A silent eyebrow raise after I’d snapped at her for the fifth time that morning was all it took. She knew I didn’t need to be told. That’s when I realised that my drug of choice was becoming an issue. I’m not talking about anything illegal. I’m not even talking about alcohol. I’m talking about caffeine.

See, my usual routine was to have a strong black coffee or a monster first thing in a morning to wake me up for the day. Then I’d have one more about mid-morning and I’d be set. But this particular day, I’d ran out of everything. So I white-knuckled it through just on water. It shouldn’t be that difficult, right? It’s not like I need this stuff to survive. I just like the taste of it and like that little pick-me-up. Or so I told myself.

But the splitting headaches and the rattiness I experienced when I didn’t have my fix – coupled with the poor sleep and over reliance on the stuff when I did, started to show me that I really needed to pay attention to whether this stuff was good for my health. After all, I’m supposed to be a health coach.

The thing is, I know I’m not alone. The vast majority of us are completely reliant on this substance to make it through our everyday lives. And let me be clear, it’s OK to enjoy a coffee or caffeinated drink in the right amounts. The trouble is when we become completely dependent on it to function.

In this article, I’m going to lay out how caffeine works, the effects it has on our brain and body, how to reduce your dependence on it and how to supercharge your energy levels to protect your health and body composition.

First, we’re going to go into the mechanism caffeine works on in the brain. I’ll keep this as brief and as non-boring as I can, so don’t get overwhelmed. If I didn’t think you needed to know about it, I wouldn’t have put it in the article. So here goes…

How Caffeine Works

Most of us know that when we consume caffeine, we feel more alert and awake. A strong coffee in the morning never fails to perk us up, or at least make us feel less like the walking dead when we arrive at work after the school run. But how and why does it have this effect?

Well, the full effects are probably a bit complex and boring to go into in this article, but we can lay out a simplified version to give you an idea.

One of the main roles caffeine plays in the brain is block the receptor sites for adenosine. I know, I’ve already lost you. But stay with me. Adenosine is a substance that builds up in the brain and gradually makes us feel more and more sleepy as it accumulates. As adenosine circulates in the brain, it looks for the specialised areas to latch onto, like a car looking for a parking space. Caffeine, in it’s infinite wisdom, sneaks in and steals this parking space like the naughty little goose it is. This stops adenosine accessing its parking spots and prevents us from feeling sleepy, perking us up and making us wired for hours.

This explains why we feel alert and awake. It isn’t that caffeine boosts our energy, it’s that it stops the natural, in-built system we have to make us progressively more sleepy as the day goes on. If this system is left unaltered and matched with a healthy diet and lifestyle, we should experience stable and healthy energy levels throughout the day, combined with a steady decline in energy as we start to wind down for bed.

The Mid-Afternoon Crash

So, now we know how caffeine gives us that morning kick. But what about that mid-afternoon crash that hits us around 2-3pm every day?

Well, when adenosine gets blocked by caffeine, it doesn’t just take the hint and drive off in a huff. Oh no. It passive aggressively waits next to each filled spot, and invites all it’s other adenosine friends along to peer pressure caffeine out the way. Over time, all this adenosine begins to wear down the caffeine molecules, degrading it to free up the spot (the receptor site). Once the spot is free, all that adenosine that’s been built up rushes in and fills the spots at the same time. This process takes about 7 hours on average, and is one of the reasons we suffer so badly from that “mid-afternoon crash” towards the end of the working day. This is because caffeine has a ‘half-life’ of 7 hours, meaning it’s half degraded after 7 hours, but can take up to 14 hours to be fully out of your system.

This means that if you have your first coffee at 8am, by 3pm the caffeine will be somewhat degraded and you’ll experience that massive slump in energy (coinciding with a natural dip in our circadian rhythm at this time of day). Most people’s response to this is to reach for another coffee or tea or energy drink. However, this restarts the cycle all over again, and we end up wired well into the night. Remember, it takes a full 14 hours for caffeine to be completely out of your system, so there’s every chance that having that mid-afternoon coffee could seriously impact your sleep later that night.

The Effects Of Caffeine On The Body

Hopefully you’re starting to see how an over reliance on caffeine can give you the worst of all worlds: an energy slump in the afternoon and a disruption to sleep at night time. However, this isn’t the only way caffeine can have a detrimental effect on us. The next issue comes with our nervous system.

The nervous system is too much of a broad topic to explain in this article (you can read more about it by clicking here), but we’ll cover in briefly.

Our autonomic nervous system functions without conscious control from us (think ‘automatic’). This branch of our nervous system has two states, and we’re always in either one or the other:

  1. The sympathetic nervous system (the ‘fight or flight’ state). This is the state we get into during stress, when we hit this state the body pushes more resources to the muscles for movement and less resources to the digestive, reproductive and immune systems.
  2. The parasympathetic nervous system (the ‘rest and digest’ state). This is the state we get into while we’re feeling at ease. During this state, the body pushes more resources to essential organs to help rest and recovery.

