June 15, 2007
More About Everybody's Favorite Drug
As we all know, but chose to ignore most of the time, caffeine is a drug. Jim Romanesco, proprietor Starbucks Gossip subtitles his blog "Monitoring America's Favorite Drug Dealer", and he's not kidding
A mom of my acquaintance who car pools preteen snowboarders blew her top the other day because of the of Red Bull abuse in her back seat, which made the long haul back from the mountain more insane than usual.
It's a drug, right? --- so medical experts have studied it and recently issued some suggestions about using caffeine most effectively.
"I hate to say it, but most of the population is using caffeine the wrong way by drinking a few mugs of coffee or tea in the morning, or three cups from their Starbuck’s grande on the way to work. This means that caffeine levels in the brain will be falling as the day goes on. Unfortunately, the physiological process they need to counteract is not a major player until the latter half of the day," said James Wyatt, PhD, sleep researcher at Rush University Medical Center and lead author on the study......Caffeine is thought to block the receptor for adenosine, a critical chemical messenger involved in the homeostatic drive for sleep. If that were true, then caffeine would be most effective if it were administered in parallel with growing pressure from the sleep homeostatic system, and also with accumulating adenosine.
Coffee, tea, and other caffeine-containing beverages are tools. Don't drink more than you need to and slow the rate of your drinking to spread it out. Keep in mind that once you reach the point where you don't need to maintain a high feeling of wakefulness that you should immediately stop drinking it. If you need something more powerful then consider Provigil (modafinil). My strongly felt advice is to stay away from methamphetamine or other amphetamines because they cause brain damage.
Gotta go - I'm meeting a friend at Starbucks to get high.
Photo note: The logo of a popular Hong Kong coffee shop -- this one was atop Victoria Peak where I was already shot through with adrenalin from looking over the cliff.
Posted by Dakota at June 15, 2007 09:31 AM