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The Mighty Motivator

Dear Caffeine: what would we do without you?  For most of the adult world, you are the beginning of every day.  For some, you are also the noon and night, and for increasing numbers you are also the mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or just-hook-it-up-to-my-veins kind of dependency.  We love you! We want you! We need you! 

Like a politician whose first job is to ensure the next term in office, caffeine gets to work right away to encourage your next dose: each cup dragging us deeper and deeper into the status quo with the almost centrifugal force of the incumbent. It is almost omnipresent — lurking in the depths of not only our coffee and tea, but also our chocolate, soft drinks, energy drinks and, pharmaceutically, our pain-relievers and weight-control drugs. Coffee-flavoured ice cream, even gum can pack a surprisingly caffeinated punch. Even Hershey's kisses, perhaps the lamest available "chocolate" candy, has a smidge of actual caffeine in it - although only about 1 mg per piece. Still, the number one caffeine delivery system in North America still appears to be coffee.

We all know (or perhaps have been) someone who drinks several large (grande, venti, whatever) cups of coffee each morning, followed by cola in the afternoon and into the evening.  It's not only students cramming for mid-terms or finals, but working stiffs, too. The software industry alone is a hotbed of caffeine consumption of legendary proportions, due in part to the ridiculous hours expected of its workers. However, it is not only the folks who are mega-dosing on the brown liquids who can feel the sting of caffeine-dependency. Even a relatively small amount of caffeine every day — for example, a single cup of regular-strength drip coffee can result in withdrawal symptoms if abruptly ceased, although the unpleasantness of the side-effects (headaches, nausea, anxiety, irritability) increases proportionately to the amount of caffeine one is accustomed to ingesting.  The average office worker, with its twice a day habit, is therefore that much more susceptible than the person who has a single cup at home before leaving for the office.

We take our coffee habit seriously in these parts.  Not only do most offices (every office that I have worked in) supply coffee free of charge to their employees, this simply isn't good enough for many folks.  We have particular notions about coffee and its most immediate provenance, leading many people to unwittingly savage their own budgets by choosing to purchase expensive (and arguably mediocre) designer coffee drinks once or twice per day.  Not unlike the "cigarette factor" if people who are in the habit of buying fancy coffees every day instead put the same amount of money into a savings account, it would be a lot easier for them to take an annual vacation, or purchase a new car or home.  A cup of coffee costing $2.75 averages close to $20 per week.  In a year's time, you've spent over $1,000 on one cup of coffee per day.  Do the math yourself.

Doing the math can make you crazy, though.  Recently, I discovered that by reducing the amount of sugar that I put in my cup of coffee from two teaspoons down to one teaspoon, I was reducing the amount of sugar I thoughtlessly consumed over the course of a year by 3.5 lbs.  Unfortunately, my glee at reducing that pointless, unnecessary, fat-inducing 3.5 lbs. of sugar was greatly diminished as I had to acknowledge that I was still eating 3.5 lbs. of technically unnecessary sugar every year anyway.  It's just that my total was down from the 7 lbs. that it had been. That, my friends, is why I've always been a little bit hostile to math. It is important to remember that it is neither useful nor particularly entertaining to measure out consumption over such a long period of time and decide therefore to deny yourself something that you really enjoy, particularly if it is something that is not intrinsically harmful.  Such is the cost of doing business, as it were, whether the toll is on your waistline or your pocketbook. Some things are worth it.  Of course, if you do decide that you can get just as much enjoyment from less, it may provide a window of motivation to make some beneficial changes, too.

That coffee is habit-forming and not entirely without drawbacks is established fact, despite the recent hoo-ha about potential antioxidants.  How much of our dependence and stress is derived from the caffeine component of the coffee (or tea) itself, and how much is from the sugar that so many of us add?  Modern science has pretty well established that sugar is also highly addictive, so what happens when these two addictive substances come together?  When we cut ourselves off from that daily cup of joe, is it the caffeine we miss, or the sugar?  Or both?  Is the sum of the parts greater than the whole?  Is it the coffee that we crave when we add sugar, milk, cream, or flavoured syrup to our morning cup, are we actually wanting the coffee, or needing the caffeine?  Would a No-Doz and a cup of hot water do the trick?  Obviously not.  It would not fulfill our desire for community the way that coffee does.

