Using Caffeine to Optimize Mental & Physical Performance
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm enjoy huberman and i'm a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing caffeine.

Caffeine is one of the most widely used substances on the planet. Estimates are that more than ninety percent of adults and as many as fifty percent of kids, that is, adolescence and teenagers, use caffeine on a daily basis. Caffeine is an amazing molecule.

Most people are familiar with caffeine, the ability to increase alertness and to reduce our feelings of sleeping, ess and fatigue, and indeed, IT does that. But what most people are not aware of is that caffeine act as a strong reinforcer. What I mean by reinforcer is that when caffeine is present in a drink or food, and yes, indeed, caffeine is present in many foods, even unbeknown to us.

When it's present in drinks, in foods, we actively come to like those foods and drinks more than if caffeine were not contained in those foods and drinks. So IT reinforces our liking of particular foods and drinks, and indeed, IT even reinforces our liking of the containers they are consumed from and the company we keep when we consume foods and drinks that contain caffeine. That is, caffeine is not just a stimulant.

Caffeine is a reinforcer, and it's a reinforcer that plays an active role in almost everybody's daily life. We can say that with confidence because, as I mentioned a moment ago, more than ninety percent of people are consuming caffeine, and most people think that they consume caffeine because that makes them feel more alert. But there are many reasons why you're consuming caffeine.

And i'm not going to tell you that consuming caffeine is necessarily bad. In fact, today, i'm going to tell you about many of the positive health benefits of caffeine, including neuroprotective effects and I depressive effects and certainly performance enhancing effects, both for mental performance and for physical performance. Now that said, there are certain situations in which you want to avoid caffeine, and there are certain people who might up to avoid caffeine.

That's especially the case when one thinks about caffeine, not just as a stimulant, but as a reinforcer. In fact, caffeine is such a strong reinforcer that if even tiny amounts of caffeine in our present in certain foods and drinks, you will very quickly come to prefer those foods and drinks over other choices, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what sorts of food and drink choices you're trying to make. So today, i'm going to inform you about how caffeine works at a mechanistic level.

I promise to do that with a minimum of knowing ing creature in such that even if you don't have a background in biology, you will be able to digest that information easily. And then i'll tell you how to use caffeine to your advantage, or conversely, how to avoid caffeine at certain times to your advantage. So today's epo de will focus both on mechanisms and tools, that is, the use and leverage of caffeine to improve mental health, physical health and performance.

Before we going further into today's discussion, I want to tell you about some recent results about a molecule that found in certain caffeine beverages and that has been proven to be very useful for both weight loss, mental performance and controlling blood sugar levels. And that's a glp one, or glucose, on like peptide one. Glucagon like peptide one is found in the brain and body.

IT acts both on the brain and body. IT does many different things, but one of its primary effects, it's been discovered, is to reduce hunger. And IT does that two ways.

IT does that by activating certain irons in your hypo thalamus. So that's a brain region that controls hunger in society. IT makes us feel full at the level of the brain.

So IT makes us feel safe, that is. And IT actually makes us feel full out that glp won act on certain receptors in the gut to make us feel as if we've adjusted enough food. IT doesn't necessary make as feel as if our god is extended.

But IT makes us feel full. That's really interesting. Because if you think about IT, when we eat, our stomach fills up, obviously. And that information has to be communicated to the brain such that the brain can then send the tidy signals that actually shut off our hunger and believe you're not, the brain actually activate signals to reduce the desire to chew when her stomach is full. And G, L, P.

One, as I mentioned, works on the brain to create these feelings of society as if we've had enough and to reduce our desire to eat more. And G, L, P, one acts directly on the gut to give us a slight sense of formas in the gut, which then is communicate to the brain. Are really, there are two parallel signals being sent when we have glp one present in our system.

A little bit of relevant history on G L P one was actually discovered in halm monsters. These are these um reptiles that can go long periods of time without eating in a very clever scientists decide to study why IT is that certain animals like you monsters, can go a long period of time without interesting anything. It's because they produce very large amounts of G L P one.

They isolate the peptide from G L P. one. Then they looked for the analogous betide in humans. And IT turns out that does exist. And as I mention, its released in both brain body to make you feel for unsated.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, today we're going to talk about caffeine, and there's one particular caffeine source, which is year. But mute, there are some other forms of tea similar to your boats.

Stimulate the release of G L P one significantly. There are also note ays drugs, which are called analogues of G L P one. So these are drugs that mimic, or are identical to the kind of G L P one that you would make.

And those drugs are proving to be very effective for the treatment of certain forms of diabetes and for the treatment of obesity, but they trigger enormous amounts of G L P one pathway activation. So those are extreme cases for people that are really struggling for weight loss. But the clinical trials and the data that are out there in the general population now are very, very promising for G, L, P.

Won analogues year by mott provided is not the smoke variety. And I mention that because a number of people have killed me to the fact that year by motes come in smoke varieties and non smoke varieties, and the smoke varieties are thought to perhaps be carse ona jeni c that is pro cancer causing. So I advise people to avoid smoke varieties of your bott.

But urban mart are known to stimulate significant amounts of gop one release, and so they can be effective as a weight loss to mainly by blunting appetite. And again, they do that both at the level of the brain and at the level of the gut. Now all of what I just told you has been known for some period of time, but there are new set of finding that we're just published in sell reports, medicine self press journal, excEllent general, which indicate exactly how IT is that G, L, P, one stimulates both satire and can trigger additional weight loss through other mechanisms.

And I find the mechanisms to be really interesting and actually really important given some other topics we have covered on this podcast before. So the basic finding is that G L P one, whether not it's stimulated through the release of analog drug that one is prescribed or by drinking your about money, for instance, and simulate release of your own so called dorgan ous G L P one. Yes, IT makes you feel more full at the level of brain in body.

But IT turns out IT also stimulates thermo genesis. Now, thermo genesis is the active utilization of more meta lic energy. And fat cells, in particular, so called beige and Brown fat cells, are a pot source of thermogenesis tivy in your body.

The basic background is that you have White at a post cells, so White fat cells, you have beige fat cells, and you have Brown fat sells. And the beige and Brown ones are fat cells that you actually want more of. They are not abundant under your skin.

They abundant really around your covers, and you're up her neck. They are the ones that generate heat. And the asian Brownness of them is actually the consequence of having a lot of midco a in those cells when G, L, P, one is elevated in your system.

IT turns out that IT communicates to those White fat cells and helps convert them into beige and Brown fat cells. That IT takes fat cells that are not doing anything useful for you except being stored energy. And I think most people out there would like to have fewer of those White adapa cells there. Few of the altho that actually need more of them that are too thin, too lean. But most people are suffering from having too many of these White ada pocket.

Ls, well, when you injust your bomb tt, or you were to take a glp one analogue, stimulate glp one in any number of different ways, yes, you stimulate, increase the tidy, but you're also stimulating the conversion of these White fat cells into beige and Brown fat cells, which makes you more thermosetting and over time raises your basel metaphoric rate. So you're burning more calories even at rest. IT also makes you feel as if you're more comfortable and colder environments at rest.

This is very much the same as the mechanism that induced when you were to, say, take a cold shower, or do you regular ice baas are going into cold water regularly, that to stimulates the conversion of White fat cells to beige and Brown fat cells. So I like these findings very much because they provided a mechanistic coherence they provide. That is a really nice story as to how something like G, L P one could be so effective for weight loss.

Yes, on the one hand, G L P one is reducing appetite, and that, of course, will help people maintain or lose weight. But it's also increasing based on meta lic. great. And we now know how that's accomplish. It's likely accomplish at least through this one mechanism by the stimulation of conversion of these White fat cells, which don't do much for us except at as energy storage units to these metals ics metareum rich beige and Brown fat t cells, which you can think of a sort of the oil in the candle that allows IT your furness metabolize to burn at a higher temperature and a higher rate. So that's the mechanism in the basic tool.

Take away is that if you are somebody who's interested in losing weight and you want to leverage the G L P one pathway, drinking a copper two of year ba mott early in the day would be a great way to stimulate G L P. Won, released. There are other ways to simulate jp one released.

You can get that through certain forms of exercise, in particular faster exercises. This is actually a vote in favor of faster exercise. There's a debate as to whether not fasted.

Cardio burns more fat than non fasted cardio. The data basically say no IT doesn't really matter, but that doesn't really take into account the longer ark of things like G P one release. So that needs to be taken into consideration.

You could do fasted cardio, you drink urban tt, keeping mind that urban mott does contain cafe and will talk more about the specific forms of stimulus, including caffeine that mark has. But muti would be a great way to stimulate job one release. And then, of course, for those of you that are interested in more robust activation of gp one, then perhaps you might want to consider some of the new prescription G L P one analogues that are out there.

But that's a more severe stimulus for gp one, of course, and for everybody, regardless, less of whether not you're trying to lose weight, gain weight, maintained weight. Think we're going to be hearing a lot more about gp one, analogs and drinks and supplements and things that sort of stimulate g one in the very near future because IT does appear to be a very important biological mechanism. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers.

Stanford IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element.

Element is an electorate drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium in patache, this so called electorate, and no sugar. Now, salt.

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are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions, intellectual al light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits and cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back write ratio of one thousand milligrams that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of patasse um and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electoral lights.

And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found in an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different donations. And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate.

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If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about caffeine.

So I mentioned earlier, caffeine is consumed by basically most all adults every single day and consumed that 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 are don't do so well. If their caffeine intake arrives even ten, twenty or thirty minutes past, they are expected or usual intake of caffeine.

That's pretty remarkable. And IT brings to mind ideas that we are all really addicted to caffeine, or that caffeine is somehow bad. I'm certainly not going 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 abuse er, but I am a regular caffeine and user, and caffeine is known to have certain health benefits. I listed off a few of the earlier, but i'll mention those again now before going forward. Caffeine is known to have certain protective effects, and that is because of its ability to increase nor modulators such as doping, but also other other so called category means ignorant and append. If you don't know what those named mean, these are molecules that increased levels of alertness, motivation and drive.

And so then, therefore, not surprisingly, the large scale analysis of the relationship between depression and caffeine shows that, provided people are not drinking so much cafe that IT makes them overly anxious, that regular intake of caffeine is inversely related to levels of depression, so IT may have some entire depression effects, and those could be direct, indirect. What do I mean by that? You could imagine that if people are interesting caffeine, and they are more motivated to do work and pursue quality social interactions, then the probably that they will have depression could be lower IT could also be that there are direct effects on the chemical systems of the brain that relate to a mood and well being that could offset depression.

IT is not clear whether not the effects of caffeine in countering depression are direct or indirect, nonetheless is a relationship there, and is an interesting and positive one, or I should say, negative correlation, positive effect overall on mood and well being, to be exact. Now it's also the case that caffeine can improve mental performance and physical performance. This has been demonstrated in tens of thousands of studies.

I will review a few studies on this in particular today, but you just give you a sense of how caffeine works at the level of its timing and impact on mental performance and physical performance when we and just caffeine provided that we don't have a lot of food in our stomach and that our blood drager isn't particularly high. Generally, we experience an increase in alertness within about five minutes, and that increase in focus in alertness cheeks around thirty minutes after a gestion of caffeine, and persist for as long as sixty minutes. Now this is assuming that one takes caffeine in pill form or drinks s the entire caffeine drink within a short period of time.

But a little bit later, i'll talk about how you can consume caffeine at regular intervals while doing mental work or physical work in a way that can further increase mental performance and physical performance. But let's just touch on what caffeine intake really does for mental performance and physical performance. Perhaps the most robust finding across all of the studies that I have examined is that caffeine reduces our reaction time.

That is, IT improves our reaction time. IT doesn't make IT longer. IT makes IT shorter.

So for instance, in laboratory study, where people were asked to hit lever every time they hear a tone, you can greatly reduce the time between the tone and the pressing of the lever. If people in just cafe about thirty minutes before they do that task. Now that seems like a trivial task.

But this has also seen in the domain of sports performance and even in cognitive performance, where people have to arrive at a particular answer to a question, and the answers to that question has to be pulled from their memory banks within the brain there. Hp, a campus for insincerely in structure involved in memory. And if you are 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 injustice 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 caine both works on the reaction time systems of the brain in body.

I'll talk about the mechanisms for that and a little bit. But IT also stimulate 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 does that mean? That means that we are Better able to access the brain circuitry involved in learning and memory when we have a certain amount of caffeine circulating in our system.

So this makes caffeine an incredible performance enhancing compound. And I could give you tens of thousands of examples of this in humans. But before I do that, I wanted to touch on what we know about the existence of caffeine in nature, and what the existence of caffeine in nature and its effects on other animals tells us about what caffeine does in humans.

