The Costs Of Caffeine
In the Open Source and geek culture there has always a celebration about taking oodles of caffeine and hacking into the early hours, boasting to your comrades that you drank more coke, hacked longer and are more hardware. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether our fascination with caffeine is such a good idea and whether there is an undercurrent of caffeine affecting our moods and the health of our bodies and our communities.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Is caffeine a good thing for communities? Does it get us more code? Do you think the health risks are really that bad? Are there health benefits or is it nonsense? Are the risks of caffeine something we need more awareness on in our communities? Share your thoughts and experiences in the shot comments below…
41 Comments to “The Costs Of Caffeine”
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I was going to write a coherent comment, but I can’t type because I’ve had too much caffeine!
A good topic.Years ago I used to be seriously, like seriously addicted to coffee. 15-20 cups of extra strong fresh-ground Egyptian coffee a day. Bad, bad stuff. Jono, you’re absolutely right about the withdrawls, tried for years to quit the stuff, but got the cold sweats, listlessness, tiredness, moods swings… Fate eventually took a hand. Came down with food severe poisoning (nothing to do with coffee) and was pretty well unconscious for a week. Couldn’t tell withdrawl from the poisoning! Certainly don’t miss the palpitations, rush or bowel pain! Nasty, nasty stuff in the wrong hands (ok, mine).
Wow, I think this is a good example of the potential risks.
This is a hard topic to fully cover.
I used to be hooked on coca-cola in college, it took one of my friends to point out I had severe mood swings when I wasn’t drinking the stuff to make me realise that it was the lack of caffeine that was causing it.
On the other hand I am a uni student and last year a project meant I had 2 hours sleep one night before presenting the work and caffeine from energy drinks pulled me through it. So is it all bad?
Also I personally find it’s easier to shift my sleeping pattern to go to bed later and wake up later than sleep earlier and wake up earlier, but this means to fit in with the rest of the world I’ll stay up late, still have to get up early and that’s when I often feel like I need a pick me up most.
I would argue that it is like anything: it is not a problem in moderation. Hell, we all use caffeine to get us through those times, but the coke addiction…less good.
I don’t consume caffeine at all, and I LIKE GETTING NORMAL SLEEPING PATTERNS!!
diet coke? what are you a faggot? /jk
I am not a programmer nor do I program, much yet, so I can’t discuss about the stereotype of the coder nearly dieing from 72 hours of coding.
But I have had worse problems with alcohol than coffee and coke – not huge problems but worse none the less.
I have been know to twitch during college – and a few times a month I crash and burn and pretty much waste a weekend on sleep (even when I wake I feel like shit I can’t do much or anything).
The point of the fact you don’t pass out or get sick from caffeine is a good one.
The worse thing for me with caffeine and sugar/sweets is the effect on my health especially on my face.
If you use homophobic language like that again, I am deleting your comments. That is not the kind of attitude we welcome in the Shot Of Jaq community.
You should delete it, and you shouldn’t be quoting it. If he had used a racial slur you wouldn’t have hesitated to delete the guy. You wouldn’t have left it posted, and then warned him not to be a racist.
On the note of Caffeine I gave it up for 3 years. My sleep improved, my energy skyrocketed. I stayed up late into the night hacking and woke up early to hack some more.
I didn’t delete his comment, because the rest of it apart from this nonsense was actually pretty good, hence the warning.
j/k = joking
it was not a serious comment.
You’re being overly harsh.
Like it or not people still associate you guys with LUGradio and the level of offensive humour it represented. Stop repressing your sense of humour for reasons of decency or politeness. Who are you trying to please with these?
In before: people change, this is a different community, you don’t know me.
Coffee. I stopped drinking it because it’s unhealthy. End of story. Now I drink a teapot of tea every day which stains teeth rather badly but is otherwise benign (as far as I know). My advice is: switch to tea. Americans dismiss it, but that’s partly because they’ve never had a decent cup of tea. Use free leaves, preheat the teapot, pour in boiling water, brew for 2 minutes, take out the leaves, pour and you might be delightfully surprised. (wikipedia for details on how to brew tea)
This also solves your problem, because tea is not a macho drink. People don’t go: “I drank so much tea I had to go and take a piss”.
