Slowly tapering your caffeine dosage each day can greatly reduce these withdrawal symptoms.WARNING: Always start with lower doses due to differences between individual body weight, tolerance, metabolism, and personal sensitivity. Some people report feeling flu-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety after reducing intake by as little as one cup a day. The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating. If you do choose to lower your caffeine intake, you should do so slowly under the guidance of a qualified medical professional. Like any stimulant, caffeine is physiologically and psychologically addictive. Caffeine very quickly creates a vicious cycle. Caffeine and lack of sleep leave you feeling tired in the afternoon, so you drink more caffeine, which leaves even more of it in your bloodstream at bedtime. The caffeine produces surges of adrenaline, which further your emotional handicap. You’re naturally going to be inclined to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel better. When caffeine disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. Caffeine disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deep sleep when your body recuperates and processes emotions. When you do finally fall asleep, the worst is yet to come. Any caffeine in your bloodstream-with the negative effects increasing with the dose-makes it harder to fall asleep. Anything you drink after noon will still be at 50% strength at bedtime. Have a cup of joe at eight a.m., and you’ll still have 25% of the caffeine in your body at eight p.m. Here’s why you’ll want to: caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means it takes a full twenty-four hours to work its way out of your system. You can help this process along and improve the quality of your sleep by reducing your caffeine intake. For you to wake up feeling rested, your brain needs to move through an elaborate series of cycles. Your brain is very fickle when it comes to sleep. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough-or the right kind-of sleep. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that large doses of caffeine raise blood pressure, stimulate the heart, and produce rapid shallow breathing, which readers of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 know deprives the brain of the oxygen needed to keep your thinking calm and rational. The negative effects of a caffeine-generated adrenaline surge are not just behavioral. Irritability and anxiety are the most commonly seen emotional effects of caffeine, but caffeine enables all of your emotions to take charge. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state, your emotions overrun your behavior. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight or flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.ĭrinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights. In essence, coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. By controlling for caffeine use in study participants, John Hopkins researchers found that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal. New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that performance increases due to caffeine intake are the result of caffeine drinkers experiencing a short-term reversal of caffeine withdrawal. Unfortunately, these studies fail to consider the participants’ caffeine habits. Many studies suggest that caffeine actually improves cognitive task performance (memory, attention span, etc.) in the short-term. Most people start drinking caffeine because it makes them feel more alert and improves their mood.
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