Because, as I looked to earlier, 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 is not just a powerful reinforcer of the caffeine containing drink that we drink, but also the mug that is contained in, plus the person that we might be sitting across from when we consume that caffeine and so on and so forth. If it's a little bit hard for you to conceptualized what a reinforcer is and why am calling IT a reinforcer, let me spell IT out in three specific ways.

We often hear about the word reward, and we think, okay, if we do certain things and we like the outcome, then those certain things are rewarded, right? If we're doing something, we receive praise. The praise is the reward, and therefore we are more likely to do that thing in the future.

A lot of parenting is like that, and a lot of life is like that. However went, we hear the word reward. We often think about something that feels good to us. And certainly, if we've worked tired and when we get some praise that's natural for the praise to feel good to us. Or for instance, if we.

We work very hard and we get a certain outcome, a trophy, a financial outcome, a degree outcome recognition that, that are all of those connectors rewards, but those are all conscious rewards. We are aware that they are happening. Reinforces are a little bit different, because the word reinforcement can apply to conscious rewards of the sort that I just described.

But there are also many ways in which caffeine stimulates the release of chemicals in our body that act as reinforces. But those reinforces are subconscious, that is, we are not aware that they cause this preference for the activities that caused their release. So the study is about to describe beautifully, I believe, in capsule tes.

How is IT that humans came to consume caffeine, and why caffeine existing nature and the powerful effects of caine as a reinforcing agent, both in animals, insects and in you and me. And the title of the paper is caffeine and Floral sector enhances a pollinators memory of reward. Keep in mind that caffeine is made from plants.

I say dub, but I think some of us don't realize that the reason why there is caffeine in coffee, as because coffee comes from a plant, is a coffee bean. Certain tea, which, of course, are plants that people brew. Caffeine is contained in those teas such as your BMI.

Well, why would this bitter substance? Because, in fact, caffeine is quite bitter in high concentrations. Why would this bitter substance to be something that insects are animals would want to consume at all? IT turns out that in most plants, caffeine is present in small enough quantities that insects and other animals, and in fact, we can't actually taste the caffeine.

If I were to give you a little bit of a pure caffeine, yes, IT would be a stimulant for you, but you would say that IT tasted awful. It's in the category of compounds that would strongly stimulate the bitter receptors on your tongue and would make you crying and pocky and essentially walk away from whatever is that contain that cafe. And from the experience that contain that caffeine.

Well, in nature, caffeine is present in very low concentrations or is masked by other flavors within flowers, beans and plants. And what this paper really points to is that caffeine in nature is acting as a reinforcer for bees that are consuming different sectors. So the way that IT works is that bees, of course, go from flower to flower.

And they are consuming the sector. They are bringing sector and poland back to the hive. And that provides critical nourishment for the b colony. The bees are for rigid in a way that includes information about color and particular ultra Violet color, things that we can see, but they can see because they're a different photos eeta than we do.

And what the study shows is that plants and actors that contain very small amount of caffeine are the preferred sources of food for bees. And the study is beautiful because they were able to confirm that they could mask the caffeine taste. So if they know that the bees are not preferred the taste of caffeine, but what they do is they pair caffeine with different food sources for the bees, then they remove the caffeine.

And what they find is that the bees very strongly prefer flavors that contained caffeine, not because they could taste the caffeine, but rather for the way that those caffeine containing flavors made the bees feel. So how do those caffeine containing flavors make the bees feel the same way that they make you when I feel a little bit more alert, and thereby able to do more work for the b, the more work is the consumption of more food, which then has a further reinforcing effect. So what really talking about here is the fact that egg caffeine exists in nature, in plants.

IT exists in concentrations that are very low, so low, in fact, that they are not detectable to the taste receptors of insects, and in many cases, to the taste receptors of humans. And of course, there can be high levels of caffeine in a plant. But if the plant also contains compounds that mask the flavor of caffeine, well, then those plans are going to essentially be even stronger.

Reinforces for the flavor of the plant. okay. So now we're talking about strong flavors plus strong neurostimulator spects of caffeine.

And the most important point here is that all of these effects of caine are subconscious. IT is not because the b or you likes the taste of caffeine. In fact, most people, when they take their for simple coffee, they find their taste bitter and kind of noxious. They don't like IT.

You may not even remember that because IT happens so long ago, and because caffeine is such a strong reinforcer that very quickly you come to like the taste of coffee, you might even come to like the feeling of your mug in your hand, you might even come to like the smell of coffee and so on and so forth. And that's because caffeine stimulates the release of certain neo chemicals in the brain, in particular doping and a seto calling two neuromodulators that increase our focus and alerts and our feelings of well being. Little bit later, i'll tell you that caffeine stimulates the release of dopamine in a way that's a very much distinct from the classical dopamine pathway associated with addiction and reward.

In fact, we can think of caffeine is having a somewhat privileged access to the reward systems. I'll give you a bit of a hint of war. This is going.

Caffeine stimulates the release of dopamine to calling, not within the classic so called me olympic reward pathway. That's just fancy nerd speak for the reward pathways of the brain they associate with things like sex and food and drugs of abuse, like cocaine and ethnic tine. But rather, caffeine seems to stimulate the release of dopamine in the parts of the brain that are associated with alertness and cognition, meaning the four brain.

This is very important with multiple dopamine systems in the brain and body. And caffeine seems to stimulate doping directly within this components of the brain that associated with clarity of thought and well being, but more so, clarity of thought. Now i'm also talking about caffeine as a strong reinforcer in that IT makes you feel good overall and IT does.

And that suggests that IT also taps into the more classic reward pathway. But IT does that in a very interesting, Frankly almost diabolical way when we regularly in just caffeine, IT stimulates the increase in dopamine e at multiple sites throughout the brain, but in particular within the reward pathways of the brain. So not the areas of the brain that associated with focus and clarity of thought and cognition.

IT does that. But IT is also increased in the level of dopamine receptions in the reward pathway. And what that means is that for any dopamine that's released in response to a positive experience, social experience, or any number of the other things that can stimulate dopamine release, there are more receptors, more parking spots, if you will, for that dopamine to arrive at and to exert its increases in mood, increases in motivation, in overall feelings, of drive, in excitement.

So there are four ways the caffeine works that we need to understand. First of all, caffeine act as a reinforcing agent. IT increases the probability that you will return to and engage in a certain activity or consume a certain beverage or food.

Second, caffeine increases dupine anotheh coin, which are both nero dullah in the forebrain, which helps us improve our ability to think, to modify our rule sets, that is, to adjust our strategies for different social situations and mental demands and physical demands. And third, IT increases the number, and efficient y of doping mean receptors in the reward pathways of the brain, that is, IT makes things that would feel pretty good, feel even Better. And fourth, caffeine access and tag nist to identify which offsets the sleeping ess that we would otherwise feel from the accumulation of a dense that occurs as we awake for more and more hours throughout the day.

So let's talk first about caffeine as a reinforcing agent. again. So was first most beautiful ly demonstrated in the study on honeybees, where the bees prefer nectared that containing caffeine, and that all makes perfect sense in terms of the ecology of bees and flowers that contain sector ah there's an advantage in at least in terms of adaptation that the flower benefits because of distribution of things from the flower, which is good for the the flowers and the bees benefit because they're getting food.

And so there's a kind of a simbo is there? But with humans, we were consuming caffeine containing beverages for our sake. I don't think we have IT in mind, nor do the bees have IT in mind, Frankly, that we're trying to preserve with the plants that provide the caffeine.

I think we would all i'm suffer where I was, say ninety percent of adults would suffer atlas. All the caffeine containing coffee and tea plants were gone, certainly, but most of us are not consuming coffee and tea and caffy containing foods because we're thinking about the plants they come from and we want to help those plans. We're think about how we want to help ourselves.

And yet the point of the reinforcing effects of caffeine are that they are largely subconscious. We are not aware of them. You might say, no, that's not true.

When I drink caffeine, IT makes me feel really good. So I am aware that IT makes me feel good. In order to illustrate how reinforcement really works, let me give you the counter example, which would be an aversive agents.

So we have reinforcing agents and we have aversive agents. Let's say that they were compounds in nature that existing plants that are aversive in india, they are. And let's say that these compounds were presented such low concentrations that you couldn't taste them.

Let's say, you wake up in the morning and you go to your refrigerator and you open IT up and you are thirsty and so you reach for a nice um you rich red containing beverage in a glass jar and IT looks like cranberry juice or something in that sort or even a nice clear glass of water IT looks like a jogger. Water, glass water and you drink that taste find you maybe even taste great to you. And then let's say, about thirty minutes later, you feel little crazy.

You feel off. You feel like going back to sleep. You just don't feel very good. You don't know why, but your nervous system is a predictive machine, and IT has a process in which IT back integrates actually integrates backwards into your immediate experience that proceeded that not so good feeling.

We can reliably say that there is a much lower probability that the next day when you wake up that you would reach for that same beverage or for that same container even. And maybe if you're in a novel environment, maybe you're staying in in an arba b or hotel or something in that sort, you might even find that you don't really like the kitchen in which you consume that beverage in the first place and you don't know why. And unless you've got very, very sick the day before, it's unlikely that you would have such a strong response that you would entirely avoided, for instance, water or glass jars containing liquids at that. But that you went back to the refrigerator and you consume beverage again and you just didn't feel so well. You feel less good than you Normally wood.

Well, even without any .

ability to taste what's in that beverage and even without any understanding of what was happening to at a conscious level, there is a very, very high probability that you will avoid drinking that particular beverage in certainly at that location and in the same volume in the subsequent days.

That's just the way that diverse of agents work, and they work by way of activating neurons in the gut that communicate with areas in the brain that give us this feeling of cuisine's. And for some of you hearing this, that pathway and that association with times in which you felt cozy and as if you wanted on IT is so powerful that you might even be feeling some of that symptom logy. Now, for certain people, that's going to be incase salvation, which proceeds.

We know that there's a classic neurons in the brain relate to an area called area postmen that actually stimulates vomiting. I keep talking about this. I'll probably feel like I want to bomb IT, so i'm going to move on from this in a moment. So when we are just caffeine containing beverages and foods is the exact opposite scenario to what I described. Caffeine as a reinforcer makes us feel slightly Better or a lot Better in the immediate minutes and hours after we injured ted.

So it's acting as a reinforcing agent not just while you're under the effects of caffeine, but for the things that preceded the injustice of caffeine, which is why you return again and again to caffeine containing beverages such as coffee and tea, or maybe even foods that contain caffeine, even if the taste of those words is not something that you would otherwise consider especially delicious. In fact, most people, when they take their first sip of coffee or tea or other of containing beverage, they find to be very bitter. And that's not because of the taste of caffeine.

It's because of the taste of the beverage itself, independent of caffeine. However, when caffeine is present there, they come to prefer that taste over most all taste. In fact, they will, as I mention early, will invest a lot of financial resources and time and energy to make sure that they get that beverage.

What they're trying to make sure is not that they get that taste, but that they get the caffeine IT. Is that positively reinforcing? And the taste, therefore, takes on new significance, new meaning, and we come to associated as positive.

And in fact, most of us, including myself, love the taste of a stressed, so, love the taste of coffee, love the taste of your even if the initial taste, the very first time that we consume that beverage, was either neutral or negative. And that is all because of the reinforcing properties of caffeine. And then, of course, there are the more direct actions of caffeine, that is, the faster actions of caffeine.

And just a lisa is off again very briefly, so that you have them in mind going forward. Caffeine also increases the release of dopamine and a C2Calling, both which are neuromodulators in the forebrain, which increases clarity of thought and your ability to rule, switch, your ability to move from one context to another, and change and understand the rules of engagement, social engagement, physical engagement, mental engagement and so forth. And as I mentioned before, caffeine also increases the number of dopamine e receptors in the reward way, such that any good thing that happens to you, any positive experience that you have, will have a more potent effect on your feelings of well being.

And last but certainly not least, caffeine access in the Denny and tagged st. IT reduces your feelings of lethargic and fatigue and your desire to sleep by parking in the receptors for a density and not allowing a denote y to have its o sleepy, if you will, affect on your brain and body. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens.

Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens in the reason I still take athi Greens once, are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health.

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I'd like to just briefly talk about a Dennison and some of its molecular features. And again, if you don't have a background of biology, don't worry. I promise to make this very clear to everyone.

First of all, caffeine is what's called the methodis anane and it's it's a plant alcohol. That's why caffeine itself is very bitter yeah, if I want to give you just a tiny is little bit of pure caffeine, you would find IT to be extremely diversified. I said these plants that have snuck small enough of the half of caffeine into them or that a massed of flavor caffeine with other flavors such that bees and humans want to consume them. Ah well, we don't know what plants think. Um IT does seem very diabolical and very clever in that we are seeking out these caffeine containing plants.

beverages and foods.

even though caffeine itself is this. Alcohol is very, very bitter metall's anthy. That is, caffeine binds to identical receptor ors. And there are really two types of identical receptor ors.

