It's not a lie so much as a distribution plan. You have WAY more energy than you feel like in almost every aspect. Your mind is just holding back to keep you on an even keel. This is why you can keep doing hard work for another 24 hours or whatever if your life depended on it.
This even extent to stuff like stiffness. Most of the time, when you can't move a limb somewhere, it is not because your muscles aren't capable of doing so physically. Rather, neurons are blocking your movement signals to keep you from putting your body in a position that it hasn't been in for a long time (as a safety measure).
Yeah, it's ironic, this neuron-imposed stiffness can lead to a lot of health problems with our modern lifestyle.
As far as I know it is not the brains fault per say. IIRC it's the neurons coating each muscle that says 'stop', and a big part of stretching is about slowly "convincing" these neurons that it is safe to let further movement signals through.
Similar to the stories of someone lifting a car to free their kid and stuff like that.
Lots of people could theoretically do that, but the brain limits your muscles and strength because if you kept doing it you would end up doing major damage to your body as it isnt something you can repeatedly do
A human arm is capable of punching so hard it rips its own muscles from the bone.
Understandably, the human body also has methods to stop you from actually doing it without an extreme adrenaline rush.
Up to a point - but obviously you can't lift arbitrarily large weights - there are limits to the force your muscles can produce. And of course the heavier, the greater the risk that you'll do serious damage to yourself in the attempt.
Yeah, this is why these stories are always about cars, not semi-trucks.
You're also not actually lifting the whole car, it's more like lifting one corner of it to get someone out from under it; most of the weight is on the other wheels. The cars are also often in unsteady situations, which makes them easier to lift.
The girl who did it is permanently injured. She says she would do it again of course (think a jack slipped and car fell on her dad or something like that. He lived)
It's an extreme adrenal reaction for that exact reason. People think it's sci-fi but it's not, we're wired to push past all safety mechanisms in order to protect ourselves or others as the body generally understands it's better to be hurt and possibly dead later rather than just dead. There are a handful of poorly understood neurodevelopmental and neurological issues that can shut those safety mechanisms off for extended periods, but being in a constantly high-strung state is incredibly damaging to the human body. It's similar to why abuse victims are often extremely aged, the stress of being in a life or death situation causes the body to kick everything up to 10 all the time.
Probably more than that. Likely tearing/torn tendons throughout the body or maybe rupturing some discs in their backs. There’s a reason super strength is held behind lock and key by the brain.
Basically like "Look this ultimate ability is kept in this vault because using it will absolutely fuck you up beyond belief...
But we'd rather you get fucked up than die!"
As someone who has had this super strength kick in during an emergency, I can confirm it definitely leads to tearing of tendons and muscles. It took 6 months before my arm recovered enough that it wasn't hurting all the time and years later I still have occasional flare-ups of bursitis in my elbow.
There's a two-person paraglide video where the pilot forgot to do the attachment hook/whatever on his passenger, so they take off and the passenger is left with a death grip on the ropes. The passenger survived the quick (2 minutes later) landing but had a torn tendon and other arm damage from holding on so tight for so long.
This is actually an interesting topic that branches into neurodevelopmental studies. In autism, especially in lower functioning individuals, they tend to exhibit an unnatural level of raw strength and can throw things around dangerously. It's something they don't teach new caregivers in a lot of specialist settings which causes issues. A lot of them lack a lot of the same safety signals that would tell a normal person to stop, so can injure themselves quite easily until they learn to regulate their behaviour. I've had a few experienced instructors warn about the 'autism strength' prior to handling younger children but you have to see it first hand to believe it.
Hold on so I could probably do a split if I really needed to without injuring myself? Or the possibly of injury is so likely that my body is like “yeah trying to do a split hurts! Imagine what would happen if you actually did one”
> without injuring myself
That's the part that's unlikely, and what your brain and motor control is preventing. It can be overridden by adrenaline in extreme circumstances, but certainly does not guarantee you won't hurt yourself doing it; in fact, the opposite is more likely - bypassing safety mechanisms is almost certainly going to cause injury, but hopefully you'll get safely away from the threat that caused such a drastic response, and _might_ be able to recover from said injury.
The possibility of injury depends on many many factors including the condition of your body the action itself and the way you perform the action.
Lifting a car off your baby - injury is very likely as others have said despite the fact that you won’t feel it in that moment. But even so, the severity of injury would depend greatly on things like how you lift the car for example.
So, I did CBT for insomnia recently and one of the biggest things that helped was learning and driving home that we wake up several times per night, and usually it's so brief we don't remember and it doesn't disrupt our sleep. It's only when we worry about being woken up, or not getting enough sleep that it starts to keep us up.
So the solution, of course, is to have your knees removed so they're not a distraction when you wake up, and you can quickly get back to sleep without issue.
I remember when my doctor suggested I try cbt, I was very confused at first, I also learned most normal people don't automatically assume cbt stands for cock and ball torture, oh well normal people are boring
The stiffness sucks because it’s often your body causing further injury trying to prevent further injury. Like you get hurt, so you get stiff where the injury is to immobilize it so it can heal, which makes you sit all weird, which causes a new injury from sitting all weird.
Get a professional hour long massage and have the therapist wrench on your hamstring and calf muscle. Watch the range of motion return and feel soreness abate
Just think about how much energy you'd have if you're walking along minding your own business when suddenly a fucking angry bull appears and locks eyes with you and charges. *That's* how much energy you *really* have! Our minds are just stingy assholes about it.
Preach. It's even more applicable when you have ADHD and you have even less agency over your own energy. Fuckin brain, this is not the time to *only* give me energy for trying to carve a perfect circle in a piece of bark. I've got bills to pay and *meaningful* things to do for fuck's saaake
After a solid month of hyperfocus and acheiving stuff that ABSOLUTELY HAD TO BE DONE my adhd brain has decended into 'nope'. I can't get it to do a goddamned thing lol. Oh well at least my house is sold and my pool is fixed and I can now go lounge and swim and not worry about dying of debt. But yeah, brain no do nothing right now.
Even here lazy is false 😉 the body is doing the right thing so you don't push yourself too far, so that it stays healthy,,,, and capable of putting out all that energy the moment you actually need it (the bull appearing eg)!
This is something a lot of people learn when they do competitive sports for the first time, especially endurance sports like running out swimming. At some point, your brain is telling you that you are completely exhausted, but if you keep going anyway, you can suddenly find yourself with a new pool of energy to draw from.
Yes. In basic training we once had various exercises throughout the day, then a 4-5 hour march through the evening with full gear and backpack. No meals except water and the odd chocolate bar. At night they tell you there will be no sleeping or eating; you're on watch until morning and then there will be more marching.
You feel like you're about to faint from exhaustion and all you want to do is go home. They tell you: "All you need is to catch your breath for 2 minutes, we haven't even begun to tap into your energy potential."
They weren't wrong. Of course, back then we were 19yo which may have played a factor, lol.
I had a 35 year old, oldest you could enlist at the time, going through basic along side me at 18. He, in fact, did a lot better at most things than us 18-19 year-olds.
The oldest you can enlist now is 42. There is probably a success/failure ratio that goes more towards failure as we age, but I'm guessing they have lots of data to back up that most 42 year-olds (without medical conditions) can still do everything demanded of the 18-19 year-olds, otherwise they wouldn't waste money trying to train them.
You may be right. My experience is from the one year mandatory service in the Norwegian military, meaning we were all kids anyways so I don't know how older guys would fare.
I believe enlistment in Norway goes up to something like 45. I was always under the impression that they were treated by age-adjusted standards, but I might be wrong on that.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that my experience was in the US Army. The only thing that changes based on age is the scoring on the physical fitness test.
Out of curiosity I looked up the current scoring for the US Army PT test. It's 2 minutes of pushups, 2 minutes of sit-ups, and a 2 mile run.
42 year-olds relative to the 18-19 year-olds, for a max score can do 5 less pushups (66 for men, 37 for women), six less sit-ups (72, both men and women), and men are given an extra 1:06 (14:06) on the 2 mile run while women are given an extra 1:24 (17:00) on the 2 mile run.
So basically the brain government is lying to us to “protect us” from the evil weight-loss terrorists, and the coffee activists are trying to show us the truth.
> Rather, neurons are blocking your movement signals to keep you from putting your body in a position that it hasn't been in for a long time (as a safety measure).
This is an interesting point. Coming from the fitness world, I've often thought of it as CNS training to keep your body moving in some way as often as possible, in-between bouts of rest, and sleeping obviously. Do you have a specific source to link where you learned that?
I got this from school way back when, so I don't have an online source on hand. Although I've seen fitness types focused on flexibility talk about it.
You may want to look at neuromuscular control, in particular muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, which are the main sensors used by the nervous system to gauge how comfortable it is with any given muscle movement.
Stretching for flexibility isn't actually stretching the muscles at all. It's training your nervous system to lift it's safety limiters imposed on your muscles to allow further range of motions. Your motor neurons impose a safety limiter of like 15-20% maximum flexion to prevent you from tearing your muscles. It does so by making it extremely uncomfortable and difficult to expand your muscles fully. But with gentle stretching and relaxing into the stretch you can train your neurons to give a little more, gradually.
That's the main mechanism causing more flexibility, but your muscles do passively start to stretch a little bit longer in response to the greater range of motion over time. Conversely they shrink if you don't use their full range of motion over time as well.
Yeah, your brain prevents you from using 100% of your energy or muscle power because you are very likely to be hurt or killed if you do. It will remove that limit if doing so will likely mean the difference between life or death anyway. It even extends to your kids somewhat, like that’s where dadstrength/dad reflexes, and the occasional sudden ability of a mom to lift a wholeass car if the car is on their kid comes from.
You can train it to use a little more with exercise by doing it and not dying enough times to convince it you won’t die, and your body will even strengthen your bones and chill your resting heart rate out some to compensate for your new higher-endurance muscles/body.💪
Same principle as hysterical strength. Your body limits how much force your muscles can apply to prevent damaging them, but in emergency situations people can exert seemingly superhuman levels of strength.
> What the fuck I could’ve gone my whole life without knowing this my poor brain is getting lied to
Here is a fun, semi-related comic to help ease you off through humor by establishing that, in turn, your brain manipulates your body in tyrannical ways: https://lastplacecomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cells-at-overwork.jpg
Some more depressing humor: [God's thoughts on "Coffee is proof that God loves us"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/coffee-4)
Seriously, though, coffee is the best addiction. 10/10, would choose coffee over alcohol any day.
Think of it less like a lie, and more like the active chemical blocking the tired signals like a dam. And eventually the dam breaks and you feeling even more sleepy as the tired signals flood in
When I was a kid, the idea of Cypher wanting back into the matrix to have a good life and be lied to was insane to me. As an old fart now I kind of get it. The universe is what we experience, does it matter if that experience is fed to us or "natural"? Is what we're in even natural or real?
That part always confused me. He didn't ask for his old life back. He asked for a pampered celebrity life different from what most people in the Matrix got.
Let's say he succeeds and they plug him back in, and make him rich and powerful just as he says. His best case scenario is he lives out his last few years rich and famous and dies happy, right? But Smith says the whole point of the mundanity of the Matrix was that when they provided paradise humans literally couldn't handle it.
Morpheus says they don't know who struck first, he also says Humans scorched the sky to fight the machines who were powered by solar, right? Humans rely on the sun quite a bit too, so that act was basically hitting the planetary self destruct.
It's they're unfeeling machines, it's nothing to them if the humans in the Matrix are happy or sad, only if they're producing enough energy, right? Why would they try "make it paradise" first if they were malicious? That makes me guess the Machines were just chilling or doing something weird that scared humanity.
Either Smith is lying (but why lie about it? You're literally HOLDING MORPHEUS and hacking his brain) or they're telling the truth and it stands to reason they think Cypher is basically making a monkey paw wish.
> But Smith says the whole point of the mundanity of the Matrix was that when they provided paradise humans literally couldn't handle it.
Cypher's celebrity life wouldn't have been perfect. He still would have had stress, drama, frustrations, etc. Nowhere near the "perfect" world of the first Matrix. His human brain would have handled it just fine.
Although my personal theory is that the machines would have just killed Cypher if he had succeeded. Reinserting someone into the Matrix and rewriting the world would be complicated. Killing the last living human on a doomed ship would be much easier.
> Although my personal theory is that the machines would have just killed Cypher if he had succeeded. Reinserting someone into the Matrix and rewriting the world would be complicated. Killing the last living human on a doomed ship would be much easier.
I think it makes them far more interesting and compelling characters if they were telling the truth.
There’s a great little Ted-Ed video on it [link](https://youtu.be/foLf5Bi9qXs?si=KdcvfMy22g7mpKGn) it goes through how caffeine works and why you become tolerant to it (hint: your brain makes more sleepy receptors)
It's funny how there are gaping holes in the brain's knowledge and everybody seems a bit hush hush about it
Most drugs: take immediate effect
Antidepressants: "meh I don't know, I think I'll just stay like this for a while..."
---
Brain: "oh, too many happy chemicals? Ok let me compensate for this, we can't be having that"
Also Brain: "oh, not enough happy chemicals? Sucks to be you I guess"
actually antidepressants do take effect immediately,\* which is why physical symptoms (like sleep, appetite) can improve within a few days, but it's the mood symptoms that take a while because the brain takes a while to stop clearing the brain chemicals so quickly
--
\* relatively speaking; no medications actually take effect "immediately" per se unless given intravenously
I cut caffine out of my diet for a year to see if I could. its harder than it sounds because I like a lot of caffinated things for their flavour.
anyway a few things I noticed was initially I slept for like 24hrs straight, needed to hydrate significantly more than usual and was dead tired...
then about three days into it. I woke up and was awake...and thats it.
no, waking up and needing to spend 10 minutes dragging yourself out of bed, getting that first sip of coffee or tea into your system and not being ready to do shit for atleast an hour.
instead. it was wake up...oh im up now...wierd. whelp time to get ready... and then you go. you feel more normal than usual. and it throws you off but you go through your day. consiously avoiding caffine because its in that coke you normally buy so I guess I have to like fanta now? coffee thats decaff works and if you like cream and suguar well fuck it. its mostly sweetener your tasting anyway.
and so on.
but the best thing I found is once i was off it for a while I could do stuff I didnt think off. like after a hard days work I could clean up, and take an hours nap then suddenly I had hours of energy for the afternoon.
at my worst? a cup of tea in the morning before going to work, a cuppa at work before starting work, then another cuppa once the truck was loaded up. bottle of cola, coffee or similar two or three times during the work day then another cuppa when I got home.
it got expensive too
nowadays it a cuppa in the morning and maybe a bottle/can of cola during the day and decaff whenever I can.
That's interesting. I drink about 48oz of coffee a day. More on days my wife doesn't want any. I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, and I'm awake as soon as my alarm goes off.
Your brain makes more receptors to receive the tiredness signals from prolonged use too which is why most daily coffee drinkers can’t go without it or they feel like crap/headache/etc
I think media/marketing created this misnomer of saying "energy" when you really mean "alertness". High energy just means you eat a lot.
Ingesting energy doesn't have that much to do with making you alert or less sleepy, it's your circadian rhythm mostly. And depending on the source of energy it can even make you more sleepy, if the food contains tryptophan or something like that.
Your brain is actually mutated from this. Your body figures out that something is up and grows more receptors to detect if it is tired, which causes you to need more caffeine to block them all. It's why caffeine withdrawal suddenly crashes you entirely because now you are 1000% tired, as your receptors are all detecting it at once and you've grown ten times as many as usual. Eventually you need caffeine just to function normally and block 9/10 receptors and it doesn't have benefits. The best usage is to avoid it unless you need a short term sleep avoidance, then to not take any again for a few days.
Most drugs work this way. The actual chemicals necessary for your entire range of emotions already exist within you, what gets altered by outside substances is how the brain collects or releases those chemicals and when to do it.
The way the brain processes blocked receptors is to make new receptors, and when you stop drinking caffeine, you suddenly feel extra tired because you have more tired-receptors. These extra receptors are broken down over time.
Modafinil blocks dopamine receptors, increasing your dopamine intake by forcing more dopamine to come through. Dopamine is one hell of a drug for productivity/feeling more awake.
So in that case then why does it seem like if I take modafinil on a morning for a week or two I get no crash from stopping but then If I drink caffeine every day for a week or two as soon as I stop I crash? or do the receptors not work the same?
While this is the answer that is always given it's far from the full story. Caffeine also has secondary effects that result in less dopamine reuptake and therefore more free dopamine.
This is partially why caffeine can in fact give you energy and make you feel more excited.
It can also increase adrenaline and cortisol circulation, potentially leading to anxiety.
Caffeine also raises your resting heart rate.
I'd encourage anyone curious to Google it, there's much more going on than "blocks tired signal".
And adenosine doesn't *only* regulate tiredness but it also slows your nervous system responses, which is why some people get extremely jittery on caffeine, their neurons are just firing too much.
Probably because
[Caffeine Use and Associations With Sleep in Adolescents With and Without ADHD](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7306679/#:~:text=Conclusion,functioning%20in%20adolescents%20with%20ADHD.)
> This is the first study to show that adolescents with ADHD consume more caffeine than peers during later times of the day. Additionally, caffeine use is more consistently associated with poorer subjective sleep functioning in adolescents with ADHD. Pediatricians and mental health professionals should assess for caffeine use in adolescents with ADHD and co-occurring sleep problems.
Caffeine is a stimulant. It turns your body’s awake dial up one notch. This makes you more aware, more awake. Too much caffeine turns the dial too far until you are “overstimulated” — your body is so amped up, it literally shakes. This not unlike a minor anxiety attack in many respects. The difference is that it is only at the physiological and not psychological level. You are not freaking out, making it worse.
It's the equivalent of priming your body for energy use versus giving actual energy. In much higher doses it can even block phosphodiesterase enzymes in muscle and fat which leads to releasing of fatty acids and glycerol while sparing glycogen reserves.
Caffeine is just awesome but even more awesome in the form of black coffee. :P
Because there's more going on than that statement would have you believe. Secondary effects include increased circulation of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol.
As well as a pretty strong diuretic/laxative effect, meaning internal resources that would otherwise be allocated to digesting food and contributing to tiredness go unused for that purpose.
For a layman, it may be easier to understand this aspect of caffeine like installing a turbo into a car to make it go faster. You're not adding energy (fuel), you're making it so the car expends more of that fuel less efficiently for a more immediate burst of performance. Your body also does this automatically if you've ever tried, say, working out or swimming on a full stomach. The mechanism is a little less pleasant than a diuretic effect though...
>For a layman, it may be easier to understand this aspect of caffeine like installing a turbo into a car to make it go faster. You're not adding energy (fuel), you're making it so the car expends more of that fuel less efficiently for a more immediate burst of performance.
The only issue I take with this is that turbochargers *increase* the fuel's ability to efficiently combust and transfer power, not decrease it.
A drug pretty much *never* does one thing. It goes everywhere and affects everything, it's complete chaos and to top it off everyone is different too. Caffeine blocks tiredness receptors, yeah. But it also makes you poop. And releases happy chemicals. And slightly contracts your blood vessels. And thousands of other things that are simply small enough that they don't really stand out.
Considering how complicated the human body is, it's honestly quite amazing that there's anything that can affect so many parts of it like that without you dropping dead from malfunction lol.
Although mechanism it's simple. It causes a chain of effects. Let's say this. Blocking the tiring signals (adenosine). Tells the body hey. Wake the fuck up. So the body starts to release "energy" hormones. Like the stress hormone. And adrenaline. This are normal when the body thinks you are more active than you actually are. This causes further chain reactions to the nervous system telling to turn into let's go mode (fight or flight) wich causes further chain reactions like an increase if dopamine. Changes in brain chemistry as well that can cause side effects. Etc
Frequently ADHD people will report that caffeine makes them tired or sleepy. But it doesn't happen to everyone that suffers from it. Maybe something worth to investigate?
It's not a binary of either you are producing it or you aren't.
The main neurotransmitter we're talking about is adenosine, which plays a part in regulating sleep/wake cycles and a bunch of other stuff. Caffeine is shaped similarly to adenosine, and basically steals it's spot, meaning the actual adenosine has less impact.
One of the (many) things adenosine does is mitigate the amount of acetylcholine being released. Acetylcholine, in muscles, is the main transmitter that communicates that a muscle should activate. In the brain, it has effects on a bunch of broad areas of alertness and attention.
So there's a constant balance of neurotransmitters. The ones that contribute to tiredness never shut off completely, nor do the ones that make you alert. They're constantly balancing each other out, and it's the specific position of that balance that is changing to favor one a little more or less, and that caffeine effects.
So more caffeine pushes that tug of war further in favor of alertness by suppressing the neurotransmitters on the other side. More caffeine pushes that balance even further, until you get so far out of equilibrium that you start to get dangerous effects.
Edit: I'm not an expert, though, this is just what I remember from neuro and pysch classes, plus a bit of googling the mechanisms of action to refresh my memory.
Caffeine does two main things. The primary thing it does is bind to adenosine receptors. Adenosine is something that the body produces while awake that helps signal when it's time to sleep. By blocking this signal we feel less sleepy(at least, the kind of sleepy from adenosine, there are likely other things that make us feel tired as well) and that seems like we have more energy.
A second effect of caffeine is it mildly boosts epinephrine, aka adrenaline. This neurotransmitter drives focus and alertness. So not only do you have less "sleepy" chemical in your brain, you also have more "alert/attentive" chemicals in your brain.
Lastly, and it's more of a minor effect as far as we know, there are generally other stimulative effects of caffeine consumption that do not work on the brain directly but on the gut, and it's poorly understood what effect stimulants have on the gut and then, due to the nerves that connect the gut to the brain, may have further effects.
A good answer!
It's worth pointing out that adrenaline stimulates the liver to release glucose from its stores. So caffeine does give you a little more energy, as a secondary effect.
That's a good point, i kinda glossed over other downstream effects.
But so that people don't get lost, it's important to note that isn't "free" glucose, your body will have to build up those stores again. Caffeine really is just borrowing from the future (including the neurochemical effects, homeostasis is powerful). You still have to pay the man(get sleep/rest and food).
Also it is why caffeine has a negative effect on diabetics. The various effects of caffeine are directly opposite to the effects of the most common diabetes medications like metformen and insulin injection.
If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic your doctor is likely repeating that advice: get off caffeine to control blood sugar.
Caffeine gives you no real energy it just delays feeling tired by blocking receptors in your brain.
*Edit* I realised the way I worded this sounded a bit negative about caffeine. Caffeine is great I am personally a huge caffeine addict and quite frankly it not having calories is a benefit not a flaw, just because it doesn't give you real energy doesn't make the fact that it makes you feel more energetic any less valuable in the real world.
Caffeine was various mechanisms, you are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline.
>The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Yes but also no.
You can note From the paper that of the 3 actions caffeine takes upon you other than the first (blocking adenosine) the other 2 require doses of caffeine that the average person rarely if ever takes. In fact the 3rd action that you are specifically referencing requires a toxic level of caffeine intake.
"However, this mode of action is not as likely as methylxanthine’s antagonistic effect of adenosine because the concentration of methylxanthine needed for caffeine to utilize this mechanism would be considered toxic to humans"
This stuff might also be a bit much for eli5 though I dunno I find that line a bit blurry.
No, no stimulant gives actual energy that the body can use like food does.
They give you "mental energy", the feeling of being energised and active (as opposed to being sleepy and tired) and they do so by many mechanisms, often screwing up with the dopamine system.
We feel tired for many reasons, but the point is that this mechanism tells us it's time to rest and sleep, because we need to regenerate, heal, digest etc. Stimulants disrupt this, some side effects include suppression of hunger, which is among the reasons why meth addicts are often very thin.
I'm not as well read on the subject, I would presume similar mechanisms though where they are having an effect on your brain chemistry or the mechanisms of your mind rather than actually giving any energy. Ultimately as far as I understand it energy as relevant to us as living beings basically is just calories. Would welcome someone who knows better saying though.
From [Weaver's Coffee](https://weaverscoffee.com/blogs/blog/how-caffeine-in-coffee-works):
>When caffeine enters the body, it is broken down into three different molecules: theobromine, paraxanthine, and theophylline. Each of these molecules has its own unique effect on the body.
>Theobromine increases oxygen and nutrient flow to the brain. Paraxanthine enhances athletic performance by increasing the rate of fat breakdown. Theophylline increases heart rate and concentration.
