The Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain Weird of How Coffee Affects Your Psychology
Few of us think of sipping our morning cup of coffee as taking a drug, but try to quit caffeine, as author Michael Pollan did while researching his book This Is Your Mind on Plants, and you’ll soon discover how much your coffee habit affects you.
“At the coffee shop, instead of my usual ‘half-caff,’ I ordered a cup of mint tea. And on this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived,” Pollan wrote of his experiment in giving up caffeine. “The fog settled over me and would not budge. It’s not that I felt terrible — I never got a serious headache — but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound.”
As much as we hide from the fact, caffeine is a powerful drug. And one that affects us in more ways than just perking us up a bit when we’re sleepy. A stack of recent studies reveals all the good, bad, and downright strange ways caffeine impacts our mental state.
The good
I am going to surprise absolutely no one when I reveal that coffee works for its intended purpose — research confirms your morning brew does indeed make you…