There are these so called a one receptors in the a two receptors, and they are present different parts of the brain and body, different levels. I don't enough, get too far into receptor subtypes. More importantly to understand is that a dense makes us feel tired because of the way that IT taps into the atp pathway.

The atp pathway is central to energy production and feelings of overall energy in our brain and body in all cells in organ systems. When caffeine bines to Denny ine receptors, IT prevents a denisse from breaking down certain components of the energy production pathway. And the net consequence of that is increased cyclic A M P.

So basically, when we in just caffeine, we are biasing our system towards the pro energetic aspects of these cellular pathways. Now it's really important understand that in biology, even if you blocker recept or you prevent the activity of an enzi, and at least in this case, you end up with more cyclic M P, more energy, you're not really getting more energy. You're actually borrowing energy against an overall system that is Frankly non negotiable.

What do I mean by that? Well, let's say that you were to wake up after six or eight hours of sleep and to drink a lot of caffeine and keep drinking caffeine throughout the day, throughout the day, blocking those at deny recipes. Yes, you'll offset fatigue.

You'll offset sleeping ess because that identity and simply can't function. But at the point where the caffeine becomes dislodged from the identify receptors, you will have a massive gut, a backlog of identify, and you will feel extra, extra sleepy. So really, there's no way to create more energy in your system.

Really, what you're doing is you're changing the timing in which the sleepy signals and the more energetic signals are arriving. And this is really important understand as as the backdrop to the various tools that we're going to get into next in which you can use caffeine for enhancing mental performance and physical performance and other aspects of health. But it's very important to understand this concept that when you wake up in the morning, provided that you slept well and enough the night before, your levels of identical will be about as low as they will ever be.

Actually, in order to get your identify levels really bottom out, you want to avoid caffeine in the first ninety, two hundred and twenty minutes after waking. I'll talk about why that is because IT turns out there's a way to completely clear dentistry out of your system in the hour so after weaken. But for most people, identify levels are going to be close to their lowest after a good night sleep.

But there's really no negotiating the accumulation of identify the it's going to occur and going to bias you towards feeling more sleepy than you would otherwise that's going to OCR throughout the day. There's really no way to eliminate dency. All you can really do is block its functions.

So it's not like borrowing energy against the fatigue that you will inevitably feel. Now this actually has very important national economical relevance. Before caffeine was regularly consumed by human beings, we were really slaves to the light, dark cycle.

And this was especially true before the presence of artificial lighting. But even before the advent of artificial lighting, humans were largely constrained to the outside light, dark cycle. We need to be active during the day and working during the day, and we need to be a sleep at night.

Caffeine allows us to divorce ourselves from that circuit I an cycle circadian in just means. About twenty four hour cafe allows us to do that at least somewhat by way of increasing our alertness, that is, spiking our alertness at various times throughout the day and even at night. This is how we can have shift workers for instinct that can sleep during the day and then drink a strong cup of coffee at eight P.

M. And then work into the night. That ability completely transformed our society. Now, of course, the healthier schedule, we know this with certainty.

The healthiest schedule for brain and body is going to be to be alert during the daytime and a sleep at night. There's no question about that. Shift workers run into all sorts of health problems.

And thank you shift workers for doing the important work that you do. We need you, air traffic controllers, paramedic, firefighters, police officers. That said, a, but we know that there are serious health consequences, negative heth consequences, that is, for shift workers. But for most people out there, about ninety five percent of people follow a typical schedule where they awake during the day and sleep at night.

And yet, IT used to be before the advent of caffeine containing beverages, that if you were sleeping in the afternoon, you either had to take an APP or battle that sleeping ess, that your activity rythm and your sleeping yet ms, were governed by these circadian changes in. Availability of sunlight and when you slept, and you just didn't have the ability to adjust a beverage that would increase your levels of alertness because you block a density. So this is important.

Understand that nowadays certainly live in a time in which we use, in fact, ninety percent more of adults in half or more of adolescence and teenagers use caffeine as a way to negotiate with, to borrow against this natural pattern of a dense making, a sleepy. But again, you're just offsetting the effects of sleeping is the dense causes. You can't eliminate the identical entirely.

The important point is that a dense as a proslavery py molecule is a non negotiable aspect of your biology, in fact, so non negotiable that every twenty four hours you are going to release a Dennison and you are going to release a density indirect proportion to how long you've been awake. So the long you've been awake, the more identical circulating your system. They're really only a handful of ways to completely clear out, identify the major one being to get sleep.

The other is to take a short nap, which of course, is sleep, but it's shallow sleep or non sleep. Deep breath, so called N S D R, has been shown to reduce levels of identity. And there are certain things, such as viewing morning sunlight, which, because of its of exon cortile, can quote and quote, clear out identity.

We will talk about this in more detail in a few minutes. And there is also evidence that certain forms of exercise, provided that its brief and intense can also reduce identity, not just block ets effects. Now that we talk about some of the incredible mechanisms by which cafe changes, our experience of life, increases alertness and mood at at A, I want to talk about the use of caffeine as a tool.

Now caffeine is a very potent and useful tool for enhancing mental health, physical health and performance. But there are certain considerations one has to keep in mind, in particular dose. Now, first off, not everybody will respond to the same dose of coffee in the same way, but we can reliably say that your body weight is a good measure by which you can estimate what a healthy, useful those of caffeine would be.

So for most people, ingesting one to three milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight is going to be the range in which caffeine can have positive effects without making us feel overly anxious and give us that feeling that you we're jumping out of our skin and turn the otherwise positive experience of caffeine into an aversive one. For those things that aren't familiar with thinking in terms of kilograms and Normally thinking pounds, i'll just quickly give you some general estimations that, for instance, one hundred kilograms equals two hundred and twenty pounds. So for me, I wait one hundred kilograms.

That means that one to three milligrams, again, milligrams, thousands of a gram, one to three milgram of caffeine per kilogram of body wait would mean for me, I could safely, and just one hundred to three hundred milligrams of caffeine in a single, in a single drink, if that's the way i'm consuming IT or pill form, if that's the way that i'm consuming IT, and it's very likely that that would be a tolerable dose. However, if you are not somebody that's a custom to drinking caffeine on a regular basis, I suggest you start on the lower end of that one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight range. So for instance, if you somebody who waited fifty kilograms, that's approximately one hundred and ten pounds, and you the pretty comfortable ingesting somewhere between fifty and a honor and fifty milligrams of caffeine.

So what I recommend is that people who are considering using caffeine as a tool or who are already interesting caffeine, start to think about the dosage of caffeine that you are interesting or planned to ingest and the timing in which you in just that caffeine relative to certain tasks throughout your day, you're waking in your sleeps. We'll talk about that in just a moment, but the first step for you is to figure out how much you weight in kilograms and then to go to that number of one to three milligrams of caffeine and per kilogram of body weight. And that's a good arrange in which you might want to explore the use of caffeine in a single application, meaning a single dose.

Now I do realized that some people out there are drinking coffee all day long or having coffee in the morning at that again in the afternoon. What i'm referring to here is the injection of caffeine in a single belt, right? One cup of coffee or two cups of coffee, for instance, to achieve that one hundred and three hundred milgram range, if that was appropriate for your body weight.

But to avoid any confusion when I talk about dosage of caffeine, when i'm really talking about is not the total amount of caffeine injured ted per day and talking about the total amount of caffeine injustice in one sitting or setting, that is. And if you are somebody who's drinking caffy multiple times throughout the day, you can imagine, for instance, they say the appropriate dose for you in order to get an enhancement. And mental performance or physical performance is is two hundred milligrams.

And you are somebody who's doing some work in the morning and you want to have that lift in the morning to be able to focus Better. And you're doing some physical exercise in the afternoon, or rice vera, that you would ingest two hundred million games of caffeine at two separate times per day, separated by about four hours. Now you don't have to separate them. You could you could put them two hours apart, for instance, but we will talk about half life of caffeine.

And so fourth, just keep in mind that if you are interesting, two hundred milligrams of caffeine and that's the appropriate dose for you based on your body weight, and then you are ingesting another two hundred milligrams of caffeine an hour later, you are effectively ingesting approximately four hundred millions of caffeine, which is going to start exceeding the editing, which you can Normally tolerate without feeling anxious and jittery. Y, with all of that said, there is a range of tolerance for caffeine that's based on two things. One is a preexisting disposition, that is, whether not your genetics and nervous system in the backlog of your life, how much stress your experiencing tends to make you feel more anxious and alert in jittery before you adjust any caffeine.

And the other is how so called caffeine adapted you are. We often hear about tolerance. Tolerance to mean something very specific at the ability to ensure more and more, or something with a patee that is a non no increase or an actual reduction in the effectiveness of that thing.

But here, we're not really talking about tolerance to caffeine. What we're talking about is being caffeine adapted. A simple way to understand whether or not you're caffeine adapted or not is that if you drink caffy and IT tends to increase your heart rate and make you feel more alone in a bit more anxious, the chances are you are not caffeine.

Adapt IT provided the amount of caffeine is within the healthy range for you. That is the ranges we talked about a moment ago. However, hear is somebody who drinks caffe ine, and you actually feel alert and relaxed.

Chances are you are caffeine adapted. And so at very times during today's episode, i'll talk about people who are cafe adapted and people who are not caffeine adapted will talk about the use of caffeine every other day. And a few habitual caffeine drinkers, including myself, just a simple mention of that probably sounds aversive um but there is actually great utility to using caffeine every other day as opposed to everyday.

But just keep in mind that some people drink caffeine and not get much of a lift from IT at all. Other people will drink caffeine, and they will feel extremely anxious, even that dosages far lower than that one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight ranged that I described a moment ago. So you have to take into account individual differences. That said, one to three milligrams of caffeine in per kilogram of body wait for a given sitting, you know, for your morning coffee, or you or your morning, your remote ity is a good arrange from which to start. And I do encourage you to go online and look up the various beverages and foods that you might be eating that contain caffeine.

For instance, some people are surprised to discover that the coffee that they get from some of the more standard popular vendors out there, the small coffee or the medium coffee, for instance, can contain as much as four hundred to six hundred milligrams of caffeine, and that the large coffee that is often sold, that those commercial vendors can contain as much as one gram, one thousand milligrams of caffeine, you may be adapted to that such that IT doesn't make you feel anxious. But if you wonder why you feel rita and you get a headache when you don't get that cafe or that amount of caffeine at precisely the time that you're used to getting in each day, that's because you are consuming quite large quantities of caffeine on a regular basis. So I do recommend whether not you drink soda, coffee, tea, that you figure out the source of that.

okay? So figure out what vender you purchase IT from what kind of coffee and go online and spend a little bit time because the information is out there to discover what levels of caffeine you're actually ingesting. Now if you happen to be interesting, more than one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight, caffeine, that's not necessarily bad. However, you do want to be careful about ingesting very high levels of caffeine over long periods of time in your life, because there can be issues that start to rise, in particular of bias towards higher levels of anxiety and depletion of certain electronic lights, because caffeine, as a diary edit, can cause you lose sodium.

Another thing that sort, and also just from simply a dependent standpoint, IT does appear that if you and just high levels of caffeine that is exceeding the dosages that Normally you could get away with and get just as much mental enhancing and physical enhancing benefits that you can cause some disruption to the microvascular tor, you can buy yourself as headaches, anxious attacks, and you can become actually quite vital when you're not getting those higher levels of caffeine. So I do encourage you to figure out not just what an appropriate caffeine dosage would be for you, but also how much caffeine you might already be interesting. The first two i'd like to talk about is one that i've mentioned before on this podcast several times and is something that if you haven't heard of will be very useful to you.

And if you have heard this tool before, i'm going to add some additional features to the description of this tool that should make this worthwhile for you as well. And that is to delay your caffeine intake to ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes after waking up on most days. You know, be very clear as today, in which you might want to adjust caffeine more closely to when you wake up.

Why would you want to delay your caffeine intake to ninety two, one hundred and twenty minutes after wakon? The answer to that is very simple. Many people wake up in the morning.

They drink caffeine within ten, twenty, thirty, sometimes within two minutes of waking, and they feel more alert naturally. That make sense because of the effects of caffeine in blocking the effects of identity, and I talked about earlier, and its effects on other neurotransmitter stems. But then what they find is that in the early afternoon, in particular, after launch, they experience a dramatic dip in their overall levels of energy, the so called afternoon crash.

And in most cases, the way they respond to that is to ingest more caffeine, which indeed can increase their levels of mood and alertness. However, as we will soon talk about, there is a problem with ingesting caffeine in the afternoon if IT falls within eight or ten, or dairy even, say, twelve hours of going to sleep. And that is caffeine adjusted in the .

afternoon for most everybody.

and say, for ninety five plus percent of people, disrupts the architectural quality of their nighttime sleep. And I should say that IT doesn't necessarily impact their ability to fall asleep and maybe even sleep through the night, but that the depth and quality of that sleep is disrupted by consuming cafe in the afternoon.

