AMA #8: Balancing Caffeine, Decision Fatigue & Social Isolation
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and am a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine today. Isn't ask me anything episode or A M A.

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And for those of you that are not human and lab podcast premium subscribers, you can still hear the first twenty minutes of today's episode and determine whether not becoming a premiums subscriber is for you. So without further a do let's get to answering your questions. The first question is about the prison cons of daily caffe ine consumption.

The question reads, what is your opinion on the net benefit of daily caffeine consumption? And how can somebody determine if daily caffeine consumption is right for them? Well, first of all, I did an entire episode about caffeine.

You can find that by going to huberman lab 点 com at that website， you can put in caffeine into the search function. In, you'll find links to that episode in all the format, youtube, apple, spotify said a and it's time stamp. Of course, you can navigate to the particular topics most of interest to you. However, for sake of this discussion, I can summarize a few of the key points.

The most important thing understand is that for most adults, so that is, people about age eighteen to twenty or order, daily cafe consumption is not going to be a problem, provided IT does not induce anxiety, and certainly provided that not induce anxiety or panic attacks, and provided that IT does not disrupt your nights sleep. This is why I always recommend that if you are going to consume caffeine in any form, coffee, t soda or otherwise, that you try not to adjust caffy within the eight and ideally within the ten or even twelve hours prior to bedtime. That's because the half life of caffeine is such that even if you are able, two, for instance, have a cup of coffee around three pm or four P M, and then fall asleep around midnight, the architecture of the sleep that you get is going to be disrupted.

For instance, IT is very important that you get sufficient amounts of both slow wave, deep sleep as well as rapid eye movement sleep each night. And if you consume caffeine and too close to bedtime, and here I am defining too close as anywhere from eight to twelve hours before going to sleep, chances are you're not going to get as much rapidity movement sleep or slow wave sleep that you would otherwise and IT is the amount of rapid I movement sleep and slow wave sleep that together lead to whether not you feel you had a good night sleep in terms of yet next day alertness and cognitive abilities. Now, again, some people may find that they can drink caffeine in the late afternoon, maybe even at night, and still fall a sleep.

But I promise you, even if you're in that category, you will sleep far Better, meaning the architecture of your sleep will be Better, and you will feel far more arrested the next day if you abstained from cafe within the eight to twelve hours prior to bedtime. And I should also say that none of us are perfect, myself included. I will sometimes have a cup coffee in the late afternoon, and sometimes that will cause me to stay up a little bit later.

Sometimes IT won't. I don't think you want to obsessed or worry too much about having some coffee in every once in a while in the late afternoon if you are still able to fall, fly, but don't make IT a regular habit. Now, as far as we know, there is no drawback to consuming caffeine on a daily basis, again, provided that does not disrupt your nights sleep and provided that does not induce anxiety.

In fact, most of the world consumes caffeine every single day. The current estimates are that ninety percent, that's right. Nine, zero, ninety percent of adults throughout the world consumer caffeinated beverage every single day.

That's a staggeringly high number making of the most popular drug on the planet, in fact, because of the way that caffeine works. And just remind you how IT works. IT effectively blocks a deny receptors.

A Denny is a molecule that builds up in your brain and body more and more according to how long you've been awake. IT makes you feel sleepy. Cafe blocks the identity. T and IT is dislodge from that receptor, whatever identic has built up and is around can then bind to the identic reception and makes you feel very sleepy. That's the caffeine crash.

So if ninety percent of the adult population of the planet earth is consuming caffeine every day, that means ninety percent of the adult population of planet earth is blocking their Denny recipes s for some portion of their daily life, and then their deny is binding to the vacant receptor once the caffeine has dislodged. And why are ninety percent of adult humans consuming cafe every day? Well, to feel more energized, more focused, to have more both cognitive energy and physical energy.

Now, of course, most people are not walking around thinking, oh, caffeine gives me more energy, more focus. That said, a, most people are consuming caffeine every single day and are consuming caffeine every single day in order to feel at Normal to be at their baseline level of cognitive ability and physical energy and so on. In fact, if you look at the data on caffeine consumption, what you'll find is that caffeine actually is a cognitive enhancer.

IT can improve learning and memory. IT can increase physical energy. IT can increase mental and physical stamina.

But a feature of those studies that's not often discussed, but that was, however, discussed in the full episode on caffeine is that studies have caffeine typically are done by taking chronic caffeine users and then having them abstained from caffeine for some period of time, usually four days to two weeks, in which time they undergo caffeine withdraw. They do not feel well league boggy headed. They have less energy there, some malee, sometimes even a mild depression.