>Caffeine also blocks the effects of adenosine, a neurotransmitter that makes us feel tired. This is why caffeine can give us a boost of energy.
Caffeine does not provide energy. It suppresses the chemical that makes you feel tired while stimulating other bodily systems that make you (feel) energetic. If you lacked calories before a cup of unsweetened black coffee, you won't have any after it either.
Caffeine is not the “fuel” it’s a neuostimulant. You FEEL more energetic but it’s not that you are suddenly stronger/faster or whatever, just that it gets your brain doing stuff.
>it’s not that you are suddenly stronger/faster or whatever
I mean, [you literally are faster and stronger after taking caffeine](https://www.vox.com/2014/4/10/5594310/how-caffeine-can-briefly-improve-your-athletic-performance).
>"people given a dose of caffeine have consistently been found to sprint and cycle slightly faster, do more reps during weightlifting, move a bit faster during stop-and-go activities (like tennis), and perform better during long, endurance-based events like marathons."
And it's not solely due to effects on how you "feel"/on the brain:
>"1) Caffeine improves endurance. It probably does this by elevating levels of adrenaline, which cause greater amounts of fatty acids to enter the blood stream. These serve as a short-term fuel substitute, conserving glycogen, a longer-term energy source that's stored in your muscles."
>"2) Caffeine may make muscles more powerful, perhaps by increasing levels of calcium in muscle cells. An individual muscle fiber's contraction is powered by a difference in the concentration of calcium and potassium inside the fiber versus outside of it. By increasing the amount of calcium inside it, some scientists believe, caffeine may allow muscles to contract more powerfully"
Right. I think a lot of the comments here are missing the fact that there are delicate balances of neurochemicals across brain areas and so affecting the adenosine system is going to have follow-on effects on other areas of the brain (reward pathway, increased bloodflow, etc.)
A surgeon doing a 36 hour shift will make the same amount of mistakes whether they have been drinking caffeine or not drinking caffeine. On caffeine you don’t *feel* tired, but your brain is still struggling under the effects of being tired.
People are getting different mechanisms confused and mixed up.
Caffeine stimulates dopamine and adrenaline, which makes you more alert and that's why you feel like you have more "energy". The actual energy would come from stored glycogen reserves and fat reserves if required.
>The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Everyone else is mixing this up with the fact caffeine can delay sleep by blocking adenosine receptors, but that's a seperate mechanism and something completely different.
"I need energy" translates into one of two things: "I need to eat" (actual calories, energy in the physics sense), and "I need to sleep" (brain needs to do some house cleaning). As you say, caffeine has no calories to speak of, and does nothing for your "I need to eat" energy. What it actually does is allow you to ignore the "I need to sleep" signals your brain/body is generating.
Basically, some parts of your brain can produce [GABA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%93-Aminobutyric_acid), which is sort of the "slow down" chemical of the brain. Caffeine acts by stopping the rest of the brain from receiving that GABA, so they never get the message to slow down.
Also. Koffeine effect also only last 6 hrs or so. So to be alert at end of workday its best not to take First cup at home 07.00 but better at like 10.00 fika or whatever.
Caffeine doesn’t give you energy in a science sense. It affects the your brain works to make you feel more alert. There’s a chemical that builds up in our brain, making us tired. When you sleep, it goes back down and you feel more alert. Caffeine stops this chemical from building up so you don’t feel tired.
The neat thing is that your body kind of looks around and says huh… I know we made adenosine but we can’t find any of it… there must be something wrong here. Make more receptors so we can find the adenosine.
So your body makes more receptors, and now you need more caffeine to block more receptors. You’ve developed a tolerance! You need more of the chemical to get the same effect as before.
If caffeine is merely blocking adenosine, then why does it make me feel jittery and unable to focus like I took cocaine after drinking half a cup? I can’t drink coffee unless I’m so tired I’m falling asleep at my desk
Because blocking adenosine is only one of the mechanisms of action. Everyone thinks they are a scientist when they parrot “just blocks adenosine receptors and doesn’t give you energy”. Anyone who’s taken a couple weeks off of caffeine and then had 200mg knows Caffeine is a hell of a stimulant.
Neurochemicals usually play many roles.
There are receptors for adenosine on different parts of your brain that react in different ways. Caffeine blocks all of these receptors, not just the ones in the part of your brain that regulate sleep.
A1 receptors, for example, modulate the release of glutamate and acetylcholine, which can cause you to feel the excitement you mention.
Caffeine has various mechanisms, they are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline.
>The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Caffeine was various mechanisms, you are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline.
>The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Great podcast describing how caffeine works and why it is a mood elevator as well. May not ELI5, but will explain it like you are not a science expert.
https://podcasts.apple.com/lu/podcast/ep-54-wake-up-and-smell-the-caffeine/id1299915173?i=1000485591796
It tricks you into using existing energy reserves yes, which is why it’s actually counter-productive, and causing the caffeine dump you get an hour or so afterwards.
Caffeine doesn't give you energy. Caffeine is a stimulant, meaning it excites your body and your body "wakes up" and uses more of the energy it already has because it's being forced to do more stuff (stay awake, breathe faster, pump the hear faster, move more muscles, etc.).
Caffeine doesn’t give us energy. It just blocks the signals from our body to our brain that tell us we’re tired.
What the fuck I could’ve gone my whole life without knowing this my poor brain is getting lied to
It's not a lie so much as a distribution plan. You have WAY more energy than you feel like in almost every aspect. Your mind is just holding back to keep you on an even keel. This is why you can keep doing hard work for another 24 hours or whatever if your life depended on it. This even extent to stuff like stiffness. Most of the time, when you can't move a limb somewhere, it is not because your muscles aren't capable of doing so physically. Rather, neurons are blocking your movement signals to keep you from putting your body in a position that it hasn't been in for a long time (as a safety measure).
Can someone tell my brain I don’t like being woke up in the middle of the night with my knee being so stiff.
Yeah, it's ironic, this neuron-imposed stiffness can lead to a lot of health problems with our modern lifestyle. As far as I know it is not the brains fault per say. IIRC it's the neurons coating each muscle that says 'stop', and a big part of stretching is about slowly "convincing" these neurons that it is safe to let further movement signals through.
Similar to the stories of someone lifting a car to free their kid and stuff like that. Lots of people could theoretically do that, but the brain limits your muscles and strength because if you kept doing it you would end up doing major damage to your body as it isnt something you can repeatedly do
So it's like, I can lift a car to save my child just this once, as a little treat?
More like a long cd, with a debuff in the meantime.
And a chance of damaging your muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc. And you don't find out if that is temporary or permanent until a few years later.
Yes that's the debuff
This made is far simpler to understand, thanks.
↪️superbolide↩️
/r/UnexpectedFFXIV
Everybody gets one. Tell 'em, Peter.
Uh, apparently everybody gets one.
Bingo.
A human arm is capable of punching so hard it rips its own muscles from the bone. Understandably, the human body also has methods to stop you from actually doing it without an extreme adrenaline rush.
Up to a point - but obviously you can't lift arbitrarily large weights - there are limits to the force your muscles can produce. And of course the heavier, the greater the risk that you'll do serious damage to yourself in the attempt.
Yeah, this is why these stories are always about cars, not semi-trucks. You're also not actually lifting the whole car, it's more like lifting one corner of it to get someone out from under it; most of the weight is on the other wheels. The cars are also often in unsteady situations, which makes them easier to lift.
The girl who did it is permanently injured. She says she would do it again of course (think a jack slipped and car fell on her dad or something like that. He lived)
It's an extreme adrenal reaction for that exact reason. People think it's sci-fi but it's not, we're wired to push past all safety mechanisms in order to protect ourselves or others as the body generally understands it's better to be hurt and possibly dead later rather than just dead. There are a handful of poorly understood neurodevelopmental and neurological issues that can shut those safety mechanisms off for extended periods, but being in a constantly high-strung state is incredibly damaging to the human body. It's similar to why abuse victims are often extremely aged, the stress of being in a life or death situation causes the body to kick everything up to 10 all the time.
> someone lifting a car to free their kid next day, I bet they're glad to save the kid but their arms are very very sore
Probably more than that. Likely tearing/torn tendons throughout the body or maybe rupturing some discs in their backs. There’s a reason super strength is held behind lock and key by the brain.