A little bit later, i'll talk about how you can offset some of those negative effects if you absolutely require caffeine in the afternoon. But there's a huge advantage to restricting your caffeine intake to the early part of your day, but not consuming caffeine within the first ninety two, one hundred and twenty minutes after waking. In fact, many people find that if they delay their caffeine intake to ninety two, one hundred and twenty minutes after waking up, that they feel more alert in the morning and they completely avoid that afternoon crash.

Now that said, many people, including myself, do need a short nap or non sleeve deep breast or other form of relaxation for ten to thirty months in the afternoon that is natural and healthy. I'm not referring to the need for that. When I referred to the so called afternoon crash, i'm talking about the afternoon crash is a inability to recover energy and focus and a need to consume more caffeine just to make IT through the afternoon by the link caffeine intake from to ninety, two hundred and months after waking.

There are couple of things that are accomplished. First of all, you offset that afternoon crash. And this is an effect that many people experiences the very first time they start to laying their caffeine intake to ninety, two hundred, twenty months after waking.

And the reason this work so well as the following, as I mentioned earlier, a Dennis, a molecule that builds up the longer that we are awake. IT is a molecule that is reduced or clear from our system by sleep. So when we emerged from sleep, regardless of how long we've slept, our identic levels are lower than they were when we went to sleep the previous night.

If you slept well enough and long enough, those identity levels can be very, very low, but they are never completely zero when you wake up in the morning, even if you're one of these people that springs out of bed and is ready to attack the day. And here I am, certainly not exit describing myself. I'm not one of those people to wake fairly slowly, but if you're one of those spring up in the attack the day or you're one of the people moves more slowly into your day, regardless, there is still some residual identity in your system.

And this is particularly the case if you did not get enough sleep or enough depth of sleep the night before the correct ratio of slow wave sleep in ee move sleep and for those of you interested optimizing sleep budges refer you to our master your sleep episode of the huberman lab podcast, the perfect you're sleep episode, the huberman lab podcast. And we have a tool kit for sleep, all of which are available zero cost, time stamped that are at huberman lab dot com. You wake up in the morning and your identity levels are low, but they're not zero.

And if you didn't sleeve that well or deeply enough the night before, you're going to have more dentistry in your system. You might think the logical thing to do is therefore d to drink caffeine and to block the identities there. But what happens if you do that is there's an accumulation sort of blood of the deny that hangs around.

And then in the afternoon, when the effects of that caffeine start to wear off, you will experience this called afternoon crash. As I mentioned earlier, there is a way to clear out the identic that's present when you wake up in the morning, and to clear IT out essentially completely without just blocking its receptors and letting IT accumulate or hang around. And the way to do that is to deliberately Spike your cordial.

Now, many of you have heard of cortisol is called stress warmond as a bad thing, and indeed chronically elevated cortisol is a bad thing that depletes your immune system, is bad for psychosocial effects. IT tends to make us feel anxious and on and on. But court is all itself is not bad.

Court is all is wonderful. Court is all enhances the efficiency the immune system IT makes us alert and focus. IT stimulates our metabolic, does a huge number of positive things provided that IT is released in a circadian fashion that is at the appropriate times every twenty four hours and that IT tends to peak very close to wake.

In fact, one of the reasons you wake up in the morning, assuming that you weren't woken up by some noise or or sleeping, an environment that's too warm sea, is that your quarter's all levels start to rise, and shortly after waking, your cortisol levels will start to reach their peak. And when I referred to a cortisol pulse, that's just the biology nerd speak for a rise and peak in court as all you want that court as all polls to occur early in the day, close to waking. And you want that for a couple of reasons.

First of all, if you don't restrict that court is all pulls to early in the day, IT will tend to bleed into the later parts of the day. And actually, a late shifted courtezan peak is one of the hallmark signatures of depression, low level depression in serious depression, and he can start to disrupt left, and certainly can mood meta lisp and your immune system. So you want that courts as all peek early in the day.

How do you ensure that that happens? Well, you wake up in the morning and whether not you are bounce out of bed type or you're more groggy, you kind of wait slowly into the day type, like I am. You wake up and you don't, in just caffeine, go fine. And in fact, beneficial to hydrate with water and electrical lights. terrific.

In fact, I would say necessary to get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight of talking others many, many times before in the podcast, if you wake up before the sun comes out and turn on bright artificial lights, but then certainly once the sun is out, and even on cloudy days, in fact, in especially on cloudy days, get outside for anywhere from five to twenty, maybe in thirty minutes. Do some work outside. Take your breakfast outside if you're breakfast leader, get something done outside, even if it's just to get outside.

Get bright light in your eyes. why? Well, because it's been shown in studies on humans that getting bright light in your eyes in the first hour after waking, or as soon as possible after waking, increases the peak of that quality is all pulls LED by fifty percent five zero.

And that cortical pulse, yes, increases mood, yes, increases alertness. But IT does one very important thing, which is that through an indirect pathway, IT can clear out any residual identic that might be present in your system when you wake up in the morning. Again, this is going to be especially important for those of you that are not getting as much sleep or as much quality sleep as you would like.

It's going to be very important for you to get that morning bright light, ideally from sunlight, get that court as all peak going. Other ways to increase that court is all peak would be to do some physical activity if you don't have time to do a full workout, well then getting some movement, you know, ten minutes of skipping rope or even five minutes of skipping rope or jumping jacks or walking, if that's all you have time for, ideally while getting the sunlight in your eyes. But that's going to zero out the identity present in your system if, however, you were to wake up and immediately drink caffeine, caffeine itself can stimulate the release of court is all a little bit more than IT would otherwise be present in your system.

But by blocking those identic receptors and because of the indirect effects of caffeine on the cortisol system, you actually are reducing the clearance of identify that would otherwise occur. So I realize that's a mouthful. Just to be very clear, if you wake up and you and just caffeine right away, you're blocking the identify receptor, but you're not clearing IT out.

You're also preventing court is all from having its Normal increase and rise such that they can directly clear out identic because court is all can clear out a dense and that's what you want. You want to be a maximum alertness and focus in your morning and throughout your day. And by delaying your coffee into ninety two, one hundred and twenty minutes after waking, you set up your system so that you get that morning court is all peak, ideally a peek that's even greater because you're getting your bright light viewing.

And then when you ingest your cafe in ninety two, one hundred and twenty months after waking, not only will you be craving IT just a little bit, but you will be drinking that caffeine on an already existing backdrop of increased alertness for two reasons. One is a denizen is zero out and your cortile peak is higher. And so now when you adjust caffeine, you can actually adjust levels of caffeine.

There are a little more reasonable that almost we certainly you are going to fall in this one to three milligrams per kilogram dosage and will allow you to feel really alert and will Carry that alertness well into the afternoon hours without the need to drink more caffeine, and thereby will prevent you from drinking caffeine and disrupting your nighttime sleep. And of course, by getting Better a nighttime sleep, you're year out, your density even more. So what i'm describing here are essentially two tools i'm telling you to get morning sunlight, and maybe some exercising conjunction with that, even if its brief exercise, but the main tool of the lin caffeine in ninety two, one hundred and twenty minutes after waking has immediate effects.

But IT also sets in motion a cade or domino falls that lead to Better sleep and more wakefulness the next night and the next day, and so on and so forth. Now I realized there are some people who just simply cannot or will not. Lay their coffee and ninety, two hundred and twenty minutes after wakon, for whatever reason.

First off, let me say that if you are somebody who likes to wake up and do very intense exercise within the first ninety minutes after waking, well, in that case, IT would be appropriate to injust your caffeine just prior to doing that exercise. Not a problem, not a problem. But you should expect that the combination of drinking caffeine very shortly after waking, plus exercising very intensely shortly after waking, will increase the intensity of that early afternoon and afternoon fatigue that you feel.

Now for some people, that's a great thing. They can afford to take a nap. Or do you non sleep, depressed, step away from work and so forth. In that case, I strongly encourage you to do whatever IT is that allows you to get regular exercise because regular exercise is going to be very beneficial.

In fact, we did entire episode called tool kit for fitness that describes A A couple of different, but really one main structure that allows you to get the appropriate amount of resistance training and cardiff asal training and flexibility training throughout the week. I happen to follow that program and IT works very well and IT doesn't volte. Some of those workouts to come very early in the morning shortly after waking.

And in those cases, I do in just caffeine just prior to those. So within ten, twenty minutes of waking, however, on other days, I personally delay my caffeine intake ninety, two hundred, twenty months, and i've done that to great benefit. And most people, if not all people that try that have reported the same.

I should mention that some people will find getting out to that ninety minutes to be exclusively difficult because there's so accustomed to ingesting caffeine close to waking up. In that case, maybe just push out your caffeine intake by about fifteen minutes each day until you hit that ninety to one hundred and twenty minute mark. And that will make IT much.

There might take you a week or or so to get there, but once you get there, you'll find IT to be quite easy to maintain. No thing is that if you are somebody who insist on drinking caffeine very shortly after waking, I would encourage you to drink half of your caffeine then and then the other half of your caffeine about an hour later. That also will help offset some of the afternoon crashed for reasons related to the social connect ics of caffeine.

Caffeine has a quarter life about twelve hours. That means if you were in just a cup of coffee at, let's say, adam and I say, one hundred milligram coffee, just for sake of simplicity, that about twenty five percent of of that caffeine action, we wouldn't really say twenty five militants, but about twenty five percent of that caffeine action will still be present at eight P. M.

That night, which is pretty remarkable. So there's a long ark of caffeine effects. And this is why I can impede sleep if it's if we take caffeine in the afternoon. But again, if you're somebody who wakes up and you really need caffeine right away and you refuse to do this ninety, two hundred and twenty minute delay thing that i'm talking about, then in that case, I would drink cafe of your caffeine pon waking and then a little bit more or the other half um about an hour later.

And that will extend the arc of that caffeine effects such that you don't need IT again in the afternoon because you won't experience the afternoon crash because of the way caffeine works. I should mention that if you injust caffeine on an empty stomach, IT will have a more potent stimulant effect that will also tend to increase the level of jitteriness the caffeine can produce. Later, i'll talk about ways to offset that jitteriness. But i'll just tell you one tool.

Now many people opt to take a hundred milligrams of theanine T H E A N I N E theanine as a way to offset some of the jitteriness and will reduce the gitanas of caffeine, which is why many energy drink manufacturers and even some coffee are now putting thinning in energy drinks and in ground coffee, because, no surprise, IT allows people to consume more of that beverage, and they're by purchase more of that average, which is what these vendors want without feeling overly anxious and jittery. So you can take pill form DNA, if you want, with your caffeine. I don't tend to do that.

Rather, I controlled the total dosage of my cain. I do tend to consume caffeine on an empty stomach because I do restrict my caffeine intake to the early part of the day. And I generally eat my first meal somewhere around eleven am, and then I generally at my last meal, sometime around eight P.

M. Or so those are those are averages, I would say, plus or minus an hour. And that's not because i'm religiously following any kind of time.

Restricted feeding is just so that tend to work best with my schedule and my appetite. But again, that's a general theme. There are days in which I wake up and i'm very ungry, and I might adjust something small and act or something.

Or if I meeting somebody for breakfast, sometimes i'll have breakfast, sometimes I won't, and so on and so forth. The point is that you can get away with drinking less caffeine to get the stimulant effect if you do IT on an empty stomach. And if you're somebody who likes exercise on an empty stomach, and i'm one of those people, well then interesting caffeine and just prior to exercise, can be a fantastic tic tool. Little bit later will talk about .

some of the physical performance .

enhancing effects of caffeine, but i'll just briefly jump to a point about that as we relate to morning exercise. If you are somebody who regularly and just cafe and we can define regularly by if you ve injustice caine every day for the last two weeks, your regular consumer caffeine, as if you're somebody who only in just caffeine somewhere between two and four times per week, well then you are not a regular consumer caffeine, your an internal user of caffeine.

If you're somebody use a regular user of caffeine, the performance enhancing effects of caffeine are going to be most dramatic if you take two or three days off from drinking caffeine which to my mind as I don't want to call myself a caffeine atic but a regular caffeine user, it's a horrible notion to me and is versions notion um because I do like the effects of caffeine so much. But if you really want to see the maximum performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you'll do either one of two things. You will either abstain from caffeine for a few days or three days prior to interesting caffeine.

or you will use caffeine .

on an empty stomach. It's very clear that caffeine on an empty stomach enhances both the mental and physical enhancing effects of caffeine. And of course, all of that has to be stated on the background of consideration that if you, you you're very, very hungry, IT can be make IT hard to concentrate and so on.