The people who complain about caffeine addictions need to STFU. It is hardly even a real chemical addiction. Basically what caffeine does is block certain neurotransmitter receptors. The body responds by making more of these. After the caffeine is gone from your system (after about half a day) your body is more sensitive to that neurotransmitter because it has more of those receptors. So it could be said that the body does become dependant on caffeine. Here’s the thing though. It only takes the body about 2 weeks for it to revert to normal levels of the receptor. After that all addiction and/or dependence on caffeine is gone. Now you might still be addicted to soda or energy drinks or coffee, but probably because you are addicted to the sugar or another ingredient in those drinks. But after about 2 weeks, it is scientifically verifiable that caffeine dependence is gone. Another cool thing about that is that after about 2 weeks, the next time you have caffeine is like the first time you ever had it (less caffeine has much more of an effect than it would have had before). If I know in advance that I might be needing to stay up late and do a lot of work then I will sometime quite the caffeine for a couple of weeks to take advantage of it.
So what I am saying is this. A caffeine addiction is no big deal in the scheme of things. It only lasts two weeks, and the worst of the withdrawal symptoms are generally gone in a couple of days. Compare this to an alcohol addiction which is permanent. No matter how long an alcoholic stays away from the drink, he or she will still feel that addiction. Not to mention that excessive alcohol will trash you liver.
With caffeine the major effect of using it is that your heart rate will increase, which is not permanent like trashing a liver. And when you consider that many of the people using caffeine are living a very sedentary lifestyle, it might even be doing them some good to get there heart rate up a little bit.
The health risks from over use of caffeine are minimal. What is really hurting people is sleep dep and consuming too much sugar. Jono talking about his blood pressure going up, but that was almost certainly a result of only sleeping 4 hours a night and ingesting a ridiculous amount of sugar. Caffeines role in that was probably almost non-existent.
The point wasn’t really the health risks. It’s the attitude that chemically pushing yourself beyond normal limits is somehow a cool and clever thing to do. Which it isn’t.
Nailed it! Not much to add…
Caffeine personally does not affect me. I can have several cups before going to bed and have a perfectly good night sleep.
Do you have several cups every night? Hopefully not.
I drinl coffee throughout the day and sometimes I have a cup right before going to bed.
A lot of the “caffeine effect” is in people’s heads.
I’d be really interested to hear how your week goes if you don’t drink anything containing caffeine for that week?
I think it is worse than you think. While some people may have a caffeine addition for a short period, a lot of people have a long-standing subtle addiction to it, and they can’t function unless they have it.
I was drinking pretty large amounts of coffee, but for me it’s more a habit than something bad, now the highest I have been is around 10 cups a day, but it is a nice thing for taking a break, but that is mostly because I love the smell, and taste of coffee, like jono mentioned earlier I think coffee works better on getting me awake than red bull, even though it has about 1/22 of the caffeine, I guess it is just more the habit and relaxation that quickens me up a bit on coffee
This is exactly the attitude that the guy who gave a course in advanced perl programming this week was depicting.
He was drinking coffee throughout the day, made several remarks about it (like “will I get to 3 liters today?”) and made us think he drinks coffee to keep him awake after another night of heavy coding in some obscure language.
Most people that attended did mimic his behaviour to certain extent. They even made some remarks to me because I only drink herbal teas
There was no difference between us how quickly we picked up the new skills, so coffee doesn’t make you a better programmer.
It would be great if this attitude would be left behind us and the water/tea drinking drinking crowd, who love to sleep normal hours and don’t frantically make 90 hours a week to get that great script running, are accepted in the world of linux/programmers.
We always used to call it “Brain Juice” at work, and get thru an awful lot of it. Was never really a contest, but drinking it “socially” at work seemed to make us drink more than we probably would have otherwise. Now I think the caffeine drinking is more habit than anything else… one for breakfast, one before the coffee shop shuts, one after lunch, one when the coffee shop opens in the afternoon, one just before it shuts. Glad I’m not alone in drinking coffee just before bed. Always have done.