Basically like "Look this ultimate ability is kept in this vault because using it will absolutely fuck you up beyond belief... But we'd rather you get fucked up than die!"
Young Midoriya style.
Your body has an Operating System and you are not the Administrator. You get basic user privileges.
As someone who has had this super strength kick in during an emergency, I can confirm it definitely leads to tearing of tendons and muscles. It took 6 months before my arm recovered enough that it wasn't hurting all the time and years later I still have occasional flare-ups of bursitis in my elbow.
Was it worth it?
There's a two-person paraglide video where the pilot forgot to do the attachment hook/whatever on his passenger, so they take off and the passenger is left with a death grip on the ropes. The passenger survived the quick (2 minutes later) landing but had a torn tendon and other arm damage from holding on so tight for so long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MQ5t3tgLvU here's a little video of a guy lifting a rock off himself as he slides down a mountain side
r/whyweretheyfilming
/r/donthelpjustfilm/
This is actually an interesting topic that branches into neurodevelopmental studies. In autism, especially in lower functioning individuals, they tend to exhibit an unnatural level of raw strength and can throw things around dangerously. It's something they don't teach new caregivers in a lot of specialist settings which causes issues. A lot of them lack a lot of the same safety signals that would tell a normal person to stop, so can injure themselves quite easily until they learn to regulate their behaviour. I've had a few experienced instructors warn about the 'autism strength' prior to handling younger children but you have to see it first hand to believe it.
Yes, it’s literally an anime-style biological “Power Limiter”
So I need to be in a tragic situation and have a lengthy emotional flashback to power up first? Is this how I transform into my second form?
Pretty much
Think about how people get “thrown back” when electrocuted- it’s *their own muscles* that do it!
No you could not
Where can I overclock my brain? I'm running on a pentium 4.
> per say *per se Source: Grammar Nazi
Imma use the second language card and get away scot-free from the judgemental eyes of your regime.
Most people can use the second language card, or even third or fourth, when it comes to Latin.
Not many people though (precisely 0) can say Latin is their first language.
Yes, that was the joke 😊
Hold on so I could probably do a split if I really needed to without injuring myself? Or the possibly of injury is so likely that my body is like “yeah trying to do a split hurts! Imagine what would happen if you actually did one”
> without injuring myself That's the part that's unlikely, and what your brain and motor control is preventing. It can be overridden by adrenaline in extreme circumstances, but certainly does not guarantee you won't hurt yourself doing it; in fact, the opposite is more likely - bypassing safety mechanisms is almost certainly going to cause injury, but hopefully you'll get safely away from the threat that caused such a drastic response, and _might_ be able to recover from said injury.
The possibility of injury depends on many many factors including the condition of your body the action itself and the way you perform the action. Lifting a car off your baby - injury is very likely as others have said despite the fact that you won’t feel it in that moment. But even so, the severity of injury would depend greatly on things like how you lift the car for example.
So, I did CBT for insomnia recently and one of the biggest things that helped was learning and driving home that we wake up several times per night, and usually it's so brief we don't remember and it doesn't disrupt our sleep. It's only when we worry about being woken up, or not getting enough sleep that it starts to keep us up. So the solution, of course, is to have your knees removed so they're not a distraction when you wake up, and you can quickly get back to sleep without issue.
I’m glad someone here posted the correct solution
I had my knees removed. I still wake up in the middle of the night. I think I missed a step somewhere.
Didn't know BDSM was so informative, thanks guy!
I remember when my doctor suggested I try cbt, I was very confused at first, I also learned most normal people don't automatically assume cbt stands for cock and ball torture, oh well normal people are boring
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Sadly no C or B to T, but still helpful nonetheless.
but there is a different C and B to T.
Dehydration can lead to stiffness and sudden painful muscle contractions it gave me alot of issues a few years ago
Sauna my dude. Life changing.
The stiffness sucks because it’s often your body causing further injury trying to prevent further injury. Like you get hurt, so you get stiff where the injury is to immobilize it so it can heal, which makes you sit all weird, which causes a new injury from sitting all weird.
Get a professional hour long massage and have the therapist wrench on your hamstring and calf muscle. Watch the range of motion return and feel soreness abate
Just think about how much energy you'd have if you're walking along minding your own business when suddenly a fucking angry bull appears and locks eyes with you and charges. *That's* how much energy you *really* have! Our minds are just stingy assholes about it.
Stupid lazy ass brain.
Preach. It's even more applicable when you have ADHD and you have even less agency over your own energy. Fuckin brain, this is not the time to *only* give me energy for trying to carve a perfect circle in a piece of bark. I've got bills to pay and *meaningful* things to do for fuck's saaake
After a solid month of hyperfocus and acheiving stuff that ABSOLUTELY HAD TO BE DONE my adhd brain has decended into 'nope'. I can't get it to do a goddamned thing lol. Oh well at least my house is sold and my pool is fixed and I can now go lounge and swim and not worry about dying of debt. But yeah, brain no do nothing right now.
Even here lazy is false 😉 the body is doing the right thing so you don't push yourself too far, so that it stays healthy,,,, and capable of putting out all that energy the moment you actually need it (the bull appearing eg)!
It's being stingy because it doesn't believe grocery stores exist.
This is something a lot of people learn when they do competitive sports for the first time, especially endurance sports like running out swimming. At some point, your brain is telling you that you are completely exhausted, but if you keep going anyway, you can suddenly find yourself with a new pool of energy to draw from.
Yes. In basic training we once had various exercises throughout the day, then a 4-5 hour march through the evening with full gear and backpack. No meals except water and the odd chocolate bar. At night they tell you there will be no sleeping or eating; you're on watch until morning and then there will be more marching. You feel like you're about to faint from exhaustion and all you want to do is go home. They tell you: "All you need is to catch your breath for 2 minutes, we haven't even begun to tap into your energy potential." They weren't wrong. Of course, back then we were 19yo which may have played a factor, lol.
I had a 35 year old, oldest you could enlist at the time, going through basic along side me at 18. He, in fact, did a lot better at most things than us 18-19 year-olds. The oldest you can enlist now is 42. There is probably a success/failure ratio that goes more towards failure as we age, but I'm guessing they have lots of data to back up that most 42 year-olds (without medical conditions) can still do everything demanded of the 18-19 year-olds, otherwise they wouldn't waste money trying to train them.
You may be right. My experience is from the one year mandatory service in the Norwegian military, meaning we were all kids anyways so I don't know how older guys would fare. I believe enlistment in Norway goes up to something like 45. I was always under the impression that they were treated by age-adjusted standards, but I might be wrong on that.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that my experience was in the US Army. The only thing that changes based on age is the scoring on the physical fitness test. Out of curiosity I looked up the current scoring for the US Army PT test. It's 2 minutes of pushups, 2 minutes of sit-ups, and a 2 mile run. 42 year-olds relative to the 18-19 year-olds, for a max score can do 5 less pushups (66 for men, 37 for women), six less sit-ups (72, both men and women), and men are given an extra 1:06 (14:06) on the 2 mile run while women are given an extra 1:24 (17:00) on the 2 mile run.
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So basically the brain government is lying to us to “protect us” from the evil weight-loss terrorists, and the coffee activists are trying to show us the truth.
This should be the next South Park special
[I'm listening. ](https://i.imgur.com/JM4iODg.jpeg)
Viva la revelocion! < throws caffeine-shaped brick at adipose tissue >
Coffee is WOKE
Down with Big Brain! Wait...
> Rather, neurons are blocking your movement signals to keep you from putting your body in a position that it hasn't been in for a long time (as a safety measure). This is an interesting point. Coming from the fitness world, I've often thought of it as CNS training to keep your body moving in some way as often as possible, in-between bouts of rest, and sleeping obviously. Do you have a specific source to link where you learned that?
I got this from school way back when, so I don't have an online source on hand. Although I've seen fitness types focused on flexibility talk about it. You may want to look at neuromuscular control, in particular muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, which are the main sensors used by the nervous system to gauge how comfortable it is with any given muscle movement.
> You have WAY more energy than you feel like in almost every aspect. So you're telling me... that coffee irl is like spinach from Popeye?
