Tea and coffee. how many?

[Louise-Paisley]

Whoo hoo five coffee's...you wimp, my intake is around ten coffee's per day. :lol: No wonder I work at the speed I do! Could have something to do with frequent visits to the toilet too.

Actually it is an urban myth that coffee is a stimulant, in fact it is not. If you regularly drink coffee then without it you get withdrawal symptoms which slows you down, taking coffee simply brings you back to a normal activity level which someone who does not drink coffee would be operating at.

Not that that makes a bean of difference to me, I probably drink 20 cups a day! If I don't get coffee though I do get bad withdrawal and absolute stinking head aches.

Tea is too much faffing about, the only time I drink tea is if I run out of coffee

Afraid that is wrong. Coffee is a stimulant as it contains caffeine which is a stimulant. The fact you have said if you are a regular drinker and you slow down then you need to drink coffee to bring you back to "normal" kind of negates your opening statement.

Maybe you never had any coffee when you wrote this lol.

A simple google search will confirm that anything with caffeine whether that is coffee, coca cola or buckfast wine is a stimulant

But what about using coffee as an energy booster? Is coffee really helping to pick you up like you think it is? The main ingredient in coffee is caffeine, which acts as a central nervous system stimulant. Stimulants can give you a FALSE feeling of energy, causing your body to experience a "spike and crash" syndrome. They can cause you to become restless and jittery. When we rely on stimulants for our energy, we take our bodies on a sort of roller coaster ride. Many of us wake up tired and drag ourselves to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. We drink that first cup and feel like we've been re-charged! But before we know it, we "crash." You might have felt like you were on a peak, but then the artificial boost brought you crashing down like the proverbial roller coaster. And so we reach for another cup to pick us up again. And the cycle goes on and on. It's no wonder so many people reach a point in the middle of the afternoon where they feel so tired that they reach for a candy bar or a caffeinated soda… or maybe yet another cup of coffee. We're looking for that energy "high" again.

Maybe I should have said "coffee does not give you energy" rather than not a stimulant..

The consumption of large amounts of coffee does not give you energy, it contains no energy as such, the net effect of drinking large quantities of caffeine is that without it you suffer withdrawal symptoms which make you feel lethargic and listless, topping up the caffeine level in the body counters this effect and leaves you feeling full of energy which in actual fact is not the case, you are simply feeling what it is like to NOT be addicted to caffeine and operating at the same energy level as someone who does not drink it.

For the occasional coffee drinker it generates a feeling of energy, this is in fact you simply temporarily drawing on body energy reserves resulting in you feeling less energetic after a short while than you did before drinking it.

For someone who regularly consumes caffeine there is no energy boost at all, you are simply taking caffeine to return to a normal energy level by countering the effects of the withdrawal symptoms. It provides no net increased energy or activity level.

So the notion that drinking buckets of coffee lets you work faster is a complete myth, stimulants simply do not work that way, long term use of any stimulant simply results in you taking the stimulant in order to feel like you would feel if you never take it.

In order to work harder/ faster then you require more energy - work IS the consumption of energy - therefore to increase the work you do or the speed you do it requires more energy such as an energy drink which contains high levels of calories - energy in = energy out.

Of course if you do not understand what stimulants are or how they work then you are likely to make ill construed statements which are completely inaccurate such as "I drink 50 gallons of coffee a day so can do 20 times as much work"