CAFFEINE And Everything Else. There Are No Shortcuts.
How Cutting Corners Actually Gets You THE OPPOSITE Of What You Want.
This article is about the trap of impatience, over-attachment and instant gratification. This phenomenon is also known as the backwards law: If you want to be entertained, first you must become bored. If you want true friendship, first you must allow yourself to be alone. If you want to be rich, you must first allow yourself to be poor. If you want to be satiated, you must first allow yourself to become hungry.
Lets look at 3 common ways in which human beings seek instant solutions and how this results in the opposite intended effect.
CAFFEINE
Most people on the planet consume caffeine in some variety. Be it tea, coffee, or energy drinks. People who consume caffeine consciously, try to do so with it’s effects and side effects in mind. They will try to consume it as early in the day as possible, so that the caffeine doesn’t inhibit their ability to get a good night’s sleep. They will also try to focus purely on productivity during the peak of their caffeine dose, so that they get the most out of the focus boost that is associated with the increased alertness of caffeine.
This all sounds great, but there is always a downside. Caffeine partially blocks your body’s ability to know what’s going on inside itself, and it also injects a bunch of chemicals into it that throw it out of it’s delicate balance, which it eventually has to figure out a way to compensate for. The important thing to note here is that even with something as inconspicuous as caffeine, people are still essentially treating their bodies like test tubes without realizing it.
It’s extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to avoid the repercussions of caffeine use while still reaping the benefits. Sooner or later it will affect your sleep, maybe not by much, but it will still degrade the quality by some amount. And it doesn’t take long at all for your body to develop a tolerance and require larger doses, effectively rendering staying at the same dose pointless.
Caffeine has also been linked to increased anxiety and stress, reduced appetite control, binge-eating and junk-food cravings. And it’s my own personal hypothesis that caffeine separates you from your intuition. It creates synthetic enthusiasm as opposed to real, aligned, authentic enthusiasm. This separation from ourselves can come in handy when we have to do something that we really don’t want to, like study. But in these situations, the better solution would be to figure out why we don’t want to study and either fix that (remove distractions or over-stimulation), or simply acknowledge that we are genuinely disinterested in the material and go do something else productive that we actually want to do.
The most important thing i want to draw attention to here is that the things people are trying to get from caffeine are the very things that they are pushing away and giving up through the unwanted side-effects of caffeine.
People consume caffeine to be more awake and focused — when it unavoidably compromises sleep. People also consume it to try and perform better mentally — when caffeine has been scientifically proven to harm the brain and impede it’s functioning. People also drink it to boost their mood and find things more engaging — but after the high has worn off, the comedown from the caffeine rush will make the world around us seem even more lifeless and dull than before.
Most of us know this, yet we keep consuming caffeine because it’s so readily available and unstigmatized, and there is an immediate perceived “reward”, so our brains naively identify caffeine as being a net positive. “Any future downsides can just be covered up with more caffeine, right?” Of course we see where this leads, and it’s a downward spiral.
This pattern of “The things people are trying to get from X-substance are the very things that they are pushing away” is found in many places throughout life in our modern society.
PORN
People consume porn for many reasons. Some people watch it because they are lonely, or crave physical intimacy with another human. Other people watch it because they are bored and crave stimulation or entertainment. Others watch it to escape from their problems.
The people who watch porn to escape from their problems in life end up worsening existing problems and creating more by harming their own mental health through the negative effects that porn has on brain function.
Like with caffeine, we have the same pattern appearing here. The people who watch it because they crave physical intimacy are actively destroying their ability to become physically intimate with someone due to the many negative effects that porn has on the consumer, which end up making the consumer less attractive and less likely to be able to enter into a romantic relationship for a host of reasons.
The people who watch it in order to escape their boredom, only end up becoming more bored in the long run as the extreme stimulation of porn desensitizes the mind to anything but stimulation of an equally extreme nature. And the threshold for what that person finds stimulating will continue to move further and further away the more it is pursued. Instead, if the addict in this situation would pursue boredom, his baseline requirement for stimulation in all things would gradually begin to lower.
The pattern described earlier can again be found here. Instant gratification destroys the ability to achieve that same gratification in it’s authentic form.
STEROIDS
There aren’t that many people who use steroids compared to caffeine and pornography, but this example is great because all you have to do in order to understand the price of impatience, over-attachment and instant gratification in all it’s hideousness is look at the before and after pictures of body builders who have used steroids and then stopped using them. They wanted huge muscles but ended up with exactly the opposite.
CONCLUSION
So what should we do with this information? Most of you probably have no interest in porn or steroids, or know you should quit. But caffeine? Now that one’s buried deep!
Well first you must know that without caffeine, you will eventually function better than you ever have before. But first you need to stick out the withdrawal period. You see it with drugs and addictions of all kinds. The addict is always scared of their own recovery, and the withdrawal process nearly breaks them. Often they cannot even conceptualize how life could possibly be better on the other side. They believe that they will be in pain and craving their substance of abuse for the rest of their lives. But if they stick it out and push through, they will ultimately reassemble on the other side as a greater version of themselves.
So if you’re struggling with caffeine and don’t see why you should quit, or want to but don’t know how, first you have to knowledge that it is a drug, and it behaves upon the human system like all other drugs.
There are no known stimulants that don’t have some sort of trade off in the long run. Your coffee or tea might seem harmless, but really it’s just extremely watered down meth. This might sound ridiculous, but it isn’t to your body. Your body knows the truth, and it speaks it’s truth to you on those days when you go without your drug of choice.
Humans have a tendency to try to push through and force things. We will prioritize work to the detriment of our health. Instead we should be prioritizing health to the benefit of our work, but this requires patience, faith and discipline.
You will find that many of the world’s top performing people all put a serious emphasis on staying fit and healthy. It is their commitment to their health which has a cascade of benefits that create a fertile ambiance out of which greatness can grow.
To get mystical here for a second: One of the most ancient symbols in all of religion, philosophy, esotericism and occultism is the human body. In his book The Secret Teachings Of All Ages, Freemason Manly Palmer Hall explains that ancient wisdom traditions revered the form of the human body as a powerful symbol from which many truths could be divined about the universe through meditation and study. Whenever you see the human body as a symbol in certain wisdom traditions, it is meant to reflect God, or the universe itself. Since they believed that man was made in God’s image.
Since the universe is all there is and everything is contained within it, they extrapolate that the same must be true of man. Which means that man doesn’t need anything outside of himself in order to attain completion, he comes pre-equipped with everything he needs. Adding in anything extra just spoils the broth!
But wait, why did i include such a delicious picture of coffee? Isn’t that sending mixed signals? Well, it’s because coffee isn't bad in and of itself. It does have it’s uses and it can be a delicious treat. The problem only comes in when it’s added to the daily diet, or used as a crutch or as some form of self-medication. It should be treated instead like a luxury. Something you only want to indulge in on rare occasions.
That’s just my two cents. Feel free to let me know what you think! :)
