The Positive Health Benefits of Caffeine
Caffeine is one of the most widely used substances on the planet. Estimates are that more than 90 percent of adults and as many as 50 percent of kids that is adolescents and teenagers use caffeine on a daily basis. Caffeine is an amazing molecule. Most people are familiar with caffeine’s ability to increase alertness and to reduce our feelings of sleepiness and fatigue. But what most people are not aware of is that caffeine acts as a strong reinforcer. Today I’m going to inform you about many of the positive health benefits of caffeine including neuroprotective effects, anti-depressive effects, and certainly performance enhancing effects both for mental performance and for physical performance.
How Caffeine Works
Caffeine is consumed by basically most all adults every single day and consumed at very regular times each day. In fact, if you were to take a look at your caffeine intake or the caffeine intake of somebody close to you, what you would realize is that they don’t do so well if their caffeine intake arrives even 10, 20, or 30 minutes past their expected or usual intake of caffeine. That’s pretty remarkable and it brings to mind ideas that we are all quote unquote addicted to caffeine or that caffeine is somehow bad. But I’m certainly not going to make the argument that caffeine is bad. First of all, I’m a regular caffeine user. I wouldn’t call myself a caffeine abuser but I am a regular caffeine user and caffeine is known to have certain health benefits.
Caffeine is known to have certain neuroprotective effects and that is because of its ability to increase neuromodulators such as dopamine but also other so-called catecholamines like norepinephrine. The large-scale analyzes of the relationship between depression and caffeine shows that provided people are not drinking so much caffeine that it makes them overly anxious, that regular intake of caffeine is inversely related to levels of depression.
It’s also the case that caffeine can improve mental performance and physical performance. This has been demonstrated in tens of thousands of studies. When we ingest caffeine provided that we don’t have a lot of food in our stomach and that our blood sugar isn’t particularly high, generally we experience an increase in alertness within about five minutes and that increase in focus and alertness peaks around 30 minutes after ingestion of caffeine and persists for as long as 60 minutes.
The Benefits of Caffeine
Perhaps the most robust finding across all of the studies that I have examined is that caffeine reduces a reaction time that is it improves our reaction time. It doesn’t make it longer, it makes it shorter. So for instance, in a laboratory study where people were asked to hit a lever every time they hear a tone, you can greatly reduce the time between the tone and the pressing of the lever if people ingest caffeine about 30 minutes before they do that task.
Asking people for instance to remember the capitals of different states or cities or to remember certain historical facts, they will do that at a particular rate but if they’ve ingested caffeine within the hour prior, their ability to recall that information is much much better. They are faster and it does not appear that accuracy is reduced. In fact, in many cases accuracy is enhanced and that’s because caffeine both works on the reaction time systems of the brain and body. It also stimulates certain neurotransmitters and so-called neuromodulators within the brain and body that give the neural circuits in the brain that are associated with learning and memory a lower threshold to activation.
What caffeine is doing for us is not just making us more alert, improving our memory, improving our reaction time and so on, it’s actually acting as a powerful reinforcer of experience and its acting as not just a powerful reinforcer of the caffeine containing drink that we drink, but also the mug that it’s contained in plus the person that we might be sitting across from when we consume that caffeine.
Conclusion
Caffeine stimulates the release of dopamine and acetylcholine not within the classic so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. We can think of caffeine as having a somewhat privileged access to the reward systems. Caffeine is an incredible performance enhancing compound and can give us tens of thousands of examples of this in humans. It’s important to understand how caffeine works at a mechanistic level and how to use it to your advantage or conversely how to avoid it at certain times to your advantage.