And then what they do is they have people take caffeine and take a cognitive exam, or do some physical activity and compare their performance to what I was when they were in the withdraw state. Another typical foremast study on caffeine is to take people who are naive to caffeine, or who would never take cafe, and then have them in just cafe and then measure their cognitive and our physical performance. And in both cases, you see improvements.

What i'm saying here is that daily caffeine consumption is not going to lead to improvements in cognitive ability or improvements in physical ability above one's baseline unless you either abstained from caffeine for some period of time, typically four days to two weeks, or you are not somebody who typically in just caffeine. In other words, ninety percent of the world's population is drinking caffeine on a daily basis to be at the Normal level of mental and physical functioning. So the question was, is there a net benefit to daily caffeine consumption? And here I can reliably say, provided you not suffer from anxiety, tacks or lack of sleep from the caffeine consumption, provided that you've mindful of not interesting caffeine too late in the day, there doesn't seem to be any big drawback to drinking caffeine on a daily basis.

However, there doesn't seem to be any great benefit, at least in terms of direct effects on cognitive or physical ability. And so I realize this a little bit of a of a convoluted answer, but we have to be honest with one another here. Caffeine is a performance sentence ced drug, but only when compared to the non cafe ated state.

And ninety percent of the adult population in the world is cathode. So adding more caffeine above what you would Normally consume is certainly not going to allow you to think Better and perform Better physically. Here's a useful way to think about caffeine.

Most people can pretty well tolerate doses of caffeine anywhere from one hundred milligrams to three hundred milligrams. Depends on body way. That depends on your tolerance. Tolerance, of course, based on how familiar you are with the effects of caffeine and how regularly you consume IT a typical cup of coffee, which by the way, does not exist depending on the vender, depending on how much water a coffee ratio one uses, depending on whether not french pressure, it's pour over the type of coffee.

He said that all of that is going to determine the total amount of caffeine in that coffee, but we can set some outer bounds on the total amount of caffeine that likely exist in a cup of coffee. And it's probably somewhere between one hundred milligrams that will be on the weaker side for a six, eight dance cup of coffee out to about three hundred milligrams for the equivalent sixty eight ounces of coffee. But if you were to brew your coffee very, very strong, or like me, occasionally throw a shot of a pressure in there too, you could get that number up to four hundred or five hundred milligrams of caffeine.

I personally tolerate caffeine pretty well. I've been drinking caffeine since I was a teenager, mostly in the form of brude unflawed yarb. Mot important, stay away from the smoke varieties of urbana.

If you're going to get your caffeine from but smoke varieties can be carton agens, the non smoke varieties don't seem to have that property, but there is a lot of caffeine in your biota. So i'll drink your biot and have for many, many years or all drink black coffee or a presso or espresso or americano, things of that sort. That's my preferred source of caffeine.

Most people are drinking coffee to get their cafe. And I would say that if you are going to drink your caffeine drink IT in the early part of the day, as I mentioned earlier, I am a big proponent of delaying your first caffeine intake until at least ninety minutes after waking in order to avoid the afternoon crash. I've talked a lot about this on the podcast that a lot of clipsed on the internet explaining the rational behind that.

And if you do experience an afternoon crash and energy, I do recommend to lay your morning caffeine intake to ninety, two hundred and twenty minutes after wakon. Now first, people that want to get more of a true cognitive enhancing and performance enhancing effect from caffeine, again, you're going to have to abstain from caffeine for about four days for regular caffeine and drinkers. That's going to be difficult, right?

That is going to lead to headaches. That's going to lead to brain fog. That's going to lead to feelings of, in fact, the last time I took four days off or even a week off from caffeine consumption was when I was sick.

I don't get sick very often, but when I am sick, I generally obtained from caffeine. And sometimes I wonder whether not the malaise I feel from whatever you know, viral, bacterial thing I might be dealing with when i'm sick is, in part the malaysia of caffeine withdraw. I certainly notice I feel much Better when i've returned to drinking caffeine, but that tends to coincide feeling relief from whatever sign of symptoms and other symptoms that might have been experiencing from the illness.

So it's not a good experiment. I can't. He's apart those variables. So the short answer is, for most adults, there does not seem to be any major downside to consumer caffeine.

And there have been scattered reports here there in humans showing that ingesting caffeine can increase doping receptors, which will effectively allow you to get more out of the dopamine that you produce. This is why caffeine has a mood elevating as well as energy elevating effect. I should point out that some people just cannot tolerate caffeine that makes them too jittery, too anxious.

They start sweating to get heart palpitations. It's very hard for these people to build up a tolerance to caffeine that allows them to enjoy. These are the people that can even feel a flustering.