And so for so i'm not encouraging people to starve themselves by any means. Certainly don't do that. But if you want to maximized the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you will consume on stomach. And then as a final point to that, caffeine is a dirac IT caused us to lose fluid and along with that fluid, to excrete sodium because of the effects of caffeine on various processes within the kidney.

So one thing that works very well to maintain mood and alertness longer, given a certain amount caffeine intake, and to avoid the jittery nesson, and what can sometimes feel like a crash or low blood gear feeling, or even blurry vision, is to make sure that you consume at least an equal volume of water with your caffeine, and ideally that water would contain maybe a small pinch of salt or some sort of electoral light drink or powder. Rather for me, I use element full disclosure. They are a podcasts, filia and sponsor.

But you don't need to do that. You could simply just have glass of water alongside your your coffee or expresso your ear, but monday, and just put a small pinch of sea salt in that, or even just playing table salt. And that will help offset some of the jitteriness of caffeine. Lot of people think that when they just caffeine, they get the jitteriness and crashed because their blood sugar is low. And while that can be the case, often times it's simply because of the excretion of sodium that's occurred when they have invested caffeine.

So I encourage you to hydrate well and to hydrate with something that contains a little bit of sodium, obviously not so much of the increases hyper perception or something that all of a small amount of sodium or an electoral light drink like element and the other electro light drinks out there, they can the same, of course, just a couple of quick notes about thein ni because there are a growing number of products out there that contain theanine, and there surely a growing number of people out there who are using scene for the effect that I described before, which is to offset some of the jitteriness associated with caffy containing beverages or foods. And of course, I should mention that i've talked about the effects of the ne on sleep at that sleep tall kit that you can find as a free downloaded. You don't even even have to sign up for anything.

You just download IT from human lab 到 com， go to the menu, go to news letter, you see the tool kick for sleep. You'll see that the so called sleep stack that H I use and recommend includes magnesium three and eight, something about APP gene Anthony, although that sleep's that is designed to be to taken thirty to sixty minutes prior to sleep. And I make the point there, and I make IT again here, that ingesting thein prior to sleep is not a good idea.

If you are somebody who tends have very vivid dreams, night terrors or night walk, sleep walking. Excuse me, etta, in that case, eliminate the eny from from the sleeping ack. However, a number of people are using thinnes and products are using the eny to offset gittern ss from caffeine containing products during the daytime daytime consumption.

That is a couple of notes about the fee is something that is present in Green tea, right? It's now been created as a supplement. It's what's called a non protein acid.

So while there mino acids and proteins are, of course a mino acid and non proteins, and the need is one such non protein mini acid zenie tends to stimulate that so called glutamate and gloomy pathway is actually very similar to good mate to mean. And IT has a lot of effects on a lot of different aspects of the nervous system. But the general effect of theanine is to compete for the receptors for certain neurotransmitters ors.

And the neurotransmitters ors are referred to were all excited atoms, neurotransmitters, things like glutamate. And they govern a tremendous amount of our daily thinking and action and feeling at set up because they presented so many connections between irons and the brain. Fining competes for the receptors for glutamate and tends to reduce our overall levels.

Of alertness. So really, when people take singing along with caffeine, what they're doing is they are really taking a slight, I don't want to call IT, depressing to the point where misleads people and makes people think that IT will make you depressed. The word is a little bit misleading, but IT tends to reduce or blunt some of the more excited tory pro alertness actions of neurons in the brain.

So when you take a alongside cafe tense, IT cortical, even things out a bit, I should mention that the dosages of the ne that are effective for offsetting the gittern ess of caffeine is two hundred to four hundred milligrams. And the studies that I was able to find show that essentially up to nine hundred milligrams per day can be safe. But that's a very hyo sage of the ni.

In fact, so much so that I might increase sleeping ess to the point where I wouldn't feel good. There are also some positive effects of daytime consumption of the that are independent of reducing the gittern ess of caffeine. For instance, to a study demonstrating that seventeen days of ingesting thinning at this two hundred four hundred milligram dosage of at one to three times per day can reduce depression and anxiety.

There are also some good data there showing that they, I can have positive effects on nathian cells of blood vessels, capitalists and so on, and increase some of the function of blood vessels, allowing them to pass more blood through them, give them a little bit more elasticity, if you will. So the ne has certain prosthetic effects of it's taken prior to sleep. IT can enhance the quality, depth, the duration of sleep. Again, if you are sleep Walker, somebody who has extremely vivid dreams from which you wake up in the milk, and I probably best to leave out the ne, or maybe reduce the dosage down to one hundred milligrams, and if that's still too much than eliminate completely. But thinking can be terrific for enhancing quality depth.

Interview of sleep IT can also reduce the gitanas associated with caffeine containing beverages and foods, and IT has certain anti depression and pro endothelial effects, that is, IT can offset depression, IT can offset anxiety, although those are minor effects, OK subtle effects, and IT has been shown to improve and do the the al cell, that is, vessel and capitale function and structure in ways that can be beneficial for both brain and body. That one final point about theanine that's worth paying attention to is that the connecting in or such that you don't need to take the ini every time you and just a caffeine beverage, when we are just caffeine, the peak effects of caffeine occur about thirty minutes after we drink IT. And there i'm assuming one takes IT all at once.

And this is a key point that will come back to later, right, rather than sipping your coffee slowly over a couple of hours or an hour, if you drink all two hundred or three hundred milligrams of caffeine in your coffee, six hundred milligrams every coffee, if you're getting one of those commercial coffees and you take thinking along with the thinking, will block some of the gittern ss and anxious inducing effects of caffeine that can occur for much longer than the effects that caffeine last. So the pecan thinking occurs about an hour after industry. I suppose if you want to get really fancy and really dialing the connecting, you could injust the in, in about a half hour before you inject your caffeine.

But I think that's getting a little bit excessive in terms of controlling your microenvironment, if you will. I think you will be perfectly fine to take a hundred to two hundred milligram capsule of thinning along with your coffee or tea is so forth, and just realized that if you drink more caffeine or you extend your caffeine and take over several hours, that you don't necessarily have to take scene repeated times throughout the day, the talk for a moment about when to avoid cafe. And in the same stroke, let's also talk about some of the mists around caffeine.

Prince, one of the major miss around caffeine is that IT can increase hostile prosa. Turns out that while there is a relationship, of course, between calcium and austria process is that is reductions in bone density and IT is the case that caffeine can extract calcium from certain tissues. The large scale studies that are out there essentially prove that if people are ingesting enough calcium through their diet, which most everybody is, although certainly there are some people that need to supplement calcium or make IT a point to consume more calcium containing foods, but assuming that you are getting adequate levels of calcium, there is no direct relationship between caffeine intake and ostia process, at least not that i'm aware of.

I know this was debated for a number of years in the literature, but the literal seems to arrive at a general consensus now that caffeine itself is not going to create or exacerbate osteria OS is provided. People are getting enough calcium through their diet, that is, through foods, through supplementation or both. Some of the other miss around caffeine are that, for instance, caffeine will reduce test asturian levels or will reduce estrogen levels.

Others missed out there are in exact opposite to that, that caffeine will increase test astro om levels, in particular free test astro n levels. There have been some large scale studies addressing the hormone effects of caffeine. There are a little bit difficult to do.

I should just mention that copy out. And the reason they are difficult to do is because ninety percent of adults are consuming caffeine. And therefore, you can imagine it's very hard to find a control group to compare the caffeine consumers to, in particular, a control group that well controlled for other things like lifestyle, diet, exercise, is set up. However, when one controls, as well as one can, for all the various factors that could impact hormones, but one discover is that caffeine take, at least at the dosages we talked about earlier, one to three milligrams for kilogram of body weight, or even up to double that, that there are no consistent increases or reductions in testosterone or estero en in men or women that can be directly attributed to the caffeine intake.

And I say directly attributed because in these association studies, one always has to wonder, for instance, if because people are ingesting more caffeine, they have more energy and therefore exercising more, and exercises is known to have effects on to starter nest in other hormones, whether or not the effects of caffeine on those hormones is indirect t and so on and so forth. And the soldiers underscores the chAllenges of doing studies on humans in the wild, in their natural habitat of living, as opposed to in acute study, as it's called, that bring someone into laboratory and studying them just for those hours or moments. With all that said, there does appear to be a relationship between caffeine intake and so old sex hormone and bonding global, which is a protein present in the body, both men and women, that binds to the sex story hormones testosterone in a gen and prevents them from being in their free or active form.

IT has been shown that in gestion of caffeine, even then, the sorts of of dangers that are concerned safe and that we've been discussing, can increase sex formal binding global in such that they can slightly reduce overall levels of free test, astro and free asteroid in women. Now, those effects are relatively minor, but they do exist. If any of your interested reading further into the effects of caffeine on hormones, i'll just refer you to a couple of studies we will link to this in the shower note caption the title of the study is consumption of caffeine beverages in serum concentrations of sexual hormones in us men and within this study there is a reference to a equally sized and power city done on women, both of which converged on the same conclusion by examining more than a thousands, in this case fourteen hundred ten men, or more than a thousand women, that there are increases in sexual moon binding globulin associated with increased intake of coffee in particular.

But they were able to narrow that down specifically to injections of caffeine. So it's not coffee per sae that's causing the increase in sex oral mom bunning libelling. It's actually caffeine in itself.

Now again, the increases in sexton's moon binding lobley were not so significant that, at least to my mind, they seem like a concern, although I think that IT is worth noting that if you're going to consume caffeine, that you probably want to consume caffeine in a way that is in dosages and with the sort of timing that will allow you to get away with adJusting caffeine, but not to access so to derive the benefits of caffeine without, for instance, driving up six mono on burning libin too far. Now, why would that be a good idea? Why would you want to make sure that you have enough free test stone and free estero?

En, well, some of that is related to the acute effects of those harmons in terms of well being and a label and strength and mood eeta, but some who is also related to the longer term effects of sexy hormones. Many people do not realize this, but the sexy hormones Operate on the receptors at the surface of cells to have immediate effects, but they also can enter cells and actually go into the nucleus of cells where the D N A of those cells are contained and controlled gene expression in those cells. So the sex storage hormones, testa, stern and estrogen are controlling a lot of different cellular functions over long periods of time.

So blunting their action over long periods of time is probably not a great idea. But again, at the dosages of casting that we're talking about today, one to three million grants per kilogram a body wait, unlikely that the increases in sex harmonizing global one experiences from that are going to be detrimental. And certainly the positive effects of caffeine, that one experiences in terms of mental performance and physical performance, in the fact that IT increases energy to do the sort of things like exercise that we know can profoundly improve hormone profiles and two folder, three fold improvement in hormonal profiles, when that case, IT seems that ingesting caffeine is overall a good thing, provided is not in access.

That also makes this the appropriate time to mention one of the more impressive effects of caffeine, which is on overall levels of mood and mental health. There are several studies on this, but the one that i'm particularly fond of was publishing twenty eighteen in psychiatry research. And the title of the paper is inverse association between cafe intake and depressive symptoms in U.

S. adults. And then use r data from the national health and nutrition examination survey. And the basic takeaway is that, well, of course, there are a ton of different factions tors, that are going to relate to whether not people are depressed or not, life circumstances, genetics and so on, that in here i'm quoting from the study cain psychostimulant properties.

That just means the billions make us more alert and positive, appear to protect against depressive. And of course, acknowledge that additional studies are needed. But this is just one of several studies pointing in the fact that people who regularly and just caffeine in the appropriate dosages do seem to enjoy an anti depressive effect.

Overall, I wouldn't want anyone to consider caffeine a treatment for severe depression, or at least not alone, a treatment for severe depression, but provided the the inducing effects of caffeine can be kept in check through use of thin or making sure that the dosage and the timing of caffeine and Justin is cracked, then caffeine overall seems to be good for our mood and prevent depression, or at least keep depression at bay when depression might otherwise surface or be more severe. And of course, there are the dots surrounding caffeine intake as IT relates to sleep. And to put IT very simply, sleep that is getting enough quality of sleep, night is the foundation.

IT is the bedrock of mental health, physical health and performance sleep, and the power of sleep for exceeds any neutral pic. You could ever take any prescription drug. You could ever take any health promoting tool for your immune system, your metabolic, your mental function, your physical function.

You could ever take. Sleep is the bedrock. I know a lot of people experience chAllenge of a sleep. Nobody is perfect about sleep. That's important to keep in mind.

I think a good goal is to get enough quality sleep of sufficient duration, eighty percent of the nights of your life, and then as much as possible to make sure that the remaining twenty percent of nights you are not getting enough sleep for good reasons as oppose the hard reasons. Good reasons would include raising children. That's important.

After all, every species um desires to make more of itself and to preserve and extend the wedding of its Young. So child wearing is a perfectly legitimate reason to get lack of sleep, but you really wanna straight to get quality sleep most nights of your life, which means that even if you're somebody who can, couldn't quote, drinking espresso and then fall right to sleep, that you avoid caffy intake in the twelve hours prior to sleep. I realized not everyone will be able to do that. In fact, I sometimes violate that, so I tend to go to sleep around ten pm every night, sometimes eleven, occasionally twelve and night, but usually around ten P. M.

Every night. I confess .

that my last infested of caffeine is not always ten A M or prior to that. So sometimes I will have caffeine up until eleven am, or maybe noon, and very, very rarely i'll have an afternoon coffee or espresso or .

non calorie containing soda .

or tea or something that's of that sort. But I really tried to restrict my caffeine intake to the early part of my day, that is before noon, given that I go to sleep around ten P M. night.

And I strongly encourage everyone out there to try and limit their afternoon caffeine intake. This is something that dr. Matt Walker, who's an expert si researcher, had a university caller, nia berkeley psychology and neusatz department there, author of the incredible book why we sleep.

He's been on this podcast, many other podcast, talking about the importance of sleep. He will remind us, and i'll remind you now that the quarter life of caffeine is twelve hours. I mentioned this earlier, but i'm going to repeat IT again. And that means that if you just caffe ine at noon, twenty five percent of its effects more less. Okay, i'm using broad stroke are to talk about quarter life.

Twenty five percent of that is still going to be bioactive at midnight that night, which will disrupt the early phase of your night, the amount of slow weave sleep, which then in turn will disrupt the amount of rapid eyes movement sleep, which will disrupt your emotional processing during the following day, and so on and so forth. Kay, none of this is to say that you have the occasional cup coffee in the afternoon. It's going to completely demolish your sleep wake cycle forever.

But I really encourage people to avoid drinking caffeine in the twelve hours prior to sleep. And if you can do that within the ten hours prior to sleep, and if you can do that within the eight hours prior to sleep. So really trying to limit your caffeine and take in the eight to twelve hours prior to go to sleep at night, and of course, slow wave sleep, A K deep sleep is the sleep that's associated with somewhat monae dreams, which makes you sound like IT might not be that important.

But it's also the sleeps that associated with growth on on release, which is important for protein synthesis, repair of all bodily tissues and meta lisp and slow way lep is also critically attached to your immune systems ability to clear out bacteria and viruses that might otherwise infector tissues. Now i'd like to talk about caffeine and its positive effects on performance when used correctly. And here we are referring to both mental performance and physical performance.

The exploration of caffeine as a pro performance tool has been explored since the nineteen thirties, at least at some of the earliest documented literature on this. Although I have to imagine, given that people have been using caffeine for much longer than that, that long ago, somebody realized that by ingesting a certain plant that they felt much more alertness. And we're able to hunting, gather or do any number of different things Better and as a consequence, decide to consume more of that plant.

Now these days, we consume a lot of cafes in in the form of coffee and t mainly, and some people consume IT in the form of caffy and tablets or energy drinks at seta. Across the board, one finds that caffeine intake at a level of one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight improves reaction time, that is, that reduces the amount of time to take a physical action or to answer a question correctly with a verbal response. IT can also improve coordination.

IT can also improve memory. Although I do want to mention that whether most studies of the effects of caffeine on improving mental and physical performance involve taking caffeine at one to three milligrams per kilogram, a body wait before the mental task or physical task, there is also a pro performance effective caffeine on memory. If one takes caffeine after learning certain material, I should say, being exposed to certain material, we will come back to that in a few minutes.

If one examines reaction time, mood, alertness, focus and memory, or the ability to call up information from memory or physical dexterity, power output, endurance and overall feelings of well being during exercise and exertion, caffeine has been shown in numerous studies in both men and women to improve all of those metrics significantly. So this is all just to say that caffeine is an incredible performance enhancing tool. Now what's not obvious from the statement that cafe is a performance enhancing tool across the board and in men and women and in different context, is that the way in which caffeine is taken is very important because ninety percent or more of adults consume caffeine.

Finding controls for studies of caffeine is really chAllenging. That is, finding people who don't injust caffeine regularly is a very chAllenging task for the research, cher. And as a consequence, many of the studies of caffeine on human beings involve depriving regular caffeine users of caffeine and then examining the effects of caffeine given after a period of, say, five to fifteen days of abstinence in a person that is essentially experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms.

Because they haven't had the cafe that they were used to getting. So this is an important point, and it's a point that likely exacerbates the observed pro performance effects of caffeine. Now all of that isn't necessarily a problem provided you keep IT in mind and IT actually points to away in which even if you're regular caffeine user, you can extract more of the benefits of caffeine.

The simplest way to do this, for instance, is to look back to what we talked about earlier in terms of the need to have most of your court is all increase restricted to the hour or hours just after waking. In terms of mood and alertness and performance, one of the ways to increase the peak of that quarters all early in the day is to consume caffeine shortly after that peak occurs. And this was really nicely demonstrated in a study entitled caffeine stimulation of coral secretion across the waking hours.

In relation to caffeine intake levels, we will provide a link to this study is a somewhat complicated study because they looked at a bunch of different times of day for caffeine intake. And I should mentioned this study, they use the three hundred milligrams per day or six hundred milligrams per day. That's quite high, although for people of sufficient body weight and who are customers taking cafe in, its certainly not going to be an excess of what a lot of people out there are taking.

But basically what they observed was the following court is all responses to caffeine are reduced but not eliminated in people who consume caffeine on a daily basis. What this means is that if you wake up, and as I recommended earlier, you avoid drinking caffeine for the first nine to one hundred twenty minutes after waking, but you do get some sunlight or other bright light in your eyes in that time, maybe even get some exercise in that time, which will be even Better. And then you in just caffeine, you'll get a further increase in court, is all which provided is restricted to the early part of the day, is a good thing overall for mood and alertness.

So this is a simple performance enhancing tool, which is to stack caffeine on the tail of that early court is all peak. I should also mention, however, that in this study, they had people do a five day caffeine absence prior to being tested with three hundred milligrams or six hundred milligrams of caffeine. So the simple tilt or extract from this and other studies like IT, is that if you want to experience the maximum alertness promoting effects of caffeine, when you adjust IT early in the day, you would have stained from caffeine for five days, and then in just caffeine, ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes after waking.

I would still hope that you were doing all the other things that I described, morning sunlight exercise that that correctly. But regardless, it's very clear that a five day absent is from caffeine, however painful that might be, will increase the performance enhancing effects of caffeine when you take caffeine on that six day. Now i'm sure many of you out there are saying, why would I ever want to abstain from caffeine for five days in order to just get this six day performance enhancing effect? Well, there are couple reasons for doing that.

Perhaps um you're planning to travel to a new time zone and you want to use caffeine as a stimulant to stay up during the day in the new time zone. That's someone in usual case others have you might be interested in the pro physical performance effects of caffeine. We'll talk more about these in a little bit.

You want to get the maximum strength increase or the maximum endurance increase from adJusting, in this case, three hundred to six hundred milligrams. Of caffeine. While that case of staining from cain for five days will greatly exacerbated pro performance effects of caffeine when you take them on that six day, although add to those five days are likely to be pretty painful if you're regular caffeine user.

Another variation on this, however, might be to have the amount of caffeine that you and just on a daily basis and then go back to your regular level of caffeine intake on that day in which you need the caffeine to really boost your mood, energy and performance. Another reason why you might want to abstain from caffeine or reduce your caffeine intake for a period of time and then go back your regular caffeine intake is simply to identify how much of an effect caffeine is really having on your overall level of daily functioning and mood. This was something that was actually covered in beautiful detail in a book by Michael paul n.

All about cafe is available and audible. I really enjoyed that book. He describes his experience with the decision to completely abstain from caffeine for a period of months. Although I confessed after hearing that book, what IT basically made me want to do is never quit drinking caffeine, because that sounded, at least my interpretation was that even after several weeks or months of abstaining from caffeine, that he still fantasized about the effects of cafe.

But he did mention that when returning to ingesting caffeine and after a period of long absence ts, but IT had almost a um let's not call IT a psychiatric property but I had such obvious effects on mood and alertness and feelings of well being that IT really highlighted for him the extent to which cafe Normally was allowing him to just function what he thought was Normally so in other words, many of us don't even really know what our Normal basic level of cognitive and physical functioning is because we're interesting caffeine on such a regular basis. I confess that as much as I enjoyed that book and as intriguing as his description of caffeine abstinence and then the return to caffeine was, I don't intend to ever find out personally. Now, a very good reason why you might want to abstain from caffeine for a deliberate period of time and then return to caffeine intake is for its physical performance enhancing effects.

And here we can look to a really interesting study, title of which is time course of tolerance to the performance effects of caffeine. And what I like about the study is that, well, yes, he does say that abstaining from caffeine and then returning to caffeine intake can enhance physical performance in a very specific way. IT also says that if you take caffeine regularly, you can still see the physical performance enhancing effects of caffeine, although they are not quite as robust as they would had you abstained from caffeine.

The design of the study is pretty straight forward. They had people either ingest three milligrams per kilogram of caffeine for twenty consecutive days. Many people are already doing that, I realized, but they had people do that or ensure that they were doing that.

or others adjusted .

a placement for twenty days. So they obtained from caffy without realizing IT. Then after that twenty days of either interesting caffeine or a placebo, their peak performance was measured in terms of a robic output.

But prior to that measurement, they had caffeine. okay. So it's twenty days of caffeine. And then a twenty first day of caffeine and then the physical task on that twenty first day or it's twenty days of absence from caffeine.

And then on day twenty one, you get caffeine and you get the same physical test. And what they discovered was that the injections of caffeine increased peak performance in this erotic c output dramatically if people had abstained from caffeine. But for people that had consumed caffeine all the way through up until that day, IT still was effective to injust caine on day twenty one, but not as effective as IT would have been had they obtained.

And in fact, the magnitude of the what they called argon ic effect, which is the pro performance enhancing effective caffeine, was higher on the first day, then in subsequent days when they allowed people to continue caffeine and take so they take away from the study, is really straight forward. If you want to get the maximum physical performance enhancing effects of caffeine, you have stained from caffeine for twenty days. Then on day twenty one, when you're going to do the physical thing, the task, you just caffy about thirty months to an hour before you do that physical chAllenge.

Now, twenty days of absent dence, it's going to be rough for a lot of people. I certainly want to sign up for this study, in which case you might want to do five days of absence, as we talked about before. And then on day six is the day that you in just caffeine and do the physical task.

There are even some study showing that you can abstain from caffeine for just two days, for just forty eight hours. And in particular, if you are a regular user of cafe, this allows you to on day three in just caffeine at the dose ts appropriate for you and do the physical or I should mention mental performance task and perform significantly Better than those that have been taking caffeine throughout the entire period, reading up to the chAllenge. So you don't necessarily need to abstain for twenty days in order to get the pro performance effects of caffeine on day twenty one.

You could do five days of absent that prior, even two days of absent its prior. Or if that's intolerable to you as IT is in my mind to me, to just reduce your caffeine and takes slightly or even perhaps have IT if you can tolerate that in the week or two weeks or maybe even three weeks proceeding some physical or mental chAllenge. Now again, this sort of implies that your going up against a marathon or you're going up against a series of long test, maybe standardize test him one day there.

I just really want to point out that there is an abundant literature showing that people perform best on mental tests if they are in the state that they were when they studied for that material. Now in college I knew a number of people who took this to the extreme thinking that if they were to study under the effects of alcohol, that they would be best of um consume alcohol prior to taking exams. And that turns out to not be the case here.

We're talking in particular about psychostimulant effects of caffeine and other compounds. So don't think that you can a drink or beyond the influence of T， H, C, and then take when you study and then take an exam under the same influence and do just as well as you would have you not interest anything. Please don't let that be the take away.

However, do let me be the take away that caffeine effects are made more pot by a brief to not so brief period of absence prior to taking a dosage of caffeine. And then the final point to make is that if you are somebody who is not a customer to drinking cafe, meaning you're hypersensitive caffeine or you don't regularly in just caffeine, please do not in just cafe on the day of any important mental or physical chAllenge of your performance. Because what you will find is that because you are not caffeine adapted, you will experience changes in your thermal regulation, in your levels of anxious and jitteriness and your levels of focus that could be very detrimental to mental or physical performance.

So you don't want to throw yourself in the deep and um by ingesting caffeine if you're not used to IT. And I should mention that for people that are not accustom to investing cafe or a very sensitive caffeine, even twenty five to fifty milligrams of caine in the amount that's found in france, a piece of certain types of chocolate can actually caused xiety. So be careful there.

Here, i'm referring only to people that are custom with cafe intake. So what I recommend is to explore the urgent etic effects of caffeine during your training and then to make a decision about what you can reasonably and reliably do in terms of absence and then pulse with caffeine on the day of the chAllenge. I get a lot of questions as to whether not caffeine has different effects on the nervous system in on performance, in particular, depending on faces of the menstrual cycle.