I’ve never been able to consume much caffeine because it gives me heart palpitations and other unpleasant side effects. I don’t like coffee – at all – and I currently limit my caffeine consumption to one cup of black tea each day.
I rarely have to burn the midnight oil anymore now that I’ve quit my programming day job, but on the occasions that I did have to work late into the night, I suppose I did it on sheer willpower. If I drank a Coke or whatever, it was for the sweet taste, not the caffeine.
I do think people bragging about how many hours they can go without sleep by consuming massive amounts of caffeine have their priorities wrong. But our society in the U.S. (can’t speak for other countries) encourages that kind of behavior, sadly, and not just in the programming field.
Coffee isn’t innocent stuff. As well as the effects on the brain and the heart, it has other effects. It’s been linked to stomach ulcers. I used to drink far too much until I blew two bloody great holes in my stomach lining. The only point I want to get across is how painful they are. Quite simply, your stomach starts eating itself from the inside out. You also need to watch out for Ibuprofen & Aspirin, & a fat rich diet.
Sorry, but the association of coffee with ulcers was debunked back in the 1980s when an infectious bacteria (Helicobacter pylori) was found to cause ulcers. Coffee can irritate the inflamed area, but is not the cause of the inflammation. It was also widely accepted back then that emotional stress can cause ulcers, but that too is another busted myth. Like coffee, stress can irritate the inflammation, along with all sorts of other bad things (heart palpitations, anxiety attacks, high blood pressure, etc.), but the ulcers are caused by the bacteria, not the symptoms.
My nephew was a caffeine addict at age 4. He used to steal cans of coke and hide them in various places in the garden so he could consume them in secret (rather like the behaviour of a secret alcoholic). His parents had to take steps to cut off his supply because it was having a very noticeable (bad) effect on his behaviour.
I think that while caffeine might keep you awake, it doesn’t do anything to help keep your judgement from deteriorating from lack of sleep. You might think you are doing something very clever, but a lot of people get the same effect from drinking alcohol (you feel your arguments are brilliant, and it’s the other person’s fault if he doesn’t understand the point you are making).
I find a high pressure day with less sleep before hand can send me into quite a crash at the end of the day. I’ve been brewing more decaf lately. I seem to think that so much of this caffine drinking is to meet other stakeholders expectations — not so much of “getting it done on time” — but the expectation of: “working hard enough to justify never making an estimate to begin with”. Often the real battle that should be fought is along the lines defeating unrealistic expectations. There’s no way as a career or a culture, to trash ourselves on caffine year after year and then say, “oh, I still love programming.” Quite the opposite. What happened to a common respect for a decent lifestyle become unacceptable? Why the expectation to shore up bad deadline choices?
Inject it into my veins!!!!
I actually like the taste of coffee but I drink more tea generally. When im pushing a deadline I drink lots and lots of coffee to keep me going.
I dont drink red bull or coke though because im afraid of whats in it.
Unlike Jono though I tend to sleep early about 11~ a night during college days and try not to lose sleep from my contributions to open source.
I havent heard any of this pissing contest stuff but im sure it goes on. To be honest though I wouldnt be too impressed by 48 hours of no sleep when they are coding because if they had of slept they might have done it quicker the next day. I love waking up and having a fresh look at the code the next day because I make mistakes when im tired. I miss type, I make silly syntax errors so I try to keep coding to 4 hours a night including college and I think its fair enough.
I found when I worked at a IT company, that we coders, sys-admins and networking guys used to “network” alot around coffee. If we had to finish a difficult project, we’d throw our heads and ideas together around more and more coffee breaks. This worked, where we’d talk 15min, work 45min and so on. Just drinking more coffee has not helped me in anyway do my job any beter.
The “pissing” contest I normally win, being 7feet tall
On the other hand, another addiction is smoking, as I’ve just lit my second sigarette, while still smoking my first one. Maybe I should wake up with some coffee?
Great shot!
