The Blackberry Walk

The Mormons might be onto something — at least one thing, we can grant them: that coffee is a drug. I have been drinking coffee from a young age, roughly the age of 14-15. At that tender year, I thought drinking coffee was cool; I thought I was like one of the programmers I admired, I felt like an adult, having to get through the day with a cup of coffee. And this childhood intuition was right, most adults do require at least one cup of coffee to get through the day, at least at my workplace. The coffee buzz was potent back then. Ten years later of drinking, the caffeine was what I needed to reach my baseline. That was until recently, mind. At the beginning of this year, I decided to give up coffee, or more specifically regular coffee. What I gave up was the morning cup of two teaspoons of instant with my breakfast and the second morning cup of two teaspoons of instant once I got to work. I had come to realise I didn't even much like coffee. My tongue had become acquainted with instant, not the best the bean has to offer no doubt, but the only coffee form I could prepare quickly, and this instant coffee began to have an acrid taste. This was the first sign: often when the salt loses its flavour, and the vice once enjoyed begins to sour, it is a sign to wash your mouth out of it. Giving up my regular two cups of coffee a morning has been hard, much harder than I expected. Ten years of compounded habit had to be overwritten, and neurotransmitters had to be up-regulated. Let's actually have a quick look at the neurochemistry of coffee. Caffeine is of course the active ingredient, and caffeine is an adenosine antagonist. To unpack this, we must look at the neuron. For a neuron to electrically fire the next neuron, a small gap known as the synapse must be bridged. However the medium of its bridging changes, it is chemical rather than electrical. It requires a small chemical known as a neurotransmitter for the next neuron to fire. Some of these neurotransmitters you'll have heard of, like serotonin and dopamine, others are a little less well known like glutamate and GABA. Since the body requires specific neurotransmitters to bridge the synapse to the next neuron, other parts of the body can modulate and regulate the amount of neural firing by selectively providing the neurotransmitters required. The synapse can also regulate itself through up-regulation and down-regulation. This is where the synapse increases or decreases the number of receptors for a certain neurotransmitter as a way of modulating how sensitive the synapse is to firing. A common cause of down-regulation — a kind of shy turning away of the neuron to firing — is the use of drugs. Drugs like caffeine — which is a drug. After all, just as a drug like methamphetamine is a dopamine agonist, caffeine is an adenosine antagonist. Adenosine is a nucleoside, which is to say a building block of DNA, and it is the 'A' of ATP, the body's energy transport vehicle; but in this instance adenosine plays a different role, specifically with what's known as 'sleep pressure'. There are two cycles in the body which modulate sleep: adenosine and melatonin. Melatonin is likely the more famous of the two, and it is produced in the pineal gland, a small gland deep in the brain which modulates our day-night cycle.¹ Melatonin is designed to make us sleepy when we ought to be sleepy, just as night is rolling in. Interestingly, we have a small spike also in the early afternoon, a kind of biological siesta. Adenosine, that second cycle, is the one we'll be looking at today, however. Adenosine builds up in the brain as a by-product of used up ATP: quite explicitly a by-product of cells working. A by-product of you working. And to expel all of this adenosine muck from your brain, animals both complex and simple have some sort of sleep which recycles the adenosine into useful ATP come morning. A sleep which coffee prevents. As an adenosine antagonist, coffee doesn't recycle adenosine and make you feel fresh as can be, but instead blocks adenosine receptors. The adenosine keeps building, but the adenosine receptors, which see all this spent ATP and signal back to the mind tiredness, aren't being triggered. This is the feeling of caffeine, it is a trick on the mind. A trick to tell it there is less adenosine, less sleepy waste, than there is. Coffee has its uses, of course: if you have to drive a long way, having a coffee or an energy drink to keep you awake will also keep you awake at the wheel and alive. But to drink coffee regularly, is this a healthy habit to live under this draped veil over the senses? I began to think otherwise. I was sick of coffee addiction, it no longer tasted nice, and I thought I would sleep better without it. Giving up coffee wasn't easy. It took roughly three-to-four months for the withdrawal to go away. When I speak of withdrawal, it was nothing serious like a smoker itching for a cigarette or an opioid addict driven to his wit's end; rather it was a notably fatigued feeling at around ten to eleven o'clock each day. The lethargy, though expected, was far stronger than I had anticipated. We can see why this happens with our earlier neurochemical models: the neuron is used to blocked adenosine receptors at this time of day, so the neuron up-regulates adenosine receptors to compensate. This is why coffee after regular drinking no longer gives a buzz but is instead needed to reach baseline. As a result, without caffeine blocking the adenosine receptors, your synapses have far more sleepy receptors all being triggered making you feel fatigued. What was unexpected was how long it would take for my body to adjust. Ten years of coffee induced synaptic weighting won't be recalibrated in a week, I suppose. "What if the coffee suddenly appears again tomorrow," my body shouts. I feel better for having given coffee up. There's a kind of rushed feeling, an urgency, I feel when on coffee which I no longer feel. Mornings no longer have the burst, and are a more gradual coming to wakefulness. I think I have a natural sensitivity to caffeine. My mum has always been sensitive to coffee, a few granules of instant in the morning, and she struggles to sleep come night. With my two cups a morning, I still managed to fall asleep every night without issue, but now having given up caffeine, I am far more sensitive. A single cup after noon, and I struggle to sleep. This was the main impetus for writing this article. Last weekend on Whitsun, we had some friends over to enjoy the scorching weather and share in our hatsu-barbecue for the year. The night before I had slept poorly, and I was writing a longer piece which I posted last week (check it out), and I figured I'd have a morning coffee. This I did, I prepared a nice Greek coffee with my breakfast. That night I slept poorly again, only getting five or so hours sleep. Perhaps it was the alcohol. I then had another coffee in the morning, and when our friends were over had another, this time at around 2PM. I was very tired and didn't want to waste our time together. That night I could hardly sleep. It took me until nearly 1AM to fall asleep, and I woke up bolt upright at 5AM, not feeling the least bit rested. Then I'd realised what a fool I'd been. Caffeine is potent. It's changed society. I was listening to some rabbi on YouTube the other day explain how the Jewish tradition on the Day of Atonement of staying up all night reading scripture was originally only practised by rabbis. But, come the spread of coffee from the Arab world, it became a practice in which even children began to participate. Use of this drug reformed Western society also with the stimulating coffee houses of the continent. Could one have gotten continental ideas without the coffeehouse and its central beverage? I think not. Just as English ideas would be vastly different should they all not have been had in a pub. Our civilisations are shaped by the drugs we deem acceptable. Coffee is understood as a stimulant, but is found everywhere whether as drink or flavouring food. It's been so integrated into our culture that many give caffeine little thought. But the caffeine is working away in your body, affecting your mood, affecting your thoughts, and affecting most crucially your sleep. So maybe in recognising coffee to be the drug it is, the Mormons really are onto something. 1. This is the third eye. The human pineal gland has vestigial photoreceptors despite being deep in the brain, and some reptiles have their third eye visible to determine their circadian pattern by the sun. Des Cartes agreed and called the pineal gland the seat of the soul. This is a bit of a rabbit hole for those who are interested.