“Usually, people will develop a tolerance to caffeine, but they’ll hit a point where they their optimal dose with their tolerance.” You’re not just going up and up and up” in the amount of caffeine you need to consume, he says. “Researchers call it a partial tolerance. To a point, at least.Įventually (thankfully) this process tends to level off, explains Murray Carpenter, author of Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us. Over time, your brain will start spouting more adenosine receptors in an effort to make up for what it’s missing - meaning that you’ll need to consume more caffeine to keep the sleepiness at bay, and you’ll feel increasingly worse when you don’t get it. Caffeine also causes an uptick in adrenaline, the hormone that makes you feel more alert, and dopamine, which plays a role in helping you feel happy. When you ingest caffeine, the molecules bind to the receptors in the brain normally used by adenosine, meaning all that sleepiness-inducing stuff doesn’t have a chance to work hence the wakefulness you feel after chugging a cup of coffee. And it means you’re going to have to learn some uncomfortable truths about your favorite beverage.Ĭaffeine has a similar chemical structure to adenosine, a substance that causes you to feel tired (adenosine naturally builds up in the body over the course of the day and then dissipates during sleep). There’s a way to reset your tolerance - but be forewarned, it is not fun. And caffeine tolerance kicks in fast in one study, subjects who otherwise normally abstained from caffeine became desensitized to its effects in just one to four days. Coffee, after all, can be a cruel mistress: The more you have it, the less it works. To be fair, though, I can grant that there may be a bit of a Stockholm-syndrome thing going on.
Claiming life is better without caffeine feels akin to describing puppies as Satan’s minions, or saying you are averse to sunshine and laughter - a worldview so baffling as to be nearly incomprehensible. This is a rift that is bigger than mere beverage preference. I consume coffee ( “the planet’s most perfect, most life-giving beverage,” as my colleague Melissa Dahl has rightly called it) like oxygen my boyfriend, meanwhile, not-that-jokingly calls it the devil’s juice and clings to his low-caffeine green tea.
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