Coffee’s Mental Kick
Although caffeine tricks your brain into action it's important to know what it does to you so you avoid addiction and poorer mental performance when feeling under pressure
Caffeine stimulates the nervous system but that’s not all.
By drinking it regularly, you can become dependent on it for your day-to-day mental performance. Although drinking coffee will not cause addiction as intense as some hard drugs such as cocaine and methadone, many people do become over-dependent on it. And by trying to withdraw from it you can feel fatigued, anxious, headaches, and irritability.
And that’s not all.
By stopping the intake of caffeine people can get into a depressive mood and have a difficulty in concentrating.
Caffeine is consumed in the liver and many people drink coffee in the morning time to give themselves a pep in their mental performance. This can promote their concentration in the short term but once an hour or two passes it will begin to wear off. That’s why many drinkers of it stop drinking it later in the day.
Otherwise, it may keep you up when they try to go to bed at night.
If you drink three cups of coffee you’d be considered a moderate drinker. And usually, this intake causes no harm to most adults. However, drinking coffee can also affect people who have high blood pressure or are in danger of getting osteoporosis.
By drinking too much caffeine it can increase the loss of magnesium and calcium levels so to offset that a couple of tablespoons of milk are advised to take with it. Without that, the likely hood of hip fractures in older adults is higher.
And by drinking excess amounts of caffeine it can cause dehydration.
You may feel like going to the toilet a lot more if you drink even a little more caffeine than usual as it is a mild diuretic.
And I should know.
Because I can remember when caffeine kept me going to the toilet when I took it to stimulate my brain before an important exam.
And the results of this exam showed that it was a mistake to take it that morning.
It was a Tuesday morning in early June and I was doing my final exams to become an internationally registered teacher. I`d studied hard for months and knew all I had to do was turn up, sit down, and write the answers on a piece of paper.
But it didn’t work out that way.
I woke at 5:30 am as the exam was at 9:30 am and I was about a kilometer from the test center. I was staying in a hotel as the exam was in a national location away from my home.
Because I was in an unusual setting my morning and nightly routine was disrupted by street noise and traffic and the room next to me had loud noises throughout the night.
So my early to bed and early to rise idea didn’t work out.
As I got up I was shattered tired. I`d barely got an hour’s sleep that night. I hadn’t a clue how I was going to perform so I needed something to give me a lift.
The hotel had left a few sachets of coffee by the kettle so I decided to make myself a morning coffee and get stuck into a couple of hours of study before the big exam.
For most people drinking coffee early in the morning would have been normal but for me, it was not.
Because I`d never drunk a full cup of coffee before that morning and now I needed it to keep me awake.
For the next couple of hours, I studied my notes intently and sipped on the coffee that was in my cup. But, it didn’t seem to be working so I opened a second sachet and drank another cup as well. In all over the next couple of hours, I drank four cups of coffee and was beginning to feel that mental kick that I so desired to perform to my ability in the exam.
With an hour to go to the exam, I packed everything into a small backpack and hit the road to walk to the test center.
The morning air gave me a huge lift too and I felt that things were going to go well and certainly better than I expected.
I was ready and all I had to do was pop the words on the page to prove it.
When I got to the test center my exam number was on the desk and I have placed only 3 rows from the front with plenty of people to the rear. The supervisor was only a few feet from my desk and as I sat down and opened my pencil case I realized that cheating was going to be impossible, not that I was intent on doing so!
After all, I was well prepared and confident I could perform to my best.
But then it all went wrong.
Once I got the exam papers out and read the questions carefully I knew that I had the answers to everything.
Then within minutes I began to shake. And I mean really shake.
As I was writing I couldn’t stop my knees from lifting the desk up and my writing became shaky as I tried to pen my way to first correct answer.
An hour later I was still on the first answer. I had planned to spend a maximum of 40 minutes on each answer but now my concentration was all over the place and each time I looked up the room seemed to spin for me.
Added to that, I was dying to go to the toilet.
And as it was a national exam I wasn’t permitted to go to the toilet every few minutes. The coffee that I’d drank earlier that morning was having an extreme effect on me and this was something I hadn’t factored into my exam planning.
In the end, I barely passed it even though I’d never spent more time studying for an exam before or since in my life.
So the bottom line is that caffeine is a drug and although moderate amounts of it are not going to kill you it will alter your mind, so be prepared for it do things to you if high performance is your main objective on a given day.
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