It's 5am, why am I still up?

by phil on Tuesday Jun 7, 2005 5:14 AM

I'm not a big coffee drinker, nor do I drink Coke and Pepsi. I'm also light on the amount of chocolate that I eat. So I guess it surprised me that, on a day that I had been working out, that I'd end up waking up in the middle of the night, at 5am, not feeling sleepy at all.

Which led me to this interesting fact: caffeine takes 6 hours to diminish by half in your body. If I remember correctly, at around 9pm, I had this nice pint (16 oz.) of thai iced tea. Whoops, that'll be the last time I have tea, chocolate, or anything caffeinated near dinnertime.

I've generally been against caffeine. It releases adrenaline which basically what is released when you're under stress. Plus, you get addicted. Then there's my latent ideological attitude toward it: caffeine is proof that someone has sold-out his or her body for the sake of a high-stress lifestyle.

Two weeks into my recent corporate job, I started getting sleepy after lunch, and instead of investigating the matter, I took some tea. This eventually became a regular affair, and I felt guilty about it. Because my thinking has been that if I really enjoy and care about my work, my enthusiasm will give me the requisite energy. Instead, I was compensating my dispassion with a drug to keep me productive. Dispassionate work is stressful enough as it is, but when you throw in caffeine, that's even more stress.

On the other hand, I admit it's nice to find some pleasure and an instant boost to productivity in a cup.

As a side note, this reminds me of this wacko near where I live: Steve Keetz, the anti-caffeine activist.

Comments

Brandon Franklin said on June 7, 2005 5:10 PM:

I view it differently. My body is a tool for my mind to use. I'll do whatever I want to it to make it do what I want. If caffeine makes it run longer, then caffeine is welcome. Every choice has to be balanced with long-term consequences of course, just like any other choice in life.