This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about coffee and tea and all things caffeine!
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In this Cast | Caffeine-Based Productivity
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Caffeine-Based Productivity
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
CaffeineCaffeine | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthHow Coffee and Caffeine Actually Affect Your ProductivityEffects of Caffeine on Cognitive Performance, Mood, and Alertness in Sleep-Deprived HumansCoffee in the WorkplaceEmber mugSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariUncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark PendergrastBulletproof Coffee Recipe: The Original Keto Coffee with Butter & MCT OilMatéTea / MatchaHerbal teas are non-caffeinated. FoodsSupplementsDrinksCaffeine/Energy shots (Best Energy Shots of 2020)Caffeine tabletsCaffeine patchesCaffeine chart | Center for Science in the Public Interest
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, what we're going to be doing is talking about caffeine based productivity, what we want to do is to give you a survey of how to use caffeine to be more productive. And so we're going to take a survey of the do an overview of all of the various caffeine based products, and I thought what we would start with doing is kind of defining what caffeine is and how it works in the first place. And then we will cover the various types of caffeinated products that are in the world. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. And then some of the health risks I think that caffeine has and we can talk about those as well. And some of the benefits, there's actually some really good benefits in the in the health space for that. And full disclosure, we're not medical professionals. So you should probably talk to your your licensed medical professional before you take any advice. And then of course, we're going to talk about timing and methods for consuming caffeine. And I think that'll be really useful for folks as well just to understand those components of how to time your caffeine intake for greater productivity. So let's start with kind of the baseline, which what caffeine is both how we think about it in terms of our world, but also from a little bit more of a scientific perspective. So caffeine, of course, we think of as being in coffee and other products is actually quite a number of other products. But at its core, what caffeine is a stimulant. And it's kind of the opposite of what you might think in the sense that it actually blocks some neural receptors, so that it causes you to stay in a wakefulness state, you have adenosine, which is a molecule that attaches to parts of your brain and causes you to get tired, get sleepy. And these adenosine receptors on your brain are blocked by caffeine. So caffeine comes in, it goes through the blood brain barrier. And it antagonizes those adenosine receptors and blocks the adenosine from being taken up by the brain and basically absorbed by the brain. And that's what actually causes you to stay awake and feel that sense of wakefulness. So it can not only block you from getting tired from the adenosine, but it can also then increase wakefulness, in that sense as well.
Art Gelwicks 2:46If you're going to look at caffeine as part of your generalized productivity, you really have to understand the science behind it. I think too many people think, okay, a cup of coffee, or two cups of coffee, this is part of what I have, or three cups or eight cups or whatever. But understanding the science behind the chemical itself, as well as how it impacts your unique physiology. And that's the other thing is that it affects everybody differently. And it changes over time. I mean, that's one of the things that I've discovered is you can mess around with caffeine and how it affects yourself. It takes time to do it. But you can adjust your physiology based on how you consume caffeine to determine what impacts it's going to have. And it becomes predictable. It's not one of those, okay, I didn't get a cup of coffee, therefore, who knows what I'm going to be like today? No, if you pay attention to it, there's a period of time you can start to understand what this is. But if you don't take the time to understand the science behind the chemical itself, and what its job is, you know, being a suppressor like, like Ray just outlined, and the fact that it constricts blood vessels in the brain and understanding those mechanisms then gives you the predictability as to well, what's it going to do? And how am I going to use that, rather than it just being an external factor that kicks in?
Francis Wade 4:12I think it's worth knowing that information because the I believe the the common sort of the average way of drinking coffee is not informed by much other than habit. I think most people just drink it out of habit. They don't delve into the sense and they don't ask the kind of questions we're about to ask, but how do you make the best use of it? So they're just basically following the crowd, which I think limits its usefulness. And maybe even those are a few things that you don't want that
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:46caffeine is a cultural component. And if I if I had to go into a product business, where you could sell very easily, very fast coffee would be it. It's just such a cultural Moray. It's such a Strong Moray are in so many different cultures around the world. And it's just easy to sell in that sense. The interesting thing you noted our which is that when you do drink caffeine, it is also a vassal constructor, right? So it is actually constricting blood vessels. And that's another component here, which is that we also have to take some of the good with the bad here, the vessel construction is what causes you to potentially feel like you're thinking faster, things of that nature, you know, that people think about and the reality is, is your water consumption, how much water you're drinking, comparative to how much coffee you're drinking affects your ability to have that feeling of effect as well. But any vessel constructor can also cause headaches, and other kinds of issues with regard to anxiety, giving you that sense of anxiety, good to kind of keep us mindful of those pieces. A couple of other like little tidbits that I picked up along the years of researching caffeine, I've done many, many experiments with caffeine. Caffeine is something that takes a very short amount of time to get into your bloodstream, usually somewhere around 15 minutes. And it can stay in your body for hours and hours and hours, depending upon your particular body type your particular circumstances. And so just be very careful about the fact that if you drink coffee, say in the late afternoon, you could still have caffeine coursing through your veins, late into the evening, which could potentially disrupt sleep. So we'll talk about some of those risks as well, because it doesn't just stop there. The point is, there are all of these biological components that caffeine is working with. And we are complex biological creatures. And so as we talk about this, just remember that the complexity really does come into play in in so many regards.
Art Gelwicks 6:42One more thing to add. And this is a really common thing. Caffeine is not measured by the cup. So many people will think that, oh, I'll just have a smaller cup of coffee. It depends what's in there. It depends what you're drinking. It depends what the consumption is, cumulative, and raise absolute right? The cumulative effect of caffeine can be way more impactful than the shot of espresso you just had, I was just looking at a chart, comparing different caffeine levels and a Starbucks pikes place venti I think it was, as compared to a Starbucks espresso, you think and express Oh, wow, that's got a lot of caffeine. No, the venti is like 410 milligrams versus the espresso of 150. So understanding that the measure of volume has nothing to do with the amount of caffeine you're actually consuming. And where all those sources are coming from, that you're right, that has that cumulative effect.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:39And as we continue our conversation on we should talk about the fact that we will be talking about this in milligrams of dosages.