Since the discussion is really about why people have such a hard time with enjoying anything “in moderation” I always wonder why people don’t focus more on that behavior than the specific fixations people develop.
I think in the past there were factors like money, family, or social reasons to keep things balanced and under control but now it’s easier to find people who have the same fixations you do and reinforce the behavior. I would also argue that these same roadblocks stopped good things so I’m not suggesting that society revert but I think we’re going through a phase of change and while we’re gaining ground in some areas we’re unintentionally losing ground in others. Does it matter if your addiction is caffeine, smoking, food, weight-loss, or working? The real question is why is it so hard to find people who can balance it all out?
Hmm.. I used to drink coffee quite a bit but now I only seem to drink tea. When im at home im drinking decafe tea all of the time so maybe I took a disliking to caffeine without noticing. :/ strange…
Take a page from Willie Nelson’s book:
“If you’re wired, you’re fired”
Full disclosure: I drink 2-3 cups of coffee per day, a cup of tea here and there in the evenings. Can’t hack without it
I got irritable bowel syndrome from drinking too much Pepsi Max. I remember I sat in front of my computer drinking Pepsi when I felt my stomach go into cramps and I had to lie like a ball on the floor just waiting for the cramps to go away.
After I began avoiding caffeine and milk like the plague I’m pretty much rid of the cramps. However if I drink a tiny amount of caffeine containing drinks I get the cramps again.
BTW – On the subject of Coke (the brown liquid type), Mark Thomas’s “Belching out the Devil” is well worth a read. (Basically it’s an expose of all the stuff Coke don’t want you to know about Coke. It’s more about Coca-Cola’s seriously dodgy business practices than the damage the drink itself does.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Belching-Out-Devil-Adventures-Coca-Cola/dp/0091922933/ref=ed_oe_p
blackcr0w-
more unsubstantiated claims about murders?
heard it all – i myself prefer proof. I am sick of this, my college shop boycotts it thinking they are doing some justice, except bs that they actually are.
Erm OK. Coca-cola have a legal department that comes down like a ton of bricks on anybody defaming the brand. One of the points the book makes is that the company is essentially a brand and very little else. Therefore they have the means and the motivation to contest any even remotely libellous allegations made about them. They haven’t contested a single word of Thomas’s book. And bear in mind that in cases of Libel, the burden of proof is only to balance of probability, not to beyond reasonable doubt. To my mind, if Coca-cola themselves are not contesting that what is written in this book is true, then it is true. So what if your college shop doesn’t sell crappy over priced sugery caffiene ridden pop? Let’s call in the UN because you have to go a few steps further to reach one of the countless other places that pimp it.
I don’t drink anything with caffeine in – a little bit because I don’t like taking mood-altering substances, but mostly because I think tea, coffee and Coke are all horrible…
Gerv
Even if you stopped drinking ridiculous amounts of caffeine, a major issue would be the lack of sleep that this pissing contestants are putting up with. It’s very well established in the literature that sleep deprivation does very bad things to your brain and attempting to do something as cognitively complex as code while you’re sleep deprived is a recipe in pointlessness (just look at some of the essays I wrote in uni at 2 in the morning – they’re barely comprehensible the next day – mind you, at least a compiler will give you a syntax error).
http://www.brainrules.net/sleep
I’m down to about two to three equivalent cups of coffee a day because I have enough trouble sleeping without it (due to small children). It does help just prior to 3pm however.
Great shot, guys.
A Canadian researcher found the reason why some people are much more sensitive to caffeine than others. A particular gene decides, if caffeine is metabolized quickly or slowly in your body. Quirks and Quarks: Coffee’s Cardiac Conundrum “Those who have the version of the gene that works slowly find their risk of heart attack increased by as much as four times, while those with the fast-acting version of the gene can have their risk cut in half.”
From the description, I have the fast-acting gene.
Just wanted to comment about alcohol, because alcohol is a worse problem than caffeine. And for all the tea drinkers there is actually caffeine in tea as well, only less per cup (about half). see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Occurrence
Coffee is not the only source, Club Mate has almost a cult following among hacker groups.