The heart and a lot of energy left from decaf coffee know something that we have, to me, is just a foreign concept. But some people are just that sensitive to caffeine that even the small amount of caffeine and chocolates or d cafe coffee make them feel too alert and they should abstain from caffeine. I don't think they are in any way harming their health by abstaining from caffeine.

Then there's the issue of children and adolescence and teenagers and Young adults ingesting caffeine. And I covered some of this in the episode about caffeine. But there has been a lot of debate as to whether not caffeine can cause hostile process, whether I can leach costume of the bones, whether not can stunt growth.

Frankly, there's not a lot of evidence for those sorts of claims. And yet, develop brain is a very tender and malleable environment. And somebody who started off his career as a developmental neurobiology, studying developmental brain, plastic and iring IT does sort make me cringe to think about children Younger than the age of, say, fourteen, ingesting large amounts of caffeine in any form.

So a coffee tea, a despite the fact that there's very little evidence that I can stand their growth, I don't personally like the idea of the Young brain being bathed in in a density receptor tag, onest, which is effectively what caffeine is as much as possible. One wants to developing brain to develop in a menu of unencumbered on chemically encumbers interactions between neurotransmitters and their receptors, unless, of course, there is a clinical need for prescription drug or a supplement or um some modification of a nutritional program specifically to upper down regulate the dopamine system or upper down regulate the serotonin system. But those are the sorts of decisions that really should be made in close oversight and recommendations by a psychiatrist.

So the short answer around daily caffeine consumption in Young people, meaning fourteen and Younger, is avoid IT if you can have your children, avoid casting if they can. The occasional bit of caffeine is probably not going to be a problem. The amount of caffeine in small amounts of chocolate probably not going to be a problem, but cafe in the form of energy during sodas, coffee t for children Younger than fourteen just seems like a bad idea from everything we understand about brain wiring and the trajectories of brains that developed with a lot of chemical adjustment from other sources like caffeine.

Now, for kids age fifteen to, say, eighteen or twenty, a lot of brain wiring is still occurring, but a lot of IT has been completed, so probably not as risky to consume caffeine. Everyone's in a while, or maybe even on a daily basis. But there are two.

I think there are a greater branches to limiting the amount of caffeine that want in dress. And of course, in the adolescent and years nowadays, lot of kids are consuming energy drinks and soda. And some of those energy drinks and soda contain a lot of cafe in anywhere from two hundred to eight hundred milligrams of caffeine and nowaday.

More sodas and energy drinks contain other things like a mino acid precursors to neuromodulators, like dopamine suffin stance. A lot of energy during now contain l terracing, which is a precor to dope in. A lot of them will contain a theanine. I've talked about thinnes as a supplement that can promote more restful sleep if taken thirty to sixty minutes before sleep.

The reason why a lot of energy drinks and soas and Frankly, now coffee brands are including thinning in the coffee or energy drink or soda is because IT tends to have a mild anxiety reducing effect and IT reduces the gitter that caffeine creates. And so that's actually a trick that these companies are using in order to get people to ingest more cafe because by including the thin in is preventing the kid or adult from feeling to jittery and therefore the can continue to consume that drink without feeling like they're overstimulated. So if I were to take the parental neuroscientist um adult voice here would say a void caffeine intake as much as you can until you're about eighteen years old.

But i'm realistic, I realized that adolescence and teenage say you know fourteen or fifteen out to eighteen and all they are going to be consuming cafe in the form of energy drinks and so does but reducing the total amount of caffeine. That one is interesting in those years. That just seems really adventures again, for all the same reasons I mentioned earlier.

You don't want the Young brain bathing in a bunch of exogenous, meaning externally introduced neurochemicals, or in things like the na al terracing. If you're going to indulge in caffeine or in energy drinks or d ne or al tyre acy for that matter, that's a sort of thing that probably is best left for people eighteen and older. And even there, if one finds that caffeine is for them, as do I, I think always best to try get your caffeine from a clean source, a clean source, meaning something that contains just coffee or just tea um again, this isn't a knock on energy drinks specifically.

But you really have to make sure that whatever energy drink you're going to consume, you know what's in IT, you recognize what the different ingredients do, and you recognize the potential of ingesting those ingredients chronically over and over again. And i've talked a little bit about this on previous podcasts. We'll get into this again.

Maybe we'll do an entire episode about energy drinks because they are so commonly consumed nowadays. Now getting back to the original question about daily caffeine consumption. This person goes on to say that for them, okay, this is their personal experience.

After a few weeks of consumption of daily caffeine, the negative start to await the positive ones they're getting. Poor quality sleep, lack of appetite, anxiety at set a and when they don't consume caffeine, they find the a lot easier to be mindful and their meditation practice is much Better. But they're lothian and less motivated OK.