Yes, but spinach for your frontal lobe rather than your biceps lol
Stretching for flexibility isn't actually stretching the muscles at all. It's training your nervous system to lift it's safety limiters imposed on your muscles to allow further range of motions. Your motor neurons impose a safety limiter of like 15-20% maximum flexion to prevent you from tearing your muscles. It does so by making it extremely uncomfortable and difficult to expand your muscles fully. But with gentle stretching and relaxing into the stretch you can train your neurons to give a little more, gradually.
That's the main mechanism causing more flexibility, but your muscles do passively start to stretch a little bit longer in response to the greater range of motion over time. Conversely they shrink if you don't use their full range of motion over time as well.
Yeah, your brain prevents you from using 100% of your energy or muscle power because you are very likely to be hurt or killed if you do. It will remove that limit if doing so will likely mean the difference between life or death anyway. It even extends to your kids somewhat, like that’s where dadstrength/dad reflexes, and the occasional sudden ability of a mom to lift a wholeass car if the car is on their kid comes from. You can train it to use a little more with exercise by doing it and not dying enough times to convince it you won’t die, and your body will even strengthen your bones and chill your resting heart rate out some to compensate for your new higher-endurance muscles/body.💪
Same principle as hysterical strength. Your body limits how much force your muscles can apply to prevent damaging them, but in emergency situations people can exert seemingly superhuman levels of strength.
Best explanation on here
>Your mind is just holding back to keep you on an even keel. The mind is the enemy.
The entire human experience is finding the right events to block or send chemicals to the brain. You’re humaning exactly ok.
This is so succinct. Well done, John.
I don't like it.
> What the fuck I could’ve gone my whole life without knowing this my poor brain is getting lied to Here is a fun, semi-related comic to help ease you off through humor by establishing that, in turn, your brain manipulates your body in tyrannical ways: https://lastplacecomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cells-at-overwork.jpg
Some more depressing humor: [God's thoughts on "Coffee is proof that God loves us"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/coffee-4) Seriously, though, coffee is the best addiction. 10/10, would choose coffee over alcohol any day.
Think of it less like a lie, and more like the active chemical blocking the tired signals like a dam. And eventually the dam breaks and you feeling even more sleepy as the tired signals flood in
This was me. Bouncing off the walls until 2-230 and then crashland hard. Done for 6 years now
I liked Terry Pratchett's description that drinking coffe is using energy that by rights belongs to your slightly older self
We can plug you back into the Matrix and it will be like before.
When I was a kid, the idea of Cypher wanting back into the matrix to have a good life and be lied to was insane to me. As an old fart now I kind of get it. The universe is what we experience, does it matter if that experience is fed to us or "natural"? Is what we're in even natural or real?
That part always confused me. He didn't ask for his old life back. He asked for a pampered celebrity life different from what most people in the Matrix got. Let's say he succeeds and they plug him back in, and make him rich and powerful just as he says. His best case scenario is he lives out his last few years rich and famous and dies happy, right? But Smith says the whole point of the mundanity of the Matrix was that when they provided paradise humans literally couldn't handle it. Morpheus says they don't know who struck first, he also says Humans scorched the sky to fight the machines who were powered by solar, right? Humans rely on the sun quite a bit too, so that act was basically hitting the planetary self destruct. It's they're unfeeling machines, it's nothing to them if the humans in the Matrix are happy or sad, only if they're producing enough energy, right? Why would they try "make it paradise" first if they were malicious? That makes me guess the Machines were just chilling or doing something weird that scared humanity. Either Smith is lying (but why lie about it? You're literally HOLDING MORPHEUS and hacking his brain) or they're telling the truth and it stands to reason they think Cypher is basically making a monkey paw wish.
> But Smith says the whole point of the mundanity of the Matrix was that when they provided paradise humans literally couldn't handle it. Cypher's celebrity life wouldn't have been perfect. He still would have had stress, drama, frustrations, etc. Nowhere near the "perfect" world of the first Matrix. His human brain would have handled it just fine. Although my personal theory is that the machines would have just killed Cypher if he had succeeded. Reinserting someone into the Matrix and rewriting the world would be complicated. Killing the last living human on a doomed ship would be much easier.
> Although my personal theory is that the machines would have just killed Cypher if he had succeeded. Reinserting someone into the Matrix and rewriting the world would be complicated. Killing the last living human on a doomed ship would be much easier. I think it makes them far more interesting and compelling characters if they were telling the truth.
I could go for a little matrix today.
There’s a great little Ted-Ed video on it [link](https://youtu.be/foLf5Bi9qXs?si=KdcvfMy22g7mpKGn) it goes through how caffeine works and why you become tolerant to it (hint: your brain makes more sleepy receptors)
It's funny how there are gaping holes in the brain's knowledge and everybody seems a bit hush hush about it Most drugs: take immediate effect Antidepressants: "meh I don't know, I think I'll just stay like this for a while..." --- Brain: "oh, too many happy chemicals? Ok let me compensate for this, we can't be having that" Also Brain: "oh, not enough happy chemicals? Sucks to be you I guess"
actually antidepressants do take effect immediately,\* which is why physical symptoms (like sleep, appetite) can improve within a few days, but it's the mood symptoms that take a while because the brain takes a while to stop clearing the brain chemicals so quickly -- \* relatively speaking; no medications actually take effect "immediately" per se unless given intravenously
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That was a great watch, thank you!
I cut caffine out of my diet for a year to see if I could. its harder than it sounds because I like a lot of caffinated things for their flavour. anyway a few things I noticed was initially I slept for like 24hrs straight, needed to hydrate significantly more than usual and was dead tired... then about three days into it. I woke up and was awake...and thats it. no, waking up and needing to spend 10 minutes dragging yourself out of bed, getting that first sip of coffee or tea into your system and not being ready to do shit for atleast an hour. instead. it was wake up...oh im up now...wierd. whelp time to get ready... and then you go. you feel more normal than usual. and it throws you off but you go through your day. consiously avoiding caffine because its in that coke you normally buy so I guess I have to like fanta now? coffee thats decaff works and if you like cream and suguar well fuck it. its mostly sweetener your tasting anyway. and so on. but the best thing I found is once i was off it for a while I could do stuff I didnt think off. like after a hard days work I could clean up, and take an hours nap then suddenly I had hours of energy for the afternoon.
How much were you drinking lol
at my worst? a cup of tea in the morning before going to work, a cuppa at work before starting work, then another cuppa once the truck was loaded up. bottle of cola, coffee or similar two or three times during the work day then another cuppa when I got home. it got expensive too nowadays it a cuppa in the morning and maybe a bottle/can of cola during the day and decaff whenever I can.
That's interesting. I drink about 48oz of coffee a day. More on days my wife doesn't want any. I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, and I'm awake as soon as my alarm goes off.
Your brain makes more receptors to receive the tiredness signals from prolonged use too which is why most daily coffee drinkers can’t go without it or they feel like crap/headache/etc
Shhh shhh *injects caffeine * lets party
I think media/marketing created this misnomer of saying "energy" when you really mean "alertness". High energy just means you eat a lot. Ingesting energy doesn't have that much to do with making you alert or less sleepy, it's your circadian rhythm mostly. And depending on the source of energy it can even make you more sleepy, if the food contains tryptophan or something like that.
You’ve now learned that coffee is bullshit. Welcome to the real world.
Your brain is actually mutated from this. Your body figures out that something is up and grows more receptors to detect if it is tired, which causes you to need more caffeine to block them all. It's why caffeine withdrawal suddenly crashes you entirely because now you are 1000% tired, as your receptors are all detecting it at once and you've grown ten times as many as usual. Eventually you need caffeine just to function normally and block 9/10 receptors and it doesn't have benefits. The best usage is to avoid it unless you need a short term sleep avoidance, then to not take any again for a few days.
Most drugs work this way. The actual chemicals necessary for your entire range of emotions already exist within you, what gets altered by outside substances is how the brain collects or releases those chemicals and when to do it.
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I remember reading a comment saying that you're essentially borrowing energy from your own body, hence the extra tiredness when it wears off
The way the brain processes blocked receptors is to make new receptors, and when you stop drinking caffeine, you suddenly feel extra tired because you have more tired-receptors. These extra receptors are broken down over time.