In an ideal world, we’d spend the majority of our time in a ‘rest and digest’ state, so we could upregulate our digestive function, immune function and other essential processes that help our body and mind in daily life, and we’d keep the ‘fight or flight’ state or short bursts of stress, like training in the gym or getting through focused periods of hard work.

However, clearly we don’t live in an ideal world. In reality, many of us live in a chronic state of fight or flight. We are constantly stressed, constantly stuck in this state of high arousal and unable to unwind. Caffeine doesn’t cause this, lifestyle choices and the pressures of life cause this – but caffeine can exacerbate the problem.

If we’re already stressed, caffeine can increase our anxiety and make us hyper alert and narrowly focused, pushing us further into that ‘fight or flight’ state. This downregulates essential processes like digestion, meaning we’re more likely to suffer from gastrointestinal issues like IBS. Lowering the caffeine won’t fix this problem, but it will stop pouring petrol on the fire that’s already out of control.

Secondly, caffeine has a diuretic effect on the body. This means it flushes out the essential electrolytes and water from cells that hydrate your body. This is why it makes you need the toilet. This isn’t necessarily the end of the world, assuming you are replenishing this lost water and electrolytes alongside your morning coffee to balance it out. The problem is, most of us aren’t. In fact, many of us aren’t even having a normal glass of water in the morning, we’re purely surviving on coffee.

Reducing Your Caffeine – The Right Way

At this point, you may be ready to bin the coffee and go cold turkey on the energy drinks. Well, not so fast. If you’ve been used to a certain level of caffeine intake for weeks, months, years or even decades, your body has built up a certain tolerance to the substance and has a reliance on getting it’s daily dose. This means if you go cold turkey, you will experience withdrawal effects, such as headaches, irritability and extreme tiredness. So, the right thing to do is to gradually reduce your caffeine intake over a number of weeks, to allow your body and brain to adjust and adapt to the lower dose.

This means if you’re used to having 4 or 5 coffees per day, start by reducing your intake by 1 coffee for the first week. Once you’ve done a week and adapted to this dose, drop another one for the second week. Continue this process until you don’t feel dependent on coffee or caffeine drinks anymore, and you feel that you can allow yourself one per day if you enjoy it. Don’t rush this process and don’t stress if it takes you a while. We’re trying to do this to improve your health without making your life miserable.

The next step is to have a defined cut-off time for your last caffeinated drink of the day. My personal rule is no coffee after 12pm. I usually have my coffee well before this, but this is the last time of day I’ll allow myself to consume caffeine. The reason for this is that over the years I’ve discovered that it takes me 12 hours to metabolise enough caffeine to be able to fall asleep. So if I drink a coffee at 3pm, I can guarantee I’ll be awake until 3am. I decided that I didn’t want to be up past midnight, so my cut off time is 12pm. You may find that your body is different, and you can get away with having caffeine later, or that you’re even more sensitive than I am, meaning you need an earlier cut-off time. It’s all trial and error, just find what works well for you.

Finally, it takes about an hour for your adenosine system to come ‘online’ after waking up in the morning. This means that you don’t even need caffeine in that first hour to wake up. If you think you do, it’s probably a placebo effect.

Your top priority after waking up in the morning shouldn’t be caffeine, instead, it should be properly hydrating your body after a full night without drinking. Therefore the best thing you can do upon waking is drink a big glass of water and consume some electrolytes (salts – sodium, potassium, magnesium etc). This will properly hydrate your cells and allow your body to start waking up naturally.

There is something to be said for having a hot drink in a morning shortly after waking up. The reason this helps is that in order to sleep, our body temperature must drop, and in order to wake up, our body temperature must rise. Drinking a hot drink upon waking helps to heat the body and speeds up the process of waking up and coming round from our sleep. What I advise my clients to do is have a non-caffeinated hot drink in the morning, something like lemon juice in hot water. This helps to heat the body to assist with waking up for the day, the acidity in the lemon juice helps to upregulate stomach acid to aid with digestion of breakfast, and the process of drinking a warm drink out of your favourite mug can act as a placebo effect to mimic the action of drinking your morning coffee. I know that might sound daft, but often I find that people don’t experience that ‘pull’ for their morning coffee in the same way as they did once they’ve had their caffeine-free hot drink for the day.

Boosting Your Energy Naturally

Now we’ve thoroughly covered caffeine, it’s time to talk about how to leverage other lifestyle hacks to boost your energy levels naturally. The good news is, there’s a lot of very simple tips and tricks we can give you that won’t massively impact your life. It just requires a bit of thought and a bit of discipline to tick the boxes every day so you can reap the rewards.

Optimising Sleep

The most obvious place to start is usually the best place to start. If you want more energy through the day, it’s probably a good idea to optimise how you sleep at night. There are two general areas of improvement when it comes to your sleep – the duration of your sleep and the quality of your sleep.

