“Caffeine is a drug that acts on the central nervous system and significantly affects other organs such as the heart, blood vessels, kidneys and adrenal hormones,” according to Nutrition Myths.
For most college students, they know the lifesaving abilities coffee has on finishing an assignment late into the night or getting through a two hour long lecture. But is it possible to lose that jolt of energy received from one cup after a while? Can a person become tolerant of two shots expresso? The answer is yes.
The Nutrition Myths identified a caffeine tolerance as, “the balancing of the physiological changes reduces the effects of caffeine. The effects tend to disappear within 1 to 4 days of the same dose of continuous caffeine intake, which indicates that tolerance to caffeine is regained. However, if the daily dose is increased again, the side effects return in a milder form than caffeine naïve people.”
The science behind it is the chemical structure. The adenosine, a substance that causes one to feel tired, binds with receptors in the brain that usually bind to the adenosine which in less scientific wording means that the sleepiness normally induced by one chemical can’t because the caffeine chemical takes its place.
After time goes by, the brain produces more adenosine receptors in an effort to make up for missing ones, which is why it feels necessary to consume more caffeine throughout the day.
On a positive note, this process will level off after a certain amount of caffeine. Murray Carpenter, author of “Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us,” stated, “Researchers call it a partial tolerance. You’re not just going up and up and up. Usually people will develop a tolerance to caffeine but they’ll hit a point where they find their optimal dose with their tolerance.”
Fear not, here’s a simple way to reduce your tolerance. In an example by New York Magazine, Science of Us, writer Cari Romm states, “Maybe it now takes five cups of coffee for you to feel awake in the morning; maybe you don’t like how you can guzzle the stuff and still nod off right afterward. To make it work for you again, you have to quit it. And to quit it, you’re going to have to suffer.”
This won’t last forever; her article recommends going a week without it or reduce the number of cups by half for a few days and then halving that for a few days and so on.