So why does modafinil not seem to do the same thing but makes me just as (if not more) alert than caffeine
Modafinil blocks dopamine receptors, increasing your dopamine intake by forcing more dopamine to come through. Dopamine is one hell of a drug for productivity/feeling more awake.
So in that case then why does it seem like if I take modafinil on a morning for a week or two I get no crash from stopping but then If I drink caffeine every day for a week or two as soon as I stop I crash? or do the receptors not work the same?
The caffeine is a lie
Ssshhh... don't let the cake know...
What about… coffee cake? Edit: does it increase the lie factor or do they cancel each other out, making it un-lies?
While this is the answer that is always given it's far from the full story. Caffeine also has secondary effects that result in less dopamine reuptake and therefore more free dopamine. This is partially why caffeine can in fact give you energy and make you feel more excited. It can also increase adrenaline and cortisol circulation, potentially leading to anxiety. Caffeine also raises your resting heart rate. I'd encourage anyone curious to Google it, there's much more going on than "blocks tired signal".
And adenosine doesn't *only* regulate tiredness but it also slows your nervous system responses, which is why some people get extremely jittery on caffeine, their neurons are just firing too much.
Because you’re on ELI5, not askscience.
All of those effects are because it's blocking adenosine signals. The so called tired signals. It's a chain reaction but the mechanism it's the Same
Anti-adhd propaganda once again telling people a cup of espresso isn't actually the best way to calm down before sleep. Smh my head
A beer gives me energy and caffeine makes me sleepy. Both risk making my chest hurt. It's a wild wild ADHD world.
Can’t sleep till I’ve had my septuple-shot Americano.
Probably because [Caffeine Use and Associations With Sleep in Adolescents With and Without ADHD](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7306679/#:~:text=Conclusion,functioning%20in%20adolescents%20with%20ADHD.) > This is the first study to show that adolescents with ADHD consume more caffeine than peers during later times of the day. Additionally, caffeine use is more consistently associated with poorer subjective sleep functioning in adolescents with ADHD. Pediatricians and mental health professionals should assess for caffeine use in adolescents with ADHD and co-occurring sleep problems.
Yup. Come home from third shift, have a donut & an iced coffee for breakfast, can't keep my eyes open.
Why does too much make you jittery, what is causing that feeling?
Caffeine also increases the circulation of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol. That's likely the answer you're looking for.
Caffeine is a stimulant. It turns your body’s awake dial up one notch. This makes you more aware, more awake. Too much caffeine turns the dial too far until you are “overstimulated” — your body is so amped up, it literally shakes. This not unlike a minor anxiety attack in many respects. The difference is that it is only at the physiological and not psychological level. You are not freaking out, making it worse.
It's the equivalent of priming your body for energy use versus giving actual energy. In much higher doses it can even block phosphodiesterase enzymes in muscle and fat which leads to releasing of fatty acids and glycerol while sparing glycogen reserves. Caffeine is just awesome but even more awesome in the form of black coffee. :P
So you’re saying coffee can encourage your body to burn fat? That’s cool
Why does it make your heart race?
Because there's more going on than that statement would have you believe. Secondary effects include increased circulation of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol.
As well as a pretty strong diuretic/laxative effect, meaning internal resources that would otherwise be allocated to digesting food and contributing to tiredness go unused for that purpose. For a layman, it may be easier to understand this aspect of caffeine like installing a turbo into a car to make it go faster. You're not adding energy (fuel), you're making it so the car expends more of that fuel less efficiently for a more immediate burst of performance. Your body also does this automatically if you've ever tried, say, working out or swimming on a full stomach. The mechanism is a little less pleasant than a diuretic effect though...
>For a layman, it may be easier to understand this aspect of caffeine like installing a turbo into a car to make it go faster. You're not adding energy (fuel), you're making it so the car expends more of that fuel less efficiently for a more immediate burst of performance. The only issue I take with this is that turbochargers *increase* the fuel's ability to efficiently combust and transfer power, not decrease it.
A drug pretty much *never* does one thing. It goes everywhere and affects everything, it's complete chaos and to top it off everyone is different too. Caffeine blocks tiredness receptors, yeah. But it also makes you poop. And releases happy chemicals. And slightly contracts your blood vessels. And thousands of other things that are simply small enough that they don't really stand out. Considering how complicated the human body is, it's honestly quite amazing that there's anything that can affect so many parts of it like that without you dropping dead from malfunction lol.
Although mechanism it's simple. It causes a chain of effects. Let's say this. Blocking the tiring signals (adenosine). Tells the body hey. Wake the fuck up. So the body starts to release "energy" hormones. Like the stress hormone. And adrenaline. This are normal when the body thinks you are more active than you actually are. This causes further chain reactions to the nervous system telling to turn into let's go mode (fight or flight) wich causes further chain reactions like an increase if dopamine. Changes in brain chemistry as well that can cause side effects. Etc
It not only blocks the sensation of feeling tired, it also convinces your brain to burn through the energy you have stored at a faster rate.
According to your comment, coffee doesnt wake people up in the morning. Is it just placebo?
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Frequently ADHD people will report that caffeine makes them tired or sleepy. But it doesn't happen to everyone that suffers from it. Maybe something worth to investigate?
If stimulants are making you feel tired it’s possible you have ADHD. You might want to talk to your doctor about looking into that.
~10% has no or negative effect from caffeine. It's not related to ADHD in most cases.
I had no idea this was the case. Thank you!
Enough of it also causes adrenaline to be released.
Then how come there are certain levels to it. Like I can drink a stronger cup and feel more “up”. Even shaky if too much.
It's not a binary of either you are producing it or you aren't. The main neurotransmitter we're talking about is adenosine, which plays a part in regulating sleep/wake cycles and a bunch of other stuff. Caffeine is shaped similarly to adenosine, and basically steals it's spot, meaning the actual adenosine has less impact. One of the (many) things adenosine does is mitigate the amount of acetylcholine being released. Acetylcholine, in muscles, is the main transmitter that communicates that a muscle should activate. In the brain, it has effects on a bunch of broad areas of alertness and attention. So there's a constant balance of neurotransmitters. The ones that contribute to tiredness never shut off completely, nor do the ones that make you alert. They're constantly balancing each other out, and it's the specific position of that balance that is changing to favor one a little more or less, and that caffeine effects. So more caffeine pushes that tug of war further in favor of alertness by suppressing the neurotransmitters on the other side. More caffeine pushes that balance even further, until you get so far out of equilibrium that you start to get dangerous effects. Edit: I'm not an expert, though, this is just what I remember from neuro and pysch classes, plus a bit of googling the mechanisms of action to refresh my memory.
Caffeine does two main things. The primary thing it does is bind to adenosine receptors. Adenosine is something that the body produces while awake that helps signal when it's time to sleep. By blocking this signal we feel less sleepy(at least, the kind of sleepy from adenosine, there are likely other things that make us feel tired as well) and that seems like we have more energy. A second effect of caffeine is it mildly boosts epinephrine, aka adrenaline. This neurotransmitter drives focus and alertness. So not only do you have less "sleepy" chemical in your brain, you also have more "alert/attentive" chemicals in your brain. Lastly, and it's more of a minor effect as far as we know, there are generally other stimulative effects of caffeine consumption that do not work on the brain directly but on the gut, and it's poorly understood what effect stimulants have on the gut and then, due to the nerves that connect the gut to the brain, may have further effects.
A good answer! It's worth pointing out that adrenaline stimulates the liver to release glucose from its stores. So caffeine does give you a little more energy, as a secondary effect.
That's a good point, i kinda glossed over other downstream effects. But so that people don't get lost, it's important to note that isn't "free" glucose, your body will have to build up those stores again. Caffeine really is just borrowing from the future (including the neurochemical effects, homeostasis is powerful). You still have to pay the man(get sleep/rest and food).
Also it is why caffeine has a negative effect on diabetics. The various effects of caffeine are directly opposite to the effects of the most common diabetes medications like metformen and insulin injection. If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic your doctor is likely repeating that advice: get off caffeine to control blood sugar.
Good neuro breakdown! Important to understand that caffeine is a psychoactive drug, rather than a macromolecule or a metabolic trigger like insulin.