Do not for one moment think that I am suggesting that because coffee and sugar are potentially addictive, and not exactly health foods, that they are therefore to be categorically avoided. The word addiction carries powerful baggage and the substantial weight of societal disapproval; however, it is helpful to understand what we are doing to ourselves when we do consume these items, and hopefully, a little knowledge can lead us to making intelligent choices about how much and how often we "choose to use."  The ritual of a cup of coffee with friends, or after dinner, or on a sunny piazza (should we be so lucky) has a real sense of shared community about it that brings people together in a context that is conducive to relaxation and enjoyment of each other's company, without the attendant issues that can accompany alcohol.  There isn't really an inappropriate time for coffee, although if you order a cappuccino after dinner in Italy, the waiter may stare at you in amazement, since it is broadly considered a morning beverage there.

I do not really consider coffee as fuel, although I know that many people do.  The problem with that is the problem of habituation, or increasing need. If you need a coffee to get focused for the day, or to "wake up" you may eventually need a stronger dose, or larger cup, or more cups, because the body becomes accustomed to the level it is usually provided with, and adjusts accordingly.  It is hard not to speculate that this is one of the things that contributes to the caffeine over consumption in the software industry. The more consumed, the greater the likelihood of habituation, which means that you then need to keep up those levels if you don't want to experience some sort of withdrawal.  If nothing changes in your routine, you'll be amazed at how much you are eventually consuming.  This is obviously not the same as a person who occasionally "boils a pot of coffee" late at night for its wakefulness properties, but if you find yourself needing to do that fairly often, it sort of speaks for itself.

It's certainly not the end of the world if we do choose to consume a little less, although Starbucks might not think so. Here in the land of Bigger is Better, we have an unfortunate tendency toward quantity over quality (monster-sized portions of gluey, blandly-sauced pasta in some popular restaurants would be a fair corollary).  We feel as though we are getting a lot, so we don't mind paying a lot.  So, we go with ubiquitous, expensive brands of coffee-to-go, and then buy insulated mugs because we cannot possibly drink it all before it goes cold. And, because people like familiarity and consistency, they are willing to go to the same nationally or internationally branded outlets over and over again, where they know exactly what they are going to get, in terms of flavour, price, and service, and convince themselves that their preference is based on really having an eye for quality.

Oddly, even people who flinch at the price of soft drinks at the movie theatre (25-cent upgrades on an extortionate base-price for double the size, or whatever the current ratio is) as a ludicrous amount of money to spend on such a product, have no problem spending big bucks on their daily fix of caffeine. What I don't understand is how few of them are willing to pay more for a small (read: regular sized) cup of really good coffee, and merely have the one. Wouldn't it be both cheaper, in the long run, as well as better?

I've learned this from my adventures in chocolate: a little bit of the good stuff will satisfy as much as a larger amount of the cheap stuff (if not more) and without the buyer's remorse.  I've also learned that, in the absence of the good stuff, for most people, for the most part, the mediocre stuff will do. What happens to the coffee empires, if we decide to prefer quality over quantity? Will they be forced to close down some of the proliferation of outlets? Our coffee habit is more than the sum of its chemical parts, and our purchasing patterns are a complex web of branding, consumer identity, geographical convenience, and peer pressure.

We've become accustomed to starting our day with something hot and caffeinated, and whether we truly need to do so or not, it is an enjoyable ritual that I am not in a hurry to discard.  I've been caffeine-free at various points in my life, but generally my decision to do so was a by-product of other health issues, and finding a non-caffeinated substitute is hard work.  Decaffeinated coffees are not really caffeine-free, although they usually contain substantially less caffeine than their high-octane brethren. Herbal tea does not have the same body or texture, and rooibos has an unusual flavour that is very much an acquired taste.  I'm somewhat fond of Ovaltine and Caf-Lib, but they are not coffee, and I know it.  Coffee and tea, and therefore caffeine, are here to stay.

June 2007