So I was just listening to episode 213 of Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and one of the hosts, Dr. Steven Novella, starts talking about caffeine. Wow, I had figured that caffeine probably wasn’t great for you, but I didn’t realize it was also so useless (apparently). I think some of my friends really ought to hear this (you know who you are):
What caffeine does is it binds to the receptor for a neurotransmitter called adenocine, and it is an antagonist, that means it binds and blocks a receptor that normally has a calming or inhibitory effect, so therefore it has a stimulatory effect. What happens though is that by blocking these receptors your body just makes more of them. That’s called “upregulation.” So your body will upregulate the adenocine receptors to compensate for the fact that caffeine is blocking some of them, and that then reestablishes the previous equilibrium. Then with the caffeine it just puts you into the normal range. If you upregulate those receptors and then you take away the caffeine, well then of course you’re going to have too much inhibition, that’s when you’ll be sleepy and have trouble thinking, and you will “crash,” and then you need to dose yourself with caffeine just to get yourself back up to normal. Even after a few weeks of using caffeine, all you’re really accomplishing from that point forward is using it just to put yourself into a normal state, so you’re not really getting much of a boost out of it, you’re just crashing when you’re not using it, so it’s actually not that advantageous as a long term strategy. [Edited for space]
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