So what they're describing are all the classic symptoms of caffeine over you probably not abuse in this case, although caine can be truly abused people taking caffeine pills. That said, in large quantities, we're not talking about that. But this person is describing the classic pattern of overuse of caffeine and the classic pattern of withdraw from caffeine when they stop taking IT.

So what should somebody like this do? And I think that's important question answer, because I think a lot of people fall in this category, eat, drink caffeine every day. There are no longer getting the performance enhancing effect of cafe into.

They are taking IT just to be Normal or feel like they can focus Normally and have Normal amount of energy. But then if they try and come off, they feel worse. Because there are couple ways to do this.

You can taper your caffeine and take off over the course of four to seven days, but most people don't have the disciplines or don't want to spend the time doing that. But if you want to, the way you would do that, as you would cut IT by about ten or fifteen percent per day, you could do that by volume. You could do that by concentration coffee, that sort of thing, a simpler way to go about all this, that still allow you to get some of the performance enhancing effects of caffeine.

And yet experiences far less withdrawal would be two things. First of all, just have your amount of caffeine intake for two or three days. So again, that could be by volume, could be by concentration.

Probably easier to do by volume. So instead of drinking in, add coffee in the morning, maybe you do four ounces of regular coffee, four ounces of d cap. Or you just have the four announces of coffee. You do that for three or four days and then you take perhaps one full day off from caffeine, maybe another full day off. You're going to feel a lot less bad on those two days having cut your caffeine and taken and half in the previous four days.

And you would if you just went cold turkey and then you go back to interesting caffeine, but you go back to interesting caffeine at that fifty percent dose or what used to represent that fifty percent do so caffeine for you and you just continue that way on a daily basis. And then every once in a while, when you want the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you go back to what was your original dose, which is now double what you're taking on, on a daily basis. So what really talking about here is not going called turkey.

We're not talking about cutting caffeine indefinitely. What we're talking about is cutting the amount of caffeine that you drink in half for about four days, okay, plus or minus today, and then taking two days off from caffeine completely and then going back on that half dose of caffeine indefinitely. That's your new baseline of caffeine intake.

And then everyone's in a while if you need a bit more of a lift, you just twice as much caffeine or a coffee that's twice as concentrated. We should acknowledge that most people aren't going to be really precise about the amount of baLances and the amount of caffeine. Non, there's it's pretty straightforward to know that you're reducing your caffeine intake.

Certainly is clear to know if you're ingesting no caffeine for a couple of days. And it's pretty clear when you're doubling the amount of caffeine, but you don't have to worry so much that you're exactly doubling the amount of caffy you can drink one and a half times as much as you happen to drink on the day before or you could drink three times as much. You would definitely feel that if you drink three times as much, one very important thing to recognizes that on any day where you really Spike your cafe and and take about baseline, no matter where that baseline is, when you start, could be zero, could be four hundred milgram, could be two hundred milgram.

When you double that intake, you will get a big boost of energy. And the next day you're going to feel the crash from that, you're going to feel more lethargic, you're going to feel not so good. This has to do with dopamine and reception modulation.

This has to do with a density receptor modulation. The important thing to do is not continue to consume that elevated level of caffeine, which is what most people do. And then they said a new higher baseline, just to feel Normal.

The key thing is to just manage to get through that crash day, managed to get through that one day where you feel little less good or maybe even down a bit, get outside a bit, get some more sunshine. We know that Spike your court is all in a good way, right? IT can increase the category.

Ans dopa mean that s that get a little bit more sunlight, get a little bit more movement, get outside, do something to offset those feelings of malaise, and then get right back to your original goal level of caffeine in each day. There's no use in getting so quantitative that you make your life a miserable. You measuring things out like a laboratory chemist.

If you're that type and you want to do that, be my guest. But unless you're taking caffeine in pills, m, it's very, very hard to get extremely exact about the amount of caffeine that you're ingesting. So IT is okay to eyeball IT, but understand the counter of how caffeine works and what the caffeine performance enhancing effect comes from. IT comes from a caffeine intake above baseline. Understand that any time you go above baseline with your caffeine intake, there's the potential of some anxiety.

Understand that there is going to be a slight withdraw effect that last about twenty four to forty eight hours battle through that short period and you'll be right back where you started and where you need to be so that you can enjoy caffe ine on a daily basis and derive the benefits because there are many benefits to drinking caffeine and avoiding some of the potential hazards. And again, if you are a Young person, I recommend to lying that caffeine intake, maybe I don't know, ten years. Thank you for joining for the beginning of this asked me anything episode, to hear the full episode and to hear future episodes of these.

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