All those people who tell you, "I'm not civil" "I'm not fit for human conversation until I have a cup of coffee" - they're beginning to go through that withdrawal. I mean, you haven't had coffee or tea since sometime the day before. And this is the subtle and, perhaps, insidious effect it's having on you. So, for example, the caffeine you ingest at noon - a quarter of it is still circulating in your bloodstream at midnight. And coffee or tea cuts into that, even if you stop drinking it, say, at noon, because caffeine has a very long half-life and quarter-life. As we get older, we have less of it naturally. Matt Walker, the psychologist who wrote Why We Sleep, thinks that this is very important to our health to have sufficient amounts of deep sleep. It's like cleaning up the desktop on your computer at the end of the day. It's where you kind of take memories from short-term working memory and put them in their proper place. It's where these slow waves start radiating from the front of your brain into the back, and they kind of harmonize all the neurons, get them on the same page. This is a really deep place you go for not that long a part of the night, but it's really important to your mental and physical health. This isn't REM sleep, where you're having dreams, or light sleep. And specifically, one very particular kind of sleep, which I'd never heard of before, called "slow wave" or deep sleep. It's a problem in ways we don't perceive, because caffeine undermines the quality - not necessarily the quantity, but the quality - of our sleep. Shots - Health News How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins
And loss of confidence is actually listed as one of the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal." The whole book seemed like a really stupid idea. It was only when he quit caffeine cold turkey that Pollan fully appreciated the mental and psychological boost his morning cup of coffee had provided: "I just couldn't focus," he says. "If you have a cup of coffee after you've learned something or read a textbook chapter, you are more likely to test better on it the next day." "There are studies that show that people's both mental performance and athletic performance are improved by coffee," he says. Caffeine, he says, is a powerful drug that alters the brain in surprising ways.
Pollan's new audiobook, Caffeine, explores the science of caffeine addiction and withdrawal - and the broader impact that coffee and tea have had on the modern world. "I thought, 'Why not explore that relationship?'" We never think about it as a drug or an addiction, but that's exactly what it is," Pollan says. "I had some great sleeps." But he didn't realize that a temporary "loss of confidence" and lack of focus were withdrawal symptoms.Īfter wrapping up his book about the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs, author Michael Pollan turned his attention to a drug that's hidden "in plain sight" in many people's lives: caffeine. "I recommend it," he says of his time without the drug. Michael Pollan gave up caffeine entirely for three months while working on his audiobook, Caffeine.
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