Aside from the caffeine considerations we’ve already gone through, improving your sleep duration has a lot to do with how you behave while you’re awake. At the risk of stating the obvious, we are diurnal creatures – we are supposed to be awake in the daytime and asleep at nighttime. In order to reinforce this sleep-wake cycle, we have an internal timer of sorts known as the ‘circadian rhythm’. This is the body’s internal clock that helps us to have energy during the day and feel sleepy at night. This rhythm exists in all of us, but a healthy body has a stronger rhythm and an easier time adhering to the natural sleep-wake and light-dark cycles every day.

To reinforce your circadian rhythm and improve your sleep quality, the first and most important task is to expose yourself to bright, natural light as early as possible after waking up. This means if the sun is up (or rising) when you wake up, get outside ASAP. Natural light from the sun (even if it’s a cloudy day) is the pinnacle of all lights we can be exposed to. It’s much brighter than the normal ceiling or wall lights we have in buildings and you get to align your body to the specific wavelengths of light that are being emitted at sunrise, aligning your circadian rhythm to that point in the day. This acts as a ‘starting gun’ on your rhythm for the day, setting off the natural peaks and troughs in energy that result in improved sleep duration at night.

Another reason bright light in the morning is important is that it suppresses one of the main hormones responsible for the onset of sleep, melatonin. So any leftover circulating melatonin you have in the morning that’s making you feel groggy will be completely suppressed by a morning walk or a few minutes in the garden at sunrise. Suppressing melatonin throughout the day has a ‘bounce back’ effect at night, meaning that when you turn off the lights in the evening you’ll experience a big surge in melatonin levels and have a much easier job falling asleep.

Further to this, keeping your lights at a low level at home at night time helps to protect this surge in melatonin. As we mentioned light suppresses melatonin. So if you have lots of exposure to blue and white lights through screens or overhead lighting, it will suppress melatonin from having that bounce back effect and keep you awake for longer, leaving you more sleepy and more reliant on caffeine the following day.

Nutritional Considerations

Another huge factor when it comes to regaining and protecting your energy levels is your nutrition. The food we eat has such an enormous impact on the way that we feel that it can’t be ignored. Some of this is common sense, most of us know that if you eat rubbish you feel rubbish. There’s a lot that goes into this area, and it could warrant a blog post if not a whole book of it’s own, so we’ll be selective in what we talk about here for the sake of brevity.

The main thing I’d like to focus on here is the timings of certain food groups. Namely, fats and carbs. I’m going to generalise here and there will be some exceptions to this rule, but across the 10+ years I’ve been working with clients on a 1-1 basis, I’ve found that the vast majority of people respond much better to a ‘carb backloading’ approach. Let me explain what this means.

Carbohydrates, while an important source of energy, can in the short term elicit a surge in the hormone serotonin. This can have the effect of making us feel ultra chilled-out and sleepy (you only have to tweak the molecular makeup of serotonin slightly to turn it into the sleep hormone melatonin). An absence of carbs, by contrast, allows us to stay more dominated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes us feel more alert, driven and motivated to get through the tasks of the day. Neither of these states are bad, in fact, both are necessary for life, but they are both inappropriate at the wrong times.

To address this, I’ve found most people respond best to keeping themselves in that highly motivated, dopaminergic state for the first part of the day. This means they can get up and push on with their daily activities, usually the most important jobs, in the morning. Once the day is more than half over, and they’ve done their exercise for the day, they can then switch to that chilled out, relaxed and happy state governed by serotonin.

This means that to achieve these states at these times, we should focus on fat heavy meals for the first half of the day (to maintain our dopamine driven state), and carb heavy meals for the latter part of the day (to switch to our serotonin driven state). In real terms, starting the day with things like whole eggs, nuts, coconut oil, fatty meats and fish is usually a far superior choice to cereals, grains, porridge or toast.

There are a whole host of other considerations when it comes to nutrition, so to learn more about these you can read one of our other articles here:

https://dcptdoncaster.co.uk/diet/fat-loss-diet/

Wrapping Up

I hope this article has given you some food for thought when it comes to protecting and boosting your energy levels without the hyper reliance on caffeine. To be clear: caffeine is not inherently bad. I still regularly have a coffee in a morning for enjoyment and for a boost. The problem comes when you are unable to go a day without a coffee or caffeinated drink. Hopefully this article has set you on your way to liberating yourself from the caffeine addiction so many of us are crippled by, and given you some healthy alternatives to think about.

Please bear in mind that there is so much I could have covered that was just beyond the scope of this article – so if you’d like to learn more about this subject or you’d like some help in implementing a healthier lifestyle and fitness regime please feel free to book a call with one of the team by accessing our personal diary using the link below:

Thank you for reading and I hope this helped

Andy Clements

Head Coach & Owner: DC Personal Training