Many of us adapted a caffeine habit from watching our friends and family members sip their morning cup of coffee while checking emails, our gym buddies taking pre-workout stimulants after work, or from café and study culture. Though caffeine can be used as a tool after a night of bad sleep or to help us focus on tasks, it’s important to know what’s actually happening inside our bodies on a biologic level when we consume it.
Let me just start guns a' blazin’ — caffeine directly stimulates your adrenal glands to release stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) which make you temporarily resistant to insulin (the hormone that stores glucose) in order to free up glycogen stores to be used for quick bursts of energy in the form of glucose, our body’s “preferred” fuel source. “Glycogen” is just a chain of glucose molecules stored in your tissues until they’re ready for use.
When you hear “fight-or-flight,” that’s referring to the sympathetic nervous system, your body’s survival mode. In this state, your body ramps up certain processes while turning other “non-essential” ones down to conserve energy in the presence of a threat, even if something non-threatening is perceived as such. For example, heart rate and blood pressure increase to quickly pump blood to your muscles and brain, breath-rate is increased to maximize oxygen intake, fuel sources are made available in the bloodstream for energy, and blood-clotting speeds up to prevent injury and blood loss.
On the other end of this spectrum, the process of digestion is deemed useless in the event of a predator or threat. Imagine someone finishing their tuna sandwich while a fire breaks out in their house; yeah, unlikely, unless their love for tuna sammies somehow outweighs millions of years of biological programming and evolution. Obviously, most of us are seldom confronted with these kinds of threats in our modern world, but our Paleolithic nervous systems haven’t gotten with the program yet, and they won’t any time soon — maybe in the next million years (thank you evolution)!
Now that we’ve gotten a quick history lesson, notice how these same symptoms might affect you in your life when you get stressed from, say, an important meeting or speech. Your mouth gets dry, your heart-rate increases, physical senses heighten or even disappear completely (numbness), suddenly you can’t seem to remember what you practiced and all you want is to crawl and hide underneath the floorboards! And it’s the same biological process when you load up on caffeine all day; or worse, combine caffeine with sugar while neglecting the other macronutrients — protein and fat plus fiber, and water (also considered a macronutrient)!
Let’s role-play for a second: say you drink coffee with your standard artificially-flavored creamer and pair it with a piece of a toast with sugary jam or a bowl of cereal. Not much fat, protein, or fiber in there, “but that’s okay,” you think to yourself, “I’m not that hungry in the morning anyway. I’ll eat something later.” So off to work you go; undernourished, yes, but full of sugar and caffeine to get you through the morning! This is how you’ve always done it, right? Two hours goes by and suddenly you’re feeling tired and hangry (low blood sugar), so you bust out the granola bar you brought from home and make another cup of coffee and go back to working at your desk.
Now this is where things get tricky: while your body was hyped up on all that caffeine and sugar, and stress hormones were making you insulin-resistant — as we discussed earlier — your pancreas was still pumping out loads of insulin to try and take all of that excess glucose out of your bloodstream and store it away as glycogen in your liver, muscle, and adipose (fat) tissues. Eventually, thanks to the overwhelming amount of insulin now in your bloodstream, your glucose is finally all stored away! Good, right? Well, yes and no, because now you’re left with LOW blood sugar — this is known as “reactive hypoglycemia.” Hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) has now lead to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar).
So, as a survival mechanism, stress hormones, as well as glucagon (the hormone responsible for raising blood glucose levels made by the alpha cells in your pancreas) are once again ramped up to bring blood sugar back into normal range. However, usually by this time you’ve already been struggling with low energy and intense hunger so you likely reached for the thing that’s most easily accessible and calorically-dense… SUGAR! Now you’ve just given yourself a double hit of stress and yet another blood sugar spike, starting the process all over again. Aren’t hormones amazing?!
Quick side note: On a night of bad sleep or when blood sugar drops, humans will gravitate toward unhealthy, calorically-dense foods; historically, our bodies crave and prioritize quick energy rather than nutrient-density in a stressed state (survival).
Here’s something else to consider when lessening the effects of a blood sugar spike: when muscles are contracted, unique proteins called "GLUT 4 transporters" come to the surface of the cell and allow glucose molecules to enter muscle/fat cells from the bloodstream. This means that someone with insulin-resistance can actually lower their blood glucose independent of the hormone insulin! If you don’t have much time or aren’t used to regular exercise, a quick set of 10 body squats every 45 minutes has been shown to be more effective in lowering blood sugar than a single 30-minute walk. Less time, plus you can do it anywhere!
Final takeaways: don’t consume caffeine after 2:00 PM or on an empty stomach; eat protein, healthy fat and fiber; move your body; wait 60-90 minutes after waking to allow natural cortisol levels to drop before consuming caffeine; try lowering the dose; practice breathwork exercises; make sure to hydrate!
It’s more than okay to indulge in simple pleasures like sipping a hot cup of coffee, but it’s just as important to recognize when to enforce proper boundaries within yourself so that you reap a healthier future. Blood sugar affects your body’s basic functionality, from metabolism to hormones to mood, so it is worth making some simple adjustments to your caffeine habit.
