Caffeine and me: is it time for a resilience reset?
How many sports drinks do you consume in a week?
How about coffee? Can you function without drinking it before you start your day?
Caffeine might just be the most widely used drug there is.
Readily available to consumers in various forms, it’s so easy to get addicted to this substance if you think about it.
Some drink a cuppa joe, and others get it from sports drinks or tea. It doesn’t matter how you get your caffeine fix; what matters is how much you consume daily.
For some people, a cup or two of coffee daily is just enough to set their day to go smoothly, but becoming too dependent on it can be pretty unnerving. Although some may argue the benefits of caffeine, such as enhancement of performance and recovery, or how it aids in preventing neurodegenerative diseases, we can’t ignore the fact that caffeine triggers the body’s fight or flight response.
A burst of cortisol, thanks to caffeine, in short periods is ok and can be beneficial to help you finish that final task. Still, the long-term usage and frequency might be detrimental to your body, especially to women.
Caffeine can definitely mess up your sleep, your hormones, your blood pressure, and trigger headaches. Some people with anxiety felt way better when they started weaning off from caffeine. So the next time you feel awful before that cup of coffee, it might be time to step back and audit how much you drink in a day and how you feel without it. Caffeine dependency might just be one of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue, and maybe, just maybe, a resilience reset for your adrenals might solve this dependency issue.
If you want to know what I think of coffee and caffeine consumption, here’s a link to mini-episode number 159 of the Less Stressed Life!
If you're curious and would like to know if you need a resilience reset, check out this quiz!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
I got a message the other day that said, what do you think of caffeine? I always love sarcasm questions without any context, because for me, when you asked me a simple question like that, it's not a very simple answer. All right. So let's talk caffeine. Caffeine has always been the most widely used drug.
Technically. Now there is some research on sports, performance and recovery, and there's also some research on the neuroprotective effects of caffeine with neurodegenerative diseases. Like Parkinson's. Now I think that men had more of a protective effect from caffeine than women. And you can look that up. There's an article PMI D two eight three one seven three one seven.
That'll take you to that article, but I always say caffeine is not just caffeine. Usually when we're talking about caffeine, we're thinking about, let's talk about the delivery form. Is it soft drinks, energy drinks, coffee, tea. I would say the majority of the population. Well, it feels like it. We're talking about coffee. So that's a little different because it turns out that caffeine and coffee might really be pretty separate conversations versus caffeine alone. Now, the first question I would say, can you clear caffeine? There's a couple different genes.
There's a slow and a fast caffeine while there's one gene. And if you process it slowly or quickly, I always thought I process it slowly. I always thought caffeine had a lot to me, but it's really the other stuff. That was the situation. There's another gene calm tea, and that one's really important for estrogen elimination. So if you have a lot of moodiness around ovulation or your period, or just those excess estrogen symptoms like heavy bleeding or pain or whatnot, sometimes come T can get blocked by, uh, caffeine and stress. So then caffeine can be important there when we're kind of relying on it versus hydration. Coffee is a diuretic. So it is helping us eliminate things that does not count towards our hydration needs and it can raise our cortisol. So cortisol is raised that can feel like anxiousness.
And I'm going to come back to that in a little bit. But when our cortisol is increased, our magnesium is dumped. And I have had multiple clients that have stopped drinking their coffee, even though like, there's this one guy who had a meditation practice and he stopped drinking coffee. First time he stopped and it stopped the anxiety. Now I have some feelings about that because I would normally say like, it's the caffeine, but it's not necessarily the caffeine. And I've really had this experience with my clients and myself. There's something about quality of coffee. And so one real quick, are you dependent on it? If you're dependent on caffeine, like if you cannot function in the morning, your adrenals are probably not in a great place and it's going to take a long time to fix them. So I'm just going to let you know that right now, but you can't function. Like you cannot necessarily live like that. I guess, at least I don't think so, but maybe you're defying the odds.
That's fine too. If that's what you think right now. So first are you dependent on it? That's the first question. And second, what happens if you go without it for a little bit, some people have a headache. I'll never forget the woman who she was a little sensitive to caffeine. So we had a conversation about whether she should stop coffee and she she's like, yeah, sure. I'll stop. Copy. And I didn't know she was drinking a pot and a half a day. So she had a headache for like a month. Anyway, I liked the stories because they help us connect things. So it's good to experiment. Are you dependent on it? Can you experiment without it? And then let's talk about, um, anxiousness and whatnot via coffee. I can tell you about the quality of coffee by seeing how I feel after I drink it. Now, generally the label is useful, but it's almost like a supplement. Like you have to know the company.
Someone asked me to say like, how do you pick coffee? Well, I mean, I have a couple brands that I know are really good quality, but if it says organic shade grown, something like that, usually it's decent. But if I don't feel good after drinking coffee, I know that there's issues with it. And I've come to think maybe it's not really the caffeine, because it seems like it's the quality of the coffee and episode one 24 talks a lot about this talks all about mycotoxins and coffee. And I think one of the stories that the guest shared was that he was touring a coffee plantation and they dry out coffee beans under a tree, right shade under the tree. And he was watering the coffee beans now. And he asked the man why he was doing that. And he said, well, we get paid by weight. So we're wedding it down to increase the weight and then it's put in a barrel and shipped. So what do you think is going to happen? It's going to be moldy.
So what I am a little concerned about, so something as I'm training, I was just doing the other day was talking about mycotoxins or molds and anxiety, because when we're exposed to molds and anxiety, we breathe a little bit shallower, like we're in an environment, but also mycotoxins or mold or on neurotoxin. And when I think about anxiety, I think about neurotoxins. And I think about my own behavior. Like even if a coffee says, it's good, if it makes me all shaky and jittery and anxious, I've just been thinking more and more about that lately. So I was asked to what I think about caffeine. And these are my very quick thoughts about caffeine, like anything there's pros and cons, but it's really the delivery method. And so I'm really focusing here on coffee. And then what is it affecting or how does it make other things get hung up that you maybe would want? So I think the bottom line is, are you dependent on caffeine? If you are, let's look at that. Maybe you need to take my resilience reset. It's a four week workshop to correct cortisol imbalances and give you the support. So you can function off of caffeine really well and sustain energy really well. So if you can't function off coffee, that's not super cool. And how do you feel off of it? Like, it's great for us to take experiments off of it. And that's kind of how I like to address it in practice. Like yeah, it tastes great. I love it. And it's good for us to take some time off of it. Cause it can sometimes test our limits. So I hope that was helpful. Have an awesome day.
Oh, you want to know how your adrenals are performing or your cortisol or your stress hormones are performing go over to christabiegler.com forward slash burnout. We just revised the adrenal assessment, the burnout quiz, the adrenal assessment. So you can check the status of your adrenals and get some quick tips on what it says about what's going on in your body. You know, I've really spent some time reading on my own phases of burnout this year and past years. And I know I'm not the only one that has gone through or goes through these peaks and valleys. And while sometimes you need Lowe's to appreciate the highs in life.
Some valleys are pretty difficult for both your mind and your body in a very literal physical way. This year, I'm feeling really pulled to help others work through burnout, nourish their adrenals, mind, body, and spirit, and have some incredible things in store to help you feel refreshed and renewed. I invite you to take my quiz. Are you approaching burnout to assess your stress resilience and find out more about how to help you overcome it? Go to christabiegler.com forward slash burnout to take that quiz. And it'll also be in the show notes.
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