Guest Post by Dr. Travis Bradberry
Today's tip for increasing your emotional intelligence is the most simple and straightforward you're ever going to get.
For many people, it has the potential to have a bigger impact upon their emotional intelligence (EQ) than any other. The catch? You have to cut down on caffeine, and as any caffeine drinker can attest, this is easier said than done...
The Good: Isn’t Really Good
Most people start drinking caffeine because it makes them feel more alert and improves their mood. Many studies suggest that caffeine actually improves cognitive task performance (memory, attention span, etc.) in the short-term.
Unfortunately, these studies fail to consider the participants’ caffeine habits. New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that performance increases due to caffeine intake are the result of caffeine drinkers experiencing a short-term reversal of caffeine withdrawal.
By controlling for caffeine use in study participants, John Hopkins researchers found that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal. In essence, coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights. In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.
The Bad: Adrenaline
Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight or flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state, your emotions overrun your behavior.
Irritability and anxiety are the most commonly seen emotional effects of caffeine, but caffeine enables all of your emotions to take charge.
The negative effects of a caffeine-generated adrenaline surge are not just behavioral. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that large doses of caffeine raise blood pressure, stimulate the heart, and produce rapid shallow breathing, which readers of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 know deprives the brain of the oxygen needed to keep your thinking calm and rational.
The Ugly: Sleep
When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep.
Your brain is very fickle when it comes to sleep. For you to wake up feeling rested, your brain needs to move through an elaborate series of cycles. You can help this process along and improve the quality of your sleep by reducing your caffeine intake.
Here’s why you’ll want to: caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means it takes a full twenty-four hours to work its way out of your system. Have a cup of joe at eight a.m., and you’ll still have 25% of the caffeine in your body at eight p.m.
Anything you drink after noon will still be at 50% strength at bedtime. Any caffeine in your bloodstream—with the negative effects increasing with the dose—makes it harder to fall asleep.
When you do finally fall asleep, the worst is yet to come.
Caffeine disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deep sleep when your body recuperates and processes emotions. When caffeine disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. You’re naturally going to be inclined to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel better.
The caffeine produces surges of adrenaline, which further your emotional handicap. Caffeine and lack of sleep leave you feeling tired in the afternoon, so you drink more caffeine, which leaves even more of it in your bloodstream at bedtime. Caffeine very quickly creates a vicious cycle.
Withdrawal
Like any stimulant, caffeine is physiologically and psychologically addictive. If you do choose to lower your caffeine intake, you should do so slowly under the guidance of a qualified medical professional. The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating.
Some people report feeling flu-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety after reducing intake by as little as one cup a day. Slowly tapering your caffeine dosage each day can greatly reduce these withdrawal symptoms.
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About the author:
I am the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and the cofounder of TalentSmart, a consultancy that serves more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies and is the world’s leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training.
My books have been translated into 28 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. I’ve written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.
I’m a world-renowned expert in emotional intelligence who speaks regularly in corporate and public settings. Example engagements include Intel, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Fortune Brands, the Fortune Growth Summit, The Conference Board: Learning from Legends, and Excellence in Government.
I hold a dual Ph.D. in clinical and industrial-organizational psychology. I received my bachelor of science in clinical psychology from the University of California – San Diego.
About Lynn Terry
"If you do choose to lower your caffeine intake, you should do so slowly under the guidance of a qualified medical professional. The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating. " ...My gosh, I'm calling doctor my doc immediately in case I begin experiencing these symptoms from the 2 cups of coffee I drink every day.
LOL, I think I've had 16 cups today. 😯 🙂
That being "real cups" not mugs... but still.
Yes I must say that caffeine is not good for we human beings but then all of us getting so much engrossed into work and the pressure, the late night presentation preparations and other tensions makes us get habituated to coffee or lets say caffeine. It does reduce our emotional intelligence was yet unknown to me. However, I am addicted to coffee. LOL.
I stopped drinking coffee and colas almost ten years ago. I was fuzzy headed and my joints ached for about a week.
I stopped because my temper would rage at the drop of a hat, with little or no provocation. I recognized caffeine as the cause. I drank industrial amounts of coffee at the time.
Since that time I have been much more even tempered. My wife says I am much more pleasant to be around.
There are many days I would like a cup of coffee, but know the result.
That being said, I (if I am) would much prefer coffee addiction to some others i.e. Alcohol &/o Cigarettes.(Neither applies)
I spent about two years without cafeine, drinking a lot of peppermint tea and once the caffeine is out of your system I found I didn't really miss coffee or 'normal' tea.
That said, I am now back to drinking several cups of coffee and tea a day and it would need a real effort to stop again entirely.
I have read that coffee helps recovering from long runs. I run a lot, this is why I must continue to drink coffee no matter what..lol 🙂
Very interesting post. Caffeine definitely destabilizes one's mood and lowers distress tolerance. It's ironic, because I started drinking a lot of coffee in response to stress (I was in school at the time).
I agree with the above comment that it's better to be addicted to caffeine than to some other substances, because if you REALLY want to lower your emotional intelligence, become a heavy drinker like I was years ago. That turns you into an emotional dwarf.
I think a lot of people with anxiety and depression, myself included, struggle with caffeine because it simultaneously makes you feel better (less depressed) and makes anxiety worse. This is a moving target issue.
Very interesting! I've always thought that, as long as I don't drink caffeine late in the afternoon, I'll be just fine. Not the case, apparently. Thanks for the little push I needed to cut back on the stuff.
I mostly gave up caffeinated sodas years ago. I still have sodas occasionally, never been a coffee drinker. Most times I cope pretty well without it, but there are days when I miss the energy boost.
The bit about withdrawal reminds me of a girl my husband used to work with. She took a 24 pack of Pepsi to work every day, and still sometimes bought sodas from the soda machine. She decided to quit cold turkey, but ended up in the hospital because she was so dependent on it. Her doctor warned her that it would take a long for her to do a full quit, as her body was so addicted to caffeine.
All that said, don't make me quit my chocolate!
A good sleep after a long day of work is absolutely necessary which should not be manually disturbed. Consuming caffeine just before going to bed might reduce the chances of completing a proper and required sleep thereby harming our health and mind. If we are not fresh the next morning, we cannot work with dedication.
No doubt caffeine has the quality to increase our performance and alertness for sometime but if we think about it in the long run it definitely has bad effects on us. Drinking caffeine releases adrenaline in our body which boosts up our performance during the time of emergency but simultaneously it affects our behaviour also, it makes the mood irritating and anxious. Caffeine increases blood pressure, stimulates the heart, and hampers the rational thinking potential of our mind. It also alters our emotional behaviour. In short, Caffeine is not as good as it seems to be. The blog shows the bad effects of caffeine very clearly.
Seriously, I need to get off this stuff! Green Tea, here I come! 😛
I was never a caffeine addict, but sometimes a cup of coffee will make me feel sooooo good! That's really interesting if it's true that the positive effects are just a reversal of withdrawal symptoms. In that case, coffee drinkers have been fooling themselves for centuries!
I quit my 6-10 coffee habit a month ago purely as a side effect of being ill at the time. In fact I was so ill I didn't notice the cold turkey and then a week in when I was feeling better I suddenly realised I hadn't touched the stuff - and then decided to quit on purpose (I'd been wanting to quit but had never been able to previously)
Now I'm on very light green tea, water and juicer juice and my goodness the difference in my life is amazing. The whites of my eyