This is your mind on coffee
I speak with author Michael Pollan about how a natural stimulant gripped humanity.
Photo by: @delightindee
I write this while sipping an oat latte, feeling the graceful flush of caffeine surge through my body. My senses are livened, my thoughts crystallised, and my fingers dance happily across the keyboard.
Put simply, when caffeine enters our system it electrifies the mind by blocking sleep hormones from reaching our receptors. These sleep hormones continue to be produced, building up in the brain – something sleep scientists refer to as ‘sleep pressure’. When the dam of caffeine wears off, these hormones flood the system, leading to the inevitable ‘caffeine crash’.
Plants are “biochemical geniuses”, says Michael Pollan, author of This Is Your Mind on Plants – a book that explores the interconnectedness between humanity and the mind and a broad spectrum of psychoactive plants. His new documentary series on Netflix, How to Change Your Mind, explores the impact of psychedelics. But, for the purpose of my interview with Pollan, I take a deep dive into the world of caffeine – or perhaps I should say, a world on caffeine?
Whilst plants produce caffeine as a defence mechanism, the perfect dose in the nectar has been found to keep bees coming back for more – and studies have found that it even improves their memory.
“Plants manipulate us the same way they manipulate bees,” explains Pollan, who explored this research in his book. “In turn, we dedicate enormous amounts of the Earth to coffee and tea cultivation.”
Coffee is the most valuable tropical crop on Earth. According to the British Coffee Association, we consume an estimated 98 million cups every day in the UK. Pollan remarks: “If you think about all the habitat that we’ve given to coffee and tea, there’s a belt all around the Earth in the tropics at a certain altitude that we have dedicated to the plant.”
Having given up caffeine for three months in order to gain an objective understanding about how this natural stimulant alters his reality, Pollan believes that abstinence is a “valuable experiment because you want to be mindful about the plants rather than just being in their sway. Plus you get the excitement of getting back on caffeine again, which was one of my favourite drug experiences ever,” he says.
Pollan describes working on his book without the influence of caffeine as having felt like an “unsharpened pencil”. “I couldn’t get into the flow state,” he says, having turned to mint and chamomile tea. “What geniuses have written on chamomile tea?” he asks.
It’s a valid question. In his book, Pollan discusses how the Great Enlightenment was sparked by caffeine because “all the best Enlightenment writers were caffeine addicts.”
“The arrival of coffee shops in England in the mid-16th century brewed “lively, political conversation, which was very threatening to the throne,” he adds.
Today, a coffee break has become a normal ritual of everyday life. We hardly even think about the term, which was birthed in the US alongside the evolution of eight-hour days in the early 1900s. “Companies would give their workers free drugs and then time in which to enjoy them. Why would they do that?” asks Pollan. “Because it increased productivity.”
In the same way that worker bees increase productivity for a caffeine buzz, caffeine is “a great drug for capitalism”, says Pollan, who believes it fuelled the Industrial Revolution. “It would have been impossible to keep those machines working throughout the night without caffeinated workers. Caffeine involved disconnecting us from the natural rhythms of Nature.” So does this make this one powerful stimulant a good thing, or a bad thing?
It depends. When over-consumed, the drug is linked to anxiety, sleep disorders and even muscle breakdown. However, most studies have concluded that caffeine has limited nega-tive health effects when drunk in moderation, although its addictive qualities can make this challenging for some.
On the flip side, there is a growing body of research that suggests that drinking coffee can help prevent several chronic diseases – including type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and liver disease.
For regular coffee users, “the only negative is that it disturbs our sleep,” says Pollan, because caffeine stays in the body for a long time. “A quarter of the caffeine you drink at noon will still be circulating in your system at midnight – and that undermines your deep sleep.” He recalls how when he withdrew from caffeine completely, he “slept like a teenager again”.
To keep us safe from abuse and addiction, rituals have long been used throughout the world to interact with powerful plants on a deeper, spiritual level. Pollan remarks that in a similar way to alcohol use, there is a social, ritual aspect that could prevent us from harm.
“There’s so much ceremony linked to coffee and tea drinking – it’s a wonderful part of it,” he says, because “people who use drugs in a ritual context are using it more safely than if they didn’t.” Most of us have ritualised ways of drinking coffee in the morning, and this ritual varies across the world.
For Pollan, it’s still very much a morning ritual that he prepares carefully with his wife – or he takes a walk to the local coffee shop. He is aware, though, that “there are people who use it just to get a fix – the recent rise in the use of takeaway cups is a big part of that culture.”
Could being more mindful of our consumption be the first step in deepening our relationship with plants that we take for granted?
While abstaining from caffeine for just a week, I was able to take a step back to re-examine my life without its grip on my mind. Now when I take a sip, I think of the hands that picked the beans, the journey from the soil to my lips, and the thousands of years of co-evolution to end up in my cup.
Yasmin Dahnoun is a member of the editorial team at Resurgence & Ecologist.