So I explored that in my research for the episode, and I found two studies, both of which we will reference in the shown note captions. The first one is entitled cafe consumption and menstrual function. So it's actually the relationship between caffeine and menstal function. We will do an entire epo de about the mental cycle commentary function.

But the other one as IT, relates to performance with publishing twenty twenty in the european journal nutrition, which is egg ic effects of caffeine on peaker road cycling power during the metro cycle and the basic takeaway of the study, Frankly, a very nice study showed that, quote, caffeine increased peek er a robot cycling power in the early folicur pro ati amid ludie phases of the mesa cycle, thus the congestion. And again, here they use three milligrams of caffeine in per kilogram of body mass might be considered an egg ic aid for women who are in the menstrual cycle during all three phases of their cycle. So keep that in mind.

Women, for those of you there are regular users of caffeine or you're using caffeine to enhance physical performance, there does not seem to be any menstrual cycle phase dependent effects of caffeine on performance, that is, caffeine seems to always increase physical performance regardless of the phase of the mental cycle you might happen to be. I'd like to touch on a little bit more of the use of caffeine for enhancing mental performance. yes.

IT is the case that ingesting one of three milligrams of kit fee per kilogram of body weight in the thirty minutes or so prior to doing a memory task or um sitting down to doing some studying or learning of any kind physical or mental performance of any kind is beneficial for all the reasons we talk about before related dopamine in the calling a but IT turns out that IT is also the case that spiking ones a journey and other so called category so this will be dopy nor and f an an een ean after about of learning can greatly enhance memory for the information that one was trying to learn. That's right. Spiking your a journal after learning can greatly increase memory for the material you're trying to learn.

In fact, this is a practice that dates back centuries and was written about in a beautiful annual review of neuroscience on the biology of memory bytes ames mega, we talks about medival practices of children being taught information and then being thrown literally into cold water to stimulate the release of a general. And that increasing in a general, while the mechanism wasn't completely understood, IT was understood that that sort of shocked to the system from the cold water LED to Better memory and retention of the information that these children had been exposed to when IT turns out the exact thing. Is true for adults in the laboratory or kids in the laboratory.

And here, i'm not suggesting throwing anyone into cold water if you want to get into cold water. And there's a reason we call IT deliberate cold exposure on the podcast is that IT should be deliberate in control by you, not by somebody else. It's control by somebody else that might be military, a screening or something.

But here we're talking about deliberately increasing your levels of a janine and other cataclases es dopamine npa ef net, said a, you can do that certainly by deliberate cold exposure with a cold shower or getting in up to your neck in cold water of any kind. But the other way to do that is to Spike yer journal by ingesting one to three milligrams for kilogram of caffeine after sitting down to try and learn some material. I confess that more often than not I use caffeine in the same way that most people use IT, which is okay when I sit down.

I'm in IT research information for a podcast or assemble um some information for a paper grant and I want to focus so I will drink a cup of coffee at the beginning of that and maybe even throughout that or a couple of year of a mute at the beginning or throughout that or all sip on one or both throughout trying to learn and that works quite well in terms of maintaining focus and alertness and retention of information but IT is indeed the case that is, the research supports the fact and i've experiences the fact that if I have stained from caffeine while i'm trying to learn something but then I drink caffy immediately after somewhat surprisingly to me, but certainly in a way that's consistent with the research, literature, memory, further information that I was focused on prior to interesting, that caffeine is much greater. And here i'm talking about as a personal inactive. But this is actually what the data point to both in animals and in humans.

And if you think about that makes perfect sense, because the way that the memory systems of the brain are organized is that we go through life experiencing things. We encounter surprises, both good and bad. We go through the motions of things both typical, mundane, exciting and and novel and not novel.

And then everyone's in a while, something will happen that will Spike. Our category means dopamine. Typically, it's a positive surprise, a journal in which can be associated with both positive surprise or positive events in negative events or surprises and without fail, in increases in the category means tend to lock in memories for things that proceeded the increase in those categories.

Again, the categories being dopamine, apple, apple and nor ean ephes. Sometimes all three incoming instance, sometimes just two of those, sometimes one of those, depending on the experience. So that makes perfect sense that using caffeine at the end of a learning about would enhance our memory for the information that we are trying to learn.

So if you decide to that, you want to try and extract this performance enhancing effect of caffeine. What I recommend would be to try to abstain from caffeine for a dair two prior, but if you can't, to just continue with your Normal caffeine intake. But then when you sit down to study or learn something to not in just any caffeine as you do that, but then afterward to injust caffeine.

Now in theory, you could probably further enhance the memory and coding effects of a generalin. And the other category means by drinking cafe and then taking a cold shower, doing deliberate cool exposure, we really wanted to, or have the ability to, or doing some sort of intense form of exercise, and will talk in a moment about how caffeine exercise in the adjournment system interact. But as a brief but relevant to side brief belt of intense exercise, ranging from ten to fifty minutes or so, have been shown to improve memory for information that one was trying to learn prior to the intense exercise.

This is work from doctor wanne suzuki lab at n. Yu, as well as other laboratories. Some of the work that's being done at stanford, in the mind body laboratories and our laboratory points in the direction of these kinds of effects as well.

They all come back to the same general neurochemical theme, which is that when we experience an increase in these cattle, coal means that included journal topmen eupeptic an the memory systems of the brain flip on in a way that try to capture the information in the perceptions, in the experiences that we were exposed to, just prior to the increase in categories. And caffeine, but also exercise, and also cold water, and of course, any of those a loner in combination, all increased the levels of categories. So IT makes perfect logical, mechanistic sense as to why this would work.

And in fact, IT does work. If you want to remember specific information, you might consider using caffeine as you move through an absorb and or exposed that information, but you might also consider using caffeine after being exposed that information, because studies and animals and humans show that that is a poor way to increase memory for what you are just exposed to. I should mention that what I just described also pushes back on something that I know a number of people perhaps have heard about and maybe even use, which is this notion of the nap.

Cho, I remember hearing about this a few years back of a of trend. You will the trend involved to drinking a cup of coffee or double espresso, so, and then going down for a nap, typically the afternoon, and then waking up in. The idea was that the caffeine would hit your system right at the time, that you wake from the nap, and that you would be Better able to focus and exercise.

There are couple of things about that practice that I don't like. First of all, IT implies in most cases that your napping and ingesting caffeine in the afternoon, which I realized for many students and for people that are comfortable staying up until the we hours of the night and then waking up late the next day might be compatible with their schedule. But again, because of the sleep diminishing effects of caffeine, and we talked about earlier, not crazy about the idea of people ingesting caffeine in the late afternoon.

In order to perform Better in the late afternoon, far Better would be to restrict caffeine intake to the early part of the days we talked about earlier. The other reason is that the data on things like non sleeps, depressed and maps in the afternoon. And again, the rule here is that you don't have a nap, but if you want to nap, it's been shown that of ninety minutes or less or non sleep deeper breath protocols.

And you can find those, for instance, this one with me speaking, you just put sdr, he remain into youtube, we can hear that is completely zero cost. The other ndr scripts out there now, of course, if you prefer those, that those can all lead to increases in one of the catalog means at least which is doping. That's been shown in a really nice nor transmitter labelling study, not from my laboratory, but from another laboratory.

But also can improve mood, focus on alertness on its own without the need to adjust caffeine prior to going into those states. And in fact, ingesting caffeine prior to a APP when getting having prior to n sdr is most certainly going to reduce the a effectiveness of that nap in N S, C R. In restoring natural levels of alertness and focus that would lead to the performance enhancing effect.

So i'm not such a fan of the called apache ino, although if any of you out there have derived great benefit from IT, definitely to let me know you're protocol, what you've experience put IT in the uh, comment section, if you would. I appreciate that there's another very important, important use of caffeine for enhancing performance. And this relates not just to the doped and epinephrine, the arousal inducing effects of caffeine and IT doesn't even just relate to the effect of caffeine on enhancing frontal lobe function.

IT does include all that, but IT also includes those reinforcing effects of caffeine that we talked about at the beginning of the episode. And the best way to illustrate these performance enhancing effects of caffeine that stem directly from its association with reinforcement is to highlight a study. And the title of the study is a blood dopamine level enhanced by caffeine in men after tread mill running.

And as the title suggests, this was Carried out in man, but there is no reason to think that the same results would also be present in women. There are some sex dependent effects of caffeine or touch on just briefly at the end, but those are largely present in kids that his adolescence and teens, as opposed to adults. So this study is really interesting.

What they had people do was run on a trade mill and either in just caffeine, again, three milligrams per kilogram of body weight, or to not in just caffeine. And then they looked at levels of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Ors and hormones such as production in court is all.

And the basic takeaway, as the title suggests, that exercise, well on its own, can increase cordial in healthy ways, provided is not too intense and too long. Little note here, if you have trouble recovering from exercise, or you want to continue to derive the benefits from exercise in general, best not to do high intensity exercise for longer than seventy five minutes or ninety minutes only. Being the outer thresh, I realized that there are some genetic freeze out there, or people that are chemically assist that can recover from very intense, long bout of exercise.

But most people don't do well long bouts of intense exercise on a regular basis, and limiting their intense exercise to sixty minutes or less, that doesn't include the warm up is going to be beneficial. See the episode on tool kept for a fitness, if you like. Details on that exercise is known to increase levels of doping cordial in other cate's means and neurotransmitters ors very importantly, and things like testosterone in astern ways, that we know are beneficial to us.

And of course, have all these positive effects on the musk skeletal system and cardiac lar effects. But unbeknown to most people, ingesting three milligrams per kilogram of caffeine prior to exercise further increases the dopamine release associated with exercise specifically. And this has two important effects.

First of all, that increase in dopamine is great because IT provides a long lasting increase in focus, alert, inss and motivation, not just during the exercise, but also after the exercise. And second. IT, that is, caffeine and dopamine in combination, act as a reinforcer to make the experience of exercise in the period immediate, after exercise, more pleasant and in factor reinforcing.

So in other words, one way, to enjoy exercise more and to enjoy the activities that follow exercise more, and to experience a genuine increase in dopamine e that's beneficial for mood and alertness, is to injust caffeine prior to exercise. Now this is important because a number of people out there are exercising, love, exercise, love, eating, great love doing all the things that are benfica al for their health. But a number of people out there really don't like to exercise, and that serves a serious block for their willingness and their consistency to exercise.

Ingesting caffeine gives us energy to exercise. IT increases the release of neo chemicals and hormones that are good for us during exercise. But as i'm highlighting here, IT also increases the reinforcement pathways associated with exercise.

That is, IT creates a positive feeling about the general theme of engaging and exercise. And IT creates a general positive experience of the things that follow exercise. So I think this, if nothing else, is A A call for or support for the idea that ingesting caffeine as a performance enhancing tool makes perfect sense.

But for those out there that don't enjoy exercise, in particular certain forms of exercise, ingesting caffeine can change your relationship to that exercise. In other words, make IT more positive, much in the same way that injustice caffeine, alongside a certain taste that would otherwise be neutral or may be even negative, can actually make the taste of that particular drink or food positive. So again, this brings us back to the reinforcing properties of caffeine that are subconscious.

It's not just about the enhanced performance in the test or the enhanced performance on the tread mill or with the weights in the gym. It's enhanced feelings of mood and well being that are genuine because of the effect of caffeine on certain neural transmitter and hormonal systems. But IT also is creating an overall menu of reinforcing all of the things that LED into occur during ing and a car after exercise.

I do want to point out something that very important as IT relates to combining things like caffeine and exercise in order to increase dopamine. This is something that came up in the episode that I did on dopamine, motivation and drive, which turns out to be one of our most popular episodes. Again, you can find that at huberman and lap dot com and linker all formats with time stamps. Ta, this also came up in the episode on add because of the relationship between A D H D and dopamine.

And that's this notion of dopamine e stacking in the episode on dopy motivation and drive, I pointed out that while there are a near infinite number of things that can increase dopamine release, most notably positive surprise um or positive anticipation or experiencing a win, certainly there are compounds both drugs of abuse, food, sex um and certain supplements that can increase opening to varying levels and to varying degrees, both healthy and unhealthy that's all containing in that episode on dopamine e motivation to drive but what I pointed out is that if you are somebody who tends to experience difficulty with motivation, that so called dopamine stacking, as I call that, might be something that you want to avoid. What is dobin stacking? Dobin stacking would be combining, you know, a highly caffeinated energy drink that also includes the mino acid tyre cine, which is a precursor dopamine.

Plus loud music, plus getting yourself really ramp ed up and an intense workout. All of that can be great if you do IT every once in a while, but what you will quickly find is that the extent to which your dopamine peaks also dictates the extent to which your dopamine will drop after that peek. And when I say drop, I mean drop below baselines.

