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Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.īy the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in east Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. The changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a fundamental level – the level of the human mind. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this molecule remade the world. H umanity’s acquaintance with caffeine is surprisingly recent. That reconsolidation of self took much longer than usual, and never quite felt complete. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.
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In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. Over the course of the next few days, I began to feel better, the veil lifted, yet I was still not quite myself, and neither, quite, was the world. “Things on the periphery intrude, and won’t be ignored. “I feel like an unsharpened pencil,” I wrote in my notebook. I was able to do some work, but distractedly. It’s not that I felt terrible – I never got a serious headache – but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound. The fog settled over me and would not budge. And on this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.Īt the coffee shop, instead of my usual “half caff”, I ordered a cup of mint tea. Its mode of action, or “pharmacodynamics”, mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. The day’s first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power – its joy! – not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal. According to the researchers I’d interviewed, the process of withdrawal had actually begun overnight, while I was sleeping, during the “trough” in the graph of caffeine’s diurnal effects. I postponed it as long as I could, but finally the dark day arrived. How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate? But beneath that deceptively mild rubric of “difficulty concentrating” hides nothing short of an existential threat to the work of the writer. The scientists have spelled out, and I had duly noted, the predictable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: headache, fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, decreased motivation, irritability, intense distress, loss of confidence and dysphoria.
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It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction.
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Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of fizzy drinks). For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness.