by Неизвестный
A warm bath and a few extra hours of sleep can work wonders.
But it is easy to see that most people today experience more stress than is desirable. And there comes a point where the sheer quantity of stress becomes unmanageable. You know this to be true, possibly because you’ve suffered from stress-related illness or perhaps because you’ve watched other people fall apart, unable to restore balance in their lives. It’s extremely painful, and the point we have to remember is that it’s preventable. Stress is not like a virus that we are exposed to from another person’s sneeze. It’s the result of decisions that we make on a day-to-day basis.
This book is about caffeine, a drug that induces and magnifies stress. I believe that we need to consider its effects carefully just as we consider all the other facets of life that affect our ability to maintain balance.
other facets of life that affect our ability to maintain balance.
We make decisions about how many hours of sleep we get. We make decisions about what and when to eat, how much alcohol we consume, how many hours we are willing to work, what kind of music we listen to, and when to take a vacation. But the caffeine decision has been difficult for most people because they just didn’t have the facts. And since everyone was drinking coffee, tea, and soft drinks by the gallon, it was hard to believe that these beverages could be harmful.
The Two Sides of Stress: A Personal Anecdote
Caffeine Blues has focused a great deal of attention on the negative aspects of stress, but there is a positive side as well, and the key, as I understand it, is this concept of balance.
I was traveling through the islands of the South Pacific, sitting one afternoon on a hotel porch looking out across a stunningly beautiful bay. In fact, I was very sensitive at that moment to the feeling of serenity and balance that I was enjoying. Then one of my fellow travelers started musing about how far it was to the opposite shore and how long it would take to swim it. I guessed it was at least a mile, and he suggested a race across the bay. Within minutes, my perfect state of balance was altered. Part of me was excited about the challenge. Win or lose, it had to be a high point of the trip.
By the time we got to water’s edge, I could feel my heart beating slightly faster. Already, you see, my body was responding to the stress of competition.
We eagerly dove into the water, and I started a slow and steady pace. In the back of my mind there was a slight fear. After all, this was going to be a long swim across an unknown body of water. But the South Pacific breeze was gentle and intoxicating, and I was enjoying the rhythmic movement of my body through the warm sea.
As I swam, my body made continual adjustments to maintain balance. My muscles demanded more and more oxygen and my breathing increased to provide it. I was aware of breathing more rapidly and deeply but, unknown to me, biochemicals including coenzyme Q10 were pouring into my bloodstream to enhance the extraction of oxygen from each breath. Fatty acid oxidase enzymes were being mobilized to enhance the utilization of fat to create even more energy for the muscles. After about thirty minutes, I stopped to get my bearings.
Looking back at the hotel, I was pleased to see that I had made it about halfway across the bay. Since my friend was nowhere in sight, I figured I must be way
across the bay. Since my friend was nowhere in sight, I figured I must be way ahead or way behind. Since I was feeling good, I picked up the pace, making my way toward the opposite shore.
Suddenly I was seized by a terrible pain. I had swum right into a colony of jellyfish. Their stinging tentacles raked over my face, arms, and chest, and I felt as if my skin were on fire. Since the tentacles of a jellyfish can extend a hundred feet, there was no way to escape their poisonous sting but to swim harder and faster. The adrenaline rush sent enormous amounts of energy to my legs and arms to accomplish this. But what followed was quite surprising. I was in incredible pain, but I was also aware of every facet of my existence, every minute detail of my surroundings. And this heightened sense was simply part of the stress response. In a split second, my brain had analyzed the situation, identified the problem, and was looking for solutions. My eyesight improved as I scanned the horizon for help. There were sailboats in the bay, but my brain instantly calculated that the opposite shore was closer. Since there was no one in sight, shouting was futile and would waste energy.
As I continued swimming, my mind raced through everything I had learned about jellyfish in marine biology. The poison released by the tentacles is actually a neuro-toxin, only slightly less powerful than cobra venom. At that moment, my body was producing massive amounts of antibodies to this toxin, trying to keep it from circulating to my heart, lungs, and kidneys. With a shudder, I remembered that men have died from the stings of jellyfish. Still, I reasoned, as long as I remained calm and continued swimming, I would survive.
A minute later, however, I tasted blood and realized that the welts on my face and chest were raw and bleeding. A new fear swept over me, knowing that a shark can sense blood from a distance of nearly a mile. This sent a second rush of adrenaline through my body, and I have to say that I swam faster in those last 200 yards than ever in my life before or since. Fortunately, when I reached the shore, my friends were waiting to congratulate me. Instead, when they saw my condition, they rushed me to the local hospital.
Medically, there’s not much you can do about jellyfish stings. Nurses applied a paste of ammonia and herbs that was supposed to neutralize the toxin but actually made the pain worse. My face swelled up like a boxer after a terrible beating, but other than that, it was just a matter of waiting for my body to restore balance.
Looking back, I am still amazed by the power of this survival mechanism.
The stress response triggered the release of endorphins, which enabled me to continue swimming without being overcome by pain. The same adrenal
continue swimming without being overcome by pain. The same adrenal hormones helped to create astounding amounts of energy. In the span of less than thirty minutes, my muscles used up all available carbohydrate, every gram of available fat, and even broke down protein to fuel the effort.
The adrenal response also created inflammation to localize the toxin and mobilize the immune system. It increased the clotting ability of my blood to minimize blood loss, and heightened every sensory organ to maximize my chance of survival.
Although I was released from the hospital that same evening, it took weeks for my body to recover fully. That was simply because my balancing mechanism and my “energy reserves” were exhausted. I felt like an invalid, hardly able to get out of bed for more than a few hours at a time. I was reminded of chronic fatigue patients who told me stories of simple tasks like grocery shopping taking half a day. Adrenal exhaustion is terribly debilitating.
I am going to suggest that we are all, to some degree, in this vulnerable state of stress response and recovery. It may not be jellyfish, mile-long swims, and the fear of sharks, but it could be job stress, bills to pay, crying children, and traffic jams. And in this modern world, there is a raft of additional stressors, including the pollution of our air, water, and food, all of which upset and tax our biochemical balance.
Each time we have to deal with one of these stresses, the body does its best to restore balance. My ocean ordeal ended happily, but for many people, the stresses of life accumulate over the years, and recovery takes longer and longer.
If you add caffeine to this scenario, you have to understand that recovery may never take place fully. Under the biochemical influence of caffeine, the body concludes that stress is always going to be present and stops trying to restore balance. Blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels remain elevated. What was meant to be a temporary emergency state becomes a way of life where the pleasures of deep relaxation, peace, and tranquillity are no longer available.
A Matter of Time
To a great extent, stress comes from the time crunch: the twelve-hour workdays and sixty-hour workweeks that have almost become routine in America.
Surveys show that nearly half of all adults feel stressed for time due to business, personal, and family responsibilities. What are these people doing to meet the deadlines and make ends meet? They’re cutting back on sleep and drinking more caffeine.
It’s not hard to see how this happened. The business climate worldwide has changed radically in the last decade. There is no such thing as job security in many industries, and the fear of losing one’s job means that employees are willing to put in extra hours, for free if necessary. A veteran of the corporate rat race recently told me that in his company “you’re either overworked or unemployed.”
Men and Women
Much has been made of the difference in the way men and women deal with the time crunch. Men, for example, tend to reduce time spent with their children and wives. Women, on the other hand, give equal time to job and family, sacrificing personal time to get everything done. On the surface, this implies that men are somehow better off, but the men I talk with feel terrible about this.
The problem is that in today’s cutthroat business environment, “family man” has taken on a whole new meaning, actually inferring that the man is not a serious player.
Unfortunately, there’s someone on nearly every corner offering the harried worker, the busy mom, and stressed-out executive a cup of coffee. But this is like the frenzied man trying to put out the fire in his house by throwing on a bucket of gasoline. His explanation? He couldn’t find a bucket of water, and he had to do something!
Saving Minutes, Losing Years
Look at the fast-food industry, still growing at an astounding rate because Americans don’t have time to cook—and drive-through windows because we hardly have time to eat. If you look at the foods and beverages served at the rate
hardly have time to eat. If you look at the foods and beverages served at the rate of hundreds of millions of “meals” per day, you come to a startling realization.
The foods, high in salt and saturated fat, combined with beverages laced with caffeine, are direct and powerful contributors to cardiovascular disease. If such fare is a once-in-a-while thing for you, it’s certainly not going to be a problem.
But if you find yourself consuming fast food on a regular basis, you have to ask yourself if the minutes you save now will be worth the years you might lose if you die prematurely of a heart attack, stroke, or diabetes.
Then there’s the “time management” industry. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to budget your time and prioritize tasks. But all too often I see people trying to control time, an effort that is futile and stressful in itself. Real time management is not about cramming activities into every minute of every day. It is looking at the time we have in life and making the most of it.
That takes wisdom and vision. It requires that we get in touch with our core desires, and make decisions based on a firm understanding of what truly matters in life. I honestly believe that caffeine has no place in developing or maintaining that perspective. In fact, it supports the opposite mind-set, which is that we are incapable, without this drug, of accomplishing anything of value. In our quantity-oriented society, quality of life is completely forgotten, and at the root of this is a very unhealthy assumption that we are not sufficient, that we must constantly strive for more and more.
In my patient interviews, one of the most common responses regarding coffee was, “I could never do what I have to do without caffeine.” People have a dependent relationship with the drug that goes deep into their self-image. The person who openly admits to a dependency on caffeine is saying, “I am not acceptable for who I am. I need to do more, sleep less, strive harder.”
The irony of it all, of course, is that caffeine actually doesn’t help at all. As I explained in Chapter 4, the drug reduces cognitive skills, impairs cerebral circulation, and hinders your ability to see the big picture. When you come right down to it, caffeine is desirable primarily because it alleviates the miserable feelings associated with withdrawal. No one has difficulty understanding this in relation to cigarette smoking. You take away a smoker’s cigarettes and he or she feels terrible. If you give the smoker a cigarette, he or she feels much better. But no sensible person would conclude that smoking is therefore good for that smoker.
Likewise, caffeine produces some shortterm improvements in mood and behavior, and we as a nation have become dependent on that “lift” with no thought to the long-term consequences. Yet the connection between nicotine and
thought to the long-term consequences. Yet the connection between nicotine and caffeine is closer than you might imagine, in terms of its psychopharmacology.
In one study, habitual users of tobacco and caffeine were asked to abstain from both products. In a short time, their performance on a variety of mental tests was remarkably impaired, even tasks involving simple addition and subtraction! The researchers noted increased ratings of irritability, muscular tension, and headache. The subjects felt “drowsy,” “clumsy,” and “feeble.” All this was accompanied by altered brain wave patterns.1 Obviously these are not enjoyable feelings, and so the temptation to continue consuming these substances is almost overwhelming.
The Road Less Traveled
More and more people today are realizing the true nature of the stress-caffeineoverwork beast. Books on simplifying one’s life are becoming best-sellers, something I don’t think could have happened a decade ago. People are starting to realize that, at a certain point, free time rather than economic gain brings value to their lives.
The yearning for a simpler, more relaxed life is very real and very deep. We look to developing countries and envy rural communities for their slower pace of life. They live by the rhythm of the seasons, have time for relationships, family, celebrations, and artistic endeavors. But, inexorably, the modern pace of Western efficiency is bearing down on these cultures, as alarm clocks, calculators, fax machines, and deadlines infiltrate their lives.
My point throughout this book has been that unless you eliminate caffeine, your chances of living a more relaxed and healthier life are practically nil. Life without the pressure of caffeine is definitely the road less traveled. Hopefully by now you’re feeling inspired to give it a try. The three steps listed below will help you transform that inspiration into action.
Step One: Resist the Herd Mentality
I’m always amazed when someone tells me about a particular pain or condition in their body, and when I ask how long they’ve been feeling that way, they answer, “Oh two or three years.” It could be lower back pain, depression, tension headaches, insomnia, or an involuntary twitch. People somehow don’t tune in to the fact that such conditions are signals that they’re doing something wrong.
They choose instead to cope with the situation (usually with over-the-counter drugs) and continue living in the same way.
Of course, one only needs to watch TV for a few evenings to learn where this behavior comes from. There is certainly no shortage of manufacturers who will gladly help you cope, with pills to help you sleep, reduce your pain, calm your nerves, and settle your stomach. At times, I imagine a giant conspiracy where such pill manufacturers pay huge kickbacks to the caffeine industry for supplying so many suffering customers.
What I teach my students is that this behavior is abnormal. “If smoke started pouring into this classroom,” I ask, “would you be concerned?” The next
pouring into this classroom,” I ask, “would you be concerned?” The next question: “What would you think if someone appeared in the smoke-filled door, saying ‘Don’t worry folks, I’ve turned off the fire alarm’?”
Now, my students all laugh because the scenario is absurd. We all know that smoke is a worrisome sign and disconnecting the alarm is not the same as putting out the fire. Yet Americans spend over $200 billion on prescription and OTC drugs every year, the vast majority of which do nothing to cure the underlying cause of pain and illness. And look at the top sellers: ulcer medications are number one, followed by antidepressants and tranquiliz
ers.
Clearly, the stress-caffeine factor is a major part of most people’s illness and pain.
But you would never know that by looking around. Practically everyone you see is on caffeine at least part of the day, and they consider it to be perfectly normal and harmless. Hopefully, this book will help bring people to a clear understanding of caffeine’s real effects and break the conspiracy of silence that has existed for so long.
A friend of mine related a very revealing story. She worked for a large metropolitan newspaper and was writing a story for the lifestyle section on stress management techniques. She covered the current understanding about visualization techniques and guided imagery, collected research on meditation, interviewed yoga teachers and biofeedback technicians. She also included her own story of how her life changed when she got off coffee. Her editor returned the rough draft with the coffee paragraphs Xed out in red. When she protested, he told her simply that people don’t want to read bad things about coffee. “But,”
she protested, “this is an article about stress reduction. How can we not mention caffeine?” “Easy,” he said, “we run this kind of story every year and we never talk about coffee. Accent the positive.”
The truth is, of course, that you can meditate, repeat a mantra, imagine yourself on a peaceful mountaintop, listen to soothing music—and not one of those techniques will relax you if there’s caffeine and stress hormones in your muscles, brain, and bloodstream. If only the editors, journalists, and doctors would look at the big picture and acknowledge that reducing caffeine is the first essential step in any stressmanagement program, we’d all be much better off. In many cases, getting off caffeine determines the actual outcome of the stressmanagement therapy or technique. For example, individuals with high blood pressure who drink coffee do not achieve the same benefits from meditation as nondrinkers. It is, as I have said many times, like trying to fill a leaky bucket.