It’s 7 a.m., and I’m standing in a gift shop in Edmonton International Airport pondering whether I should get the protein bar with or without the caffeine.
It’s probably worth mentioning that at this point, I’m already a couple of caffeinated beverages into my day. I’m on my way to spend a week rafting on the South Nahanni River in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and when I woke up in an airport hotel at 5 this morning on my second day of travel, I already had a Red Bull staged and ready to go on the nightstand. After clearing security, I drank a mocha in the terminal while I read the news. I had been looking for a snack, not another jolt, when I walked into the newsstand next door. But there it was, staring right at me.
This is a fairly typical morning for me. By most standards, I’m a remarkably clean-living person: I’m a vegetarian, a teetotaler, drug-free, and, except for the occasional sugar binge, mostly eat well. Caffeine is my only remaining chemical vice, but it’s one I’m dedicated to. As a person with a full-time job, two small children, and a long list of outdoor hobbies, I’m in the odd position of being both a night owl and an early riser. Along the way, caffeine has graduated from being an occasional indulgence to a regular, metered part of my daily life.
I start my mornings with coffee, habitually spike my water with squirts of caffeinated flavor concentrate through the day, and usually have a packet of powdered energy drink rattling around somewhere in my glove compartment. I keep a running mental tally of my daily caffeine consumption against the FDA’s recommended 400 mg daily limit. Once the rest of the family’s asleep, it’s not unheard of for me to shotgun a Red Bull before I start my nighttime workout on the climbing wall in my garage. On weekend mornings I’m often out of the house by 5 to hike or ski, and some kind of canned drink is usually waiting in my car’s cupholder.
When does a habit become a problem? When I told a relative who doesn’t drink coffee after noon that I could fall asleep an hour or two after my last caffeinated beverage, he expressed concern that I had let my tolerance get too high. But despite being the world’s most commonly consumed stimulant, there’s little evidence that caffeine has any meaningful long-term effect on human health. Users who imbibe too much may report jitters or difficulty getting to bed, and people with heart conditions can experience serious, occasionally lethal, side effects. The rest of us seem to manage it just fine.
There’s even reason to be skeptical that caffeine dependence is as widespread or as serious as many of us assume. Studies have pegged the proportion of users who experience withdrawal after kicking coffee at somewhere between 10 and 15 percent. (If I go a day without caffeine I wake up more slowly and fall asleep earlier, but there’s a strong argument that that’s just a return to a normal human schedule.) But I’m not sure a habit needs to become a physical need to be a dependence. If maintaining the rhythm of my life requires me to use a drug, even a benign one, doesn’t that count regardless of whether I crash without it?
It’s possible this is society’s problem more than mine. Like protein, caffeine seems to be sneaking into an ever-increasing variety of foods and beverages, from energy bars to chocolate to sparkling water. Most of the audience for those are not hikers, as evidenced by the long line of people in work boots buying white Monsters at my local 7-11 most mornings.
Indeed, when all I have to do is hike, paddle, or ski and sleep, I usually don’t drink more than a cup or two of coffee a day. It’s the rest of the time, when I’m balancing my desire to go outside with an American 40-plus-hour work week and two kids who need my attention, that I feel the need to get juiced. (It’s worth mentioning here that, unlike caffeine, there is evidence that not sleeping enough raises your risk of chronic disease and early death. I’m working on that one.)
I did end up buying that caffeinated protein bar. I’ll probably eat it today, too, sometime between sorting my gear for the fifth time and portaging it past 300-foot Virginia Falls. But what I’m really looking forward to is tonight, when I’ll sprawl out on the banks of the Nahanni and, with the white noise of the river in my ears, fall fast asleep.
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