So a lot of people find that they stack a lot of things to peak their dopamine, that then they experience a low and IT does take some time for them to return to baseline. And I highly recommend not engaging in activities or consuming compounds that are in attempt to accelerate that return to baseline because all IT will do is drive that baseline lower and lower. So this requires being able to tolerate a drop in doing me baseline for a period time eeta.

Now the reason bringing this up now in the context of this caffeine episodes, I just described a study in which using caffeine prior to exercise increases dopamine e after exercise. And so you might be saying, especially we heard that the early epo de way. Isn't that doping stacking? Aren't you encouraging me to stack my dopamine well in some sense? yes.

But keep in mind, i'm not suggesting that you do this every time you exercise. So just as in that earlier episode, I emphasize the fact that while stacking multiple stimulating caffeine or energy drinks and music and and set up for exercise or for mental work of any experience for that matter, is OK to do every once in a while. For most people, you don't want to get in the habit of doing IT consistently every time you exercise or every time you go out, for instance.

And so you really want to be cautious, that is, you want to protect your both baseline levels of doping and your peak levels of doping. That said, for people that want to experience an increase in mood, alertness and performance or who want to condition themselves, because that's really what IT is. It's conditioning yourself by the reinforcing .

effects of doping to increase .

your liking or maybe even your loving of exercise, occasionally using caffeine or frequently using caffeine. Private exercises, fine, but be very careful. And by being very careful, what I mean is pay attention to how you feel in the hours and days after that dopamine increase wears off.

So for instance, if you in just cafe and then exercise very intensely and you're feeling great afterwards, but then eight hours later, the next day you're feeling a little bit low, I suggest you don't go back and do the exact thing thing right away. I would give you yourself a little bit of time to let that baseline of dopamine return to Normal. So again, stacking different things, chemical and behavioral, in order to increase depine can be done in a safe way that's beneficial to you depending on your goals.

But be careful about not stacking too many stimuli. Y for dopamine too often. That's the key. Early in the epsom, I mentioned one possible caffeine consuming schedule that works very well. That doesn't fortunately subject you to a long twenty day bouts or five day or even two day bouts of absence. Ts, and that's the every other day schedule of caffeine. If you look at the half life of caffeine, and you look at its effects on the dopamine system and its performance enhancing effects, and how a period of abstinence can, in fact, increase the performance enhancing effects of caine. But also taken into consideration, the caffeine be habit forming, and we can develop a sort of tolerance to caffeine.

Well, then what emerges from all of that is that, being a person who consumes caffeine every other day, can I actually help you maximized most of the positive effects of caffeine without subjecting you to the kind of misery that occurs if you're accustomed to consuming caffeine every single day and then suddenly go into a two or five or twenty day absence? So I myself, i've never tried in every other day caffeine approach, although i'm considering doing IT based on the literature that i've read. And i'm considering doing in a very specific way, which will be to only consume caffeine on the days in which I resistance train.

And since I tend to to do that about three or four days per week, organized in a way that every other day, again, if you want to see the exercise schedule that I follow, including cardiff, asked lar exercise and weight training and all the reasons and rational for what I do, and how IT maps on to the scientific literature related to health, spin in life to in vitality, sea, you can find that a human lapdog. com. And we had a tool kit for fitness that ought to be posted um to our website before long.

The every other day schedule of caffeine intake to me seems like the most rational one if one wants to maxim on the performance enhances effects of caine without suffering the effects of caffeine withdrawal that are associated with being a regular consumer of caffeine, and then stopping caffeine index such as headache, your, the ability and so worth, not I, nor anyone in my life wants me to experience those effects. And i'm sure you don't want to experience those effects for you either. So if you're somebody that decides to try the every other day protocol or you are somebody who's already doing that protocol, please let me know what your experiences with that or at least by my read of the literature on caffeine and its performance enhancing effects, but also the effects of caffeine under a transmit hormone systems, the every other day caffeine schedule does seem to be the most rational and scientifically grounded one in order to maximize on all those effects.

In addition to so called performance enhancing effects of caine, there are also the well studied and now fairly well mechanistically understood pro health effects of caffeine. Now here, when I talk about pro health effects of caffeine, I want to be very clear that if your schedule of caffeine intake, that is, your timing of caffeine intake, or anything else for that matter, offsets getting regular, high quality sleep of sufficiently ation well, then you are undermining the pro health effects of that thing. This is true for exercise.

This is true for caffeine. This is true for supplementation. This is true for prescription drugs. Again, you don't want to be neurotically ally attached. The idea that you have to get perfectly ep every night because that's simply not true.

But IT is absolutely the case that anything, whether it's good for you or bad for you in the short term that disrupts your sleep because of the timing in which you're doing that thing, is going to undermine your immediate long term health before long. So with that said, there are several well described health promoting effects of caffeine. And Justin.

And once again, when I say caffeine adjusted, i'm referring to that one to three milligrams per kilogram of body way dosage. There are really nice study showing that being a regular consumer, caffeine can help offset some of the probability some of the probability of developing parkinson's and maybe alzheimer's related dementia as well. These are not terribly controversial data because of the fact that caffeine is known to increase the release of those cats.

Com means dopamine, epa, phone and nor epinephrine. Well, as a seto calling, all those new transmitter in neural dual systems are the ones that are known to be defective in parkinson's, in alzheimer, although the other transmitter or and hormone systems that are defective as well. There are beautiful reviews on the neuroprotective effects of caffeine and neurology re diseases.

They're quite extensive and i'll just refer you to one and the references they are in and we'll provide a link to this in the shown out captions to the title. As the um topic at hand suggests, is the neuroprotective effects of caine and neurology, eric diseases. This was published in twenty sixteen. Um sure they're been other reviews since then.

Body includes many, many quality references and studies both in animals and in humans, pointing to the fact that specific enzymes that are associated with the health of, in particular, dopy neons or made more robust by regular in gestion of caffeine IT also points the fact that the increase in doping receptors that is induced by regular injections of caffeine that referred to earlier is another way in which dopamine, however many dopamine neurons remain around in people's parkinson's or people who are aging that lose doping irons naturally, that dopamine in can have its that similar effect because of the increase in receptors for dopamine in that caffeine induces in the other biological mechanisms that further support why caffeine ought to be neuroprotective, including its effects on the of coin system, which is one of the major systems disrupted in alzheimer's dementia. So in other words, that makes perfect sense as to why caine would be neuroprotective. Caffeine has also been shown to diminish headache, particularly when taken in combination with aspirin in, and that's because of the effects of caffeine and aspirin on blood flow.

There's also evidence that caffeine can provide brief but substantial relief from asma. So I wouldn't want people to rely on caffeine as a life of saving approach to an asmah attack. That said, for people that suffer from minor asthma, that caffeine intake, again of the dosages that we talked about before, has been shown to alleviate some of the major symptoms of asma for anywhere from one to four hours.

And I know this is a relevance to a lot of people out there, because caffeine increases the cata com means, and in particular, because caffeine increases dopamine in transmission in the preferences cortex. This area, the brain associated with focus and rule settle in context and task switching. Caffeine is known to improve focus on alertness, in particular in people who have symptoms of A D, H D or other attention in focus issues.

Now caffeine alone does not appear to be as potent for the treatment of hd as are things like riddle at oral, model on model vivants, if you would like a sort of head by head comparison of prescription drugs, supplements and things like caffeine, as well as coverage of behavioral tools and nutritional tools at sea that can positively offset some of the symptoms of ADC. Please see the episode I did on again that's available what he women lab up com and all formats. But that said, caffeine does increase focus and IT does IT through a number different mechanisms, not the least of which is to dopamine in transmission in the forebrain, just as a drug like ridden or atter all wood, although not to the same extent as a drug like riddle or atole does.

Before we close today, I do want to just briefly return to the reinforcing effects of caffeine that we talked about earlier. The study on the honeybees that show that bees prefer certain actors could because they contain cafe, even though they are not aware that those nettles contain, they just come to like the feeling that those sectors provide them so much that they associate that in a some conscious way with the flowers themselves. And they come to like those flowers, or human beings, for instance, children that in just cafe ated beverages come to a door, the taste of those beverages.

And beautiful studies have been done that describe how children and adults truly cannot distinguish between the taste of a caffeinated and non caffeinated beverage. And caffeine can be placed into essentially any beverage in order to give us a preference for that beverage or food. In fact, the studies have been done with yogurt.

If you put caffeine into yogurt of different flavors, even plain yoga, which most kids don't like, they will come to prefer whatever flavor contain the caffeine, even if then you remove the caffeine from that flavor now, eventually their preference for that flavor will be extinguished. But all of this is just to say that so many of the things that we like, whether not its coffee or tea, or given flavor of food, or giving experience, or even exercise, occur because we injust caffeine in conjunction with those activities. Now these are not tricks that your nervous system plays on you.

These are real neurochemical reinforcing effects. And I think that we would all do well to think about til leverage these reinforcing effects much in the same way we would do well to think about, and hopefully not leverage aversive effects of certain compound, right? The simple way to put this is I or anyone could get you to dislike something, someone or some place by making you feel slightly less good, lower mood.

I only want have to make you feel nauseous but less good after ingesting something or having a certain kind of interaction or being in a certain environment. Very straightforward to do that because of the way that your naval system is wired for conditioning. However, there's the positive side of all this, which is that it's very straight forward to reinforce the experience of a given food, including its taste, but all the context around of the container, the texture, the people you consume IT with where you consume IT.

Etta, for instance, I wonder why we are not paying caffeine with broccoli. And here, i'm not suggested that people actually do that experiment or play that trick on people. But you have .

to sort .

of imagine that if caffeine is this incredible reinforcer of all sorts of things, in particular things that we invest and would want to invest more of if it's red with caffeine, well, then you actually can use caffeine as a tool to increase reinforcement of different things, and you can avoid caine as a way to further reinforce things that you would like to stop. And here I D like to just give the example of sugar cravings.

A lot of people ask me, how do I avoid sugar cravings? I've talked about the use of I will glue to mean for that. I've talked about making sure you're getting enough essential fatty acids and essential mino acids as a way to reduce sugar cravings.

Please note, however, that if you are somebody who likes to have your sugar, whether not it's a piece of chocolate or your dessert, that i'm not saying that's bad, but if you're trying to reduce your sugar cravings, ask yourself, are you interesting sugar along with caffeine, could be the caffeine contained in that sugar containing food like chocolate or IT? Could be that you're having a cup of coffee along with your pastry and then you are struggling with sugar cravings. Well, think about IT.

You're not just being reinforced by the sugar and the effects of sugar and dopamine in which are real and both conscious and subconscious through the gut to the brain dopamine system and direct on the brain dopamine in system. But by co ingesting caffeine, you are also further enhancing the reinforcing effects of sugar. The flip side, all of this is that you could use caffeine as a way to increase your appetite for certain things.

Actually know somebody, I won't reveal who this person is, but they are quite prominent. Pod caster, who injures one hundred and twenty five to one hundred and fifty milligrams of caffeine. Tablet form, tablet form, along with her bet, and use this as a way to develop a preference for arbeit because they found that coffee was giving them other effects that weren't good for them.

So IT works quite well in animals, and IT works quite well in insects, and IT works quite well in humans. I suppose animals, insects and humans are all animals at the end of the day, so no surprise there. But IT all underscores the expense to which caffeine is an absolutely fascinating molecule.

I in its a ability to offset the sleepiness system, if you will, this a denizen system, and to control our schedules in that way to essentially a withdrawal against the bank that is a density, and then pay that back later in the form of getting sleepy later, as opposed to when we want to be alert. Its ability to enhance focus, alertness and mood, and if taken after trying to learn something and remember IT to enhance memory especially and its ability to increase V O two max, increase strength. We didn't even talk today about IT, but I just briefly mention that caffeine adjusted the sorts of doses we talk about earlier because its effects on the neural scutter system and the calcium system associated neuromuscular exertion and fatigue can increase peak power output and muscle contraction ability.

Hands ing performance there as well. And of course, caffeine does a number of other things just generally related or overall basel level of mood and alertness, not the least of which are these increases in dopy. So caffeine is really incredible molecule.

It's affecting all these various newer transmit systems but not have hazardous. It's increasing dopamine and a city of calling in the forebrain to increase attention. It's reducing fatigue.

It's improving mental and physical performance for some obvious and some not so obvious reasons. And what I think is among the more maculate and powerful effects of caffeine, IT is a potent pot, potent reinforcer of things, needs people and experiences. And it's one that you can leverage in any direction that you like once you understand the way that caffeine exerts those reinforcing properties.

So today, I really tried to cover as much as I could about the mechanisms of caffeine action in the brain and body, as well as tools and schedules and dosages in which you can leverage caffeine in order to meet your physical performance, mental performance and, Frankly, mental health and overall health goals. If you're learning from and enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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