This post is part two of a series (to read Part 1, click here).
“For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness…it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness, but an altered state…”—Michael Pollan, Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World
Beneath caffeine use is our need to experience the contrasts inherent in our existence as humans.
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Caffeine consumption offers benefits and risks, mentally, emotionally, physically, culturally, and existentially.
Beneath the surface of our relationship with caffeine runs our need to grapple with life and death; freedom and limitation; expansion and constriction; control and acceptance.
A comforting caveat: this blog is not anti-caffeine. Rest easy (rather, caffeinate easy)—this blog is about our relationship with caffeine and its deeper meaning in our lives.
Caffeine Both Protects Plants and Motivates Humans to Conquer Nature
Caffeine is a protective substance in the evolution of certain plants. Predators become disoriented when ingesting caffeine—making them vulnerable.
Our favorite caffeine-bearing plants flourished by warding off natural predators and attracting the human beings necessary to mass produce across the planet.
The beloved stimulant was discovered by humans as long ago as 1200 A.D. Legend goes: Ethiopian goat herder Kaldi (possibly where the word coffee comes from) saw his goats dancing when they ate berries from a bush. He ate the berries and noted increased alertness, physical stamina, and emotional well-being. Kaldi informed a Sufi monastery. The first cup of coffee emerged.
The use of caffeinated tea accelerated in the 15th century, in China, and coffee use exploded in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries with the industrial revolution. Caffeine makes for more productive, pain-tolerant, sleep-resistant workers.
Caffeine is both lauded as a boon to creativity, productivity, and spiritual development and critiqued as a restless robber of physical, emotional, and mental balance.
Caffeine contains many potential health benefits.
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Health Benefits
Moderate caffeine use may be linked to decreased chances of developing Parkinson’s disease through anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects and slowing down the degeneration of dopamine production. Largely through anti-inflammatory abilities, caffeine may also reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Neurochemically, caffeine boosts mood and behavior by decreasing awareness of sleepiness and increasing euphoria, vigilance, motivation, and curiosity. Caffeine may enhance information processing speed, memory, reaction time, and the subjective sense of well-being, sociability, and self-confidence.
Caffeine may increase oxygen uptake, reduce fatigue, improve physical coordination, stimulate weight loss, and decrease pain awareness. It may help prevent chronic liver disease, and may be a protective factor against some heart arrythmias.
Health Risks
According to de Paula and Farah (2019), excess caffeine use, or caffeine use among sensitive individuals, can result in: restlessness, nervousness, anxiety, irritability, agitation, muscle tremors, insomnia, headache, diuresis, tachycardia, elevated respiration, gastrointestinal disturbances.
Caffeine’s antagonistic effects on adenosine receptors in the brain and heart and engagement of the “fight-flight” oriented sympathetic nervous system can lead to blood pressure issues and arrythmias.
Caffeine’s biggest health detriment may be its deleterious effect on sleep. As 25 percent of the caffeine dose remains in our system 12 hours after consumption, we may spend less time in continuous “deep sleep.” This is linked to dementia, heart-disease, lowered immune function, hormonal imbalance, and psychiatric disorders.
Caffeine presents physical, emotional, mental risks.
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An Existential Encounter With “the Other”
“Dreams are like letters from God. Isn’t it time you answered your mail?” — Marie-Louise von Fransz.
“To die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream–ay, there’s the rub. For in this sleep of death what dreams may come?” — Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Caffeine’s biggest positive and negative is that it blocks our awareness of sleepiness during the day and often keeps us in the shallow stages of sleep at night.
Sleep asks us to surrender our familiar and seemingly-controlled daytime ego consciousness. Death requires total surrender—giving up the ghost.
Sleep reminds us we are limited in how much we can produce, have fun, and meet expectations. Death is the ultimate human limitation—we have a limited amount of time for what matters most.
If we don’t come into a deep relationship with our limits, we don’t get the chance to open up to larger, awe-inspiring meaning and cannot reach our full potential.
“What dreams may come…” illustrates anxiety regarding death, sleep, surrender, acceptance of limitation, the unknown, “the other”; dread of losing control; dread of overwhelm and annihilation.
What nightmarishly uncontrollable reality may overwhelm and annihilate us if we allow into our body, heart, and mind the polar opposite of our political views?
In productivity-obsessed, “positive” modern U.S. society, what nightmare will annihilate us if we surrender to the ebb and flow of our body’s natural rhythm?
A Toxically Positive Society Afraid of Limits
We must be free, productive, confident, in control, happy, clear-headed, sharp-thinking, efficient, assertive, friendly, logical, attractive, rich and successful, extroverted, objective, funny, knowledgeable, and on and on.
We must be hard-nosed scientists, productive workers, sexually attractive badasses. We must know the answers and convey them assertively and attractively.
Caffeine may either spark or block existential encounter with “The Other.”
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We must stay young-looking (further from death).
We exist in echo chambers and experience an intense dread of the “other”—those with different or even opposing views or values and the parts of ourselves we don’t want to look at or experience and don’t want others to look at or experience.
High “self-esteem” and “having fun” have become aggressively entitled rights.
Bringing Existential Depth to Our Relationship With Caffeine
Underneath our surface-level concerns is a need to “encounter” (face, accept, engage, integrate) the givens of existence: death, meaninglessness, isolation, freedom. To confront these concerns creates anxiety, guilt, grief, remorse, and, finally, meaning, creativity, fulfillment, and awe.
To avoid this confrontation, we create defense mechanisms, bad habits, self-protective and yet oddly self-sabotaging behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns—such as an unskillful use of our favorite consciousness-altering drug: caffeine.
Caffeine consumption can become fuel to confront and transcend our death anxiety by creating more urgency, drive to find meaning, and useful anxiety. Or, caffeine could lodge us into a deeper denial of our natural limitations and impending death.
Much depends on our priorities and aims.
The skillful use of caffeine may depend on whether we are tempered in our consumption through sensitivity to our natural limitations or we deny death and limits and remain oblivious, culturally-programmed consumers.
Caffeine could be more a benefit, or more a risk, to our existence depending on our level of willingness and ability to become present in our full range of experience; depending on our knowledge of the substance and the roles given to it by modern culture; and depending on our meaning-making power.