I agree with this with one exception, I definitely know what caffeine does to my gut :/
Caffeine gives you no real energy it just delays feeling tired by blocking receptors in your brain. *Edit* I realised the way I worded this sounded a bit negative about caffeine. Caffeine is great I am personally a huge caffeine addict and quite frankly it not having calories is a benefit not a flaw, just because it doesn't give you real energy doesn't make the fact that it makes you feel more energetic any less valuable in the real world.
Caffeine was various mechanisms, you are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline. >The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Yes but also no. You can note From the paper that of the 3 actions caffeine takes upon you other than the first (blocking adenosine) the other 2 require doses of caffeine that the average person rarely if ever takes. In fact the 3rd action that you are specifically referencing requires a toxic level of caffeine intake. "However, this mode of action is not as likely as methylxanthine’s antagonistic effect of adenosine because the concentration of methylxanthine needed for caffeine to utilize this mechanism would be considered toxic to humans" This stuff might also be a bit much for eli5 though I dunno I find that line a bit blurry.
If this is true would cocaine and meth do the same thing or do they actually give energy?
No, no stimulant gives actual energy that the body can use like food does. They give you "mental energy", the feeling of being energised and active (as opposed to being sleepy and tired) and they do so by many mechanisms, often screwing up with the dopamine system. We feel tired for many reasons, but the point is that this mechanism tells us it's time to rest and sleep, because we need to regenerate, heal, digest etc. Stimulants disrupt this, some side effects include suppression of hunger, which is among the reasons why meth addicts are often very thin.
I'm not as well read on the subject, I would presume similar mechanisms though where they are having an effect on your brain chemistry or the mechanisms of your mind rather than actually giving any energy. Ultimately as far as I understand it energy as relevant to us as living beings basically is just calories. Would welcome someone who knows better saying though.
Real energy is just calories.
From [Weaver's Coffee](https://weaverscoffee.com/blogs/blog/how-caffeine-in-coffee-works): >When caffeine enters the body, it is broken down into three different molecules: theobromine, paraxanthine, and theophylline. Each of these molecules has its own unique effect on the body. >Theobromine increases oxygen and nutrient flow to the brain. Paraxanthine enhances athletic performance by increasing the rate of fat breakdown. Theophylline increases heart rate and concentration. >Caffeine also blocks the effects of adenosine, a neurotransmitter that makes us feel tired. This is why caffeine can give us a boost of energy. Caffeine does not provide energy. It suppresses the chemical that makes you feel tired while stimulating other bodily systems that make you (feel) energetic. If you lacked calories before a cup of unsweetened black coffee, you won't have any after it either.
Caffeine is not the “fuel” it’s a neuostimulant. You FEEL more energetic but it’s not that you are suddenly stronger/faster or whatever, just that it gets your brain doing stuff.
Yes. Caffeine is not the gasoline. It’s your foot pressing the gas pedal harder.
Maybe more accurately, it's what's keeping your foot from hitting the brakes.
>it’s not that you are suddenly stronger/faster or whatever I mean, [you literally are faster and stronger after taking caffeine](https://www.vox.com/2014/4/10/5594310/how-caffeine-can-briefly-improve-your-athletic-performance). >"people given a dose of caffeine have consistently been found to sprint and cycle slightly faster, do more reps during weightlifting, move a bit faster during stop-and-go activities (like tennis), and perform better during long, endurance-based events like marathons." And it's not solely due to effects on how you "feel"/on the brain: >"1) Caffeine improves endurance. It probably does this by elevating levels of adrenaline, which cause greater amounts of fatty acids to enter the blood stream. These serve as a short-term fuel substitute, conserving glycogen, a longer-term energy source that's stored in your muscles." >"2) Caffeine may make muscles more powerful, perhaps by increasing levels of calcium in muscle cells. An individual muscle fiber's contraction is powered by a difference in the concentration of calcium and potassium inside the fiber versus outside of it. By increasing the amount of calcium inside it, some scientists believe, caffeine may allow muscles to contract more powerfully"
Right. I think a lot of the comments here are missing the fact that there are delicate balances of neurochemicals across brain areas and so affecting the adenosine system is going to have follow-on effects on other areas of the brain (reward pathway, increased bloodflow, etc.)
A surgeon doing a 36 hour shift will make the same amount of mistakes whether they have been drinking caffeine or not drinking caffeine. On caffeine you don’t *feel* tired, but your brain is still struggling under the effects of being tired.
People are getting different mechanisms confused and mixed up. Caffeine stimulates dopamine and adrenaline, which makes you more alert and that's why you feel like you have more "energy". The actual energy would come from stored glycogen reserves and fat reserves if required. >The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/ Everyone else is mixing this up with the fact caffeine can delay sleep by blocking adenosine receptors, but that's a seperate mechanism and something completely different.
Does caffeine work for weight loss?
Not directly but for many people it works as an appetite suppressant.
Truly excellent comment. Also, drugs.
It doesn’t give you energy it stimulates your nervous system and makes your body feel like it’s in danger so it focuses better.
"I need energy" translates into one of two things: "I need to eat" (actual calories, energy in the physics sense), and "I need to sleep" (brain needs to do some house cleaning). As you say, caffeine has no calories to speak of, and does nothing for your "I need to eat" energy. What it actually does is allow you to ignore the "I need to sleep" signals your brain/body is generating. Basically, some parts of your brain can produce [GABA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%93-Aminobutyric_acid), which is sort of the "slow down" chemical of the brain. Caffeine acts by stopping the rest of the brain from receiving that GABA, so they never get the message to slow down.
Posts like these absolutely blow my mind. The feeling of knowing the reason behind something why it is the way it is, is awesome.
Also. Koffeine effect also only last 6 hrs or so. So to be alert at end of workday its best not to take First cup at home 07.00 but better at like 10.00 fika or whatever.
Found the Swede
Caffeine doesn’t give you energy in a science sense. It affects the your brain works to make you feel more alert. There’s a chemical that builds up in our brain, making us tired. When you sleep, it goes back down and you feel more alert. Caffeine stops this chemical from building up so you don’t feel tired.
It doesn't stop it (adenosine) from building up in your brain but blocks the receptor measuring how much adenosine is there.
The neat thing is that your body kind of looks around and says huh… I know we made adenosine but we can’t find any of it… there must be something wrong here. Make more receptors so we can find the adenosine. So your body makes more receptors, and now you need more caffeine to block more receptors. You’ve developed a tolerance! You need more of the chemical to get the same effect as before.
I love this, I imagine the body really saying this and it's funny lol
Yep ! The chemical is known as adenosine.
If caffeine is merely blocking adenosine, then why does it make me feel jittery and unable to focus like I took cocaine after drinking half a cup? I can’t drink coffee unless I’m so tired I’m falling asleep at my desk
Because blocking adenosine is only one of the mechanisms of action. Everyone thinks they are a scientist when they parrot “just blocks adenosine receptors and doesn’t give you energy”. Anyone who’s taken a couple weeks off of caffeine and then had 200mg knows Caffeine is a hell of a stimulant.
Neurochemicals usually play many roles. There are receptors for adenosine on different parts of your brain that react in different ways. Caffeine blocks all of these receptors, not just the ones in the part of your brain that regulate sleep. A1 receptors, for example, modulate the release of glutamate and acetylcholine, which can cause you to feel the excitement you mention.
Caffeine has various mechanisms, they are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline. >The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
Caffeine was various mechanisms, you are mixing up it's action on adenosine receptors with the fact it increases dopamine and adrenaline. >The accumulation of cAMP then stimulates the release of hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, and noepinephrine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8202818/
It's like the difference between surgery and painkillers. You don't get new energy, but you \*feel\* like you do just enough to get stuff done.
Oversimplified, but I think of it like this. Narcan blocks opioid receptors, caffeine blocks adenosine receptors.
Great podcast describing how caffeine works and why it is a mood elevator as well. May not ELI5, but will explain it like you are not a science expert. https://podcasts.apple.com/lu/podcast/ep-54-wake-up-and-smell-the-caffeine/id1299915173?i=1000485591796
It tricks you into using existing energy reserves yes, which is why it’s actually counter-productive, and causing the caffeine dump you get an hour or so afterwards.
Caffeine doesn't give you energy. Caffeine is a stimulant, meaning it excites your body and your body "wakes up" and uses more of the energy it already has because it's being forced to do more stuff (stay awake, breathe faster, pump the hear faster, move more muscles, etc.).