How do you feel about caffeine?

[LindseyAtVeeTea]

I recently wrote a little homage to caffeine (http://coffeetea.about.com/b/2009/11/19/homage-to-caffeine.htm) and it got me thinking about how caffeine impacts other tea lovers. I find that many people have complex relationships with caffeine. What do you love about it? Do you experience side effects from caffeine? Do you find that coffee and tea have a different impact on your mood/energy levels? Do you ever consciously avoid caffeine (in the evening or for fasting purposes or for any other reason)?

[bpfeifer]

Sure, I generally avoid caffeine after dinner unless I plan to stay up late.

I do notice the caffeine affects from most of the teas I drink. I use them to help me over my afternoon slump, and I can't complain about it in the morning.

Since I don't drink coffee (just don't like the flavor), I can't compare the two, but I do notice that new ideas are likely to bubble up as I'm drinking tea. It's great for sitting around discussing things with friends.

On a few occasions I've gotten caffeine headaches from drinking too much tea. One time was at a tea convention and the other was while traveling in Taiwan. I really should have just "sampled" the teas, but they were so good I kept drinking whole cups of the stuff.

One odd note: I feel like I can sleep or at least nap right after drinking pu-erh. It still has caffeine, but...

Interesting topic, thanks.

[Tea Geek]

At this year's Northwest Tea Festival, I taught an advanced class on caffeine. Two interesting things I discovered when researching the topic were:

1) The physiological effects of "caffiene" often don't come from caffeine but from other related compounds. These compounds are sometimes found in the tea leaf, and sometimes are produced when the body metabolizes caffeine. So if your heart races after you drink caffeine, you may be glad to know that it's more likely racing because the caffeine has been broken down into other methylxanthines that affect heart rate far more than caffeine does.

2) Caffeine is not only a central nervous system stimulant. It has other depressant-like effects as well, just not as strong. However, the more caffeine intake you've got, the more your body adjusts. And the human body can, generally, adjust to the point that the stimulant effects are overpowered by the depressant effects. At that point, the person is considered to have "total caffeine tolerance" and it will no longer act as a stimulant as long as average daily intake stays about the same.

I also talked a little about psychosomatic effects. The basics of how your thoughts and beliefs about caffeine and what you think they do in your body are covered in a blog post I wrote last year: http://www.teageek.net/blog/?p=55