiredness, headaches, and basically the inability to function, and it can take some time to ween yourself off it. What’s funny is that if you are addicted to the drug caffeine, that buzz you feel when you drink it, is actually just your brain returning to your normal levels. So you’re buzzing on being normal LOL. 

Ok so what’s a healthy amount of caffeine – they say 3 cup’s of coffee / tea per day is fine. But 5 or more is too many. I definitely fall into the 5 or more per day category and I’m trying to drink less.

The symptoms / problems off too much caffeine is death, twitchiness, irritation, headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, heart palpitations. It’s also important to remember that caffeine is a diuretic (so you’ll pee a lot).

I guess the main reason for this article is because of the amount of people, like me, gamers, programmers who drink way too much tea of coffee!! So drink less! You don’t actually need it! If you’re feeling tired you just need to get that blood pumping, perhaps a short period of exercise or even just go to sleep.

Cheers

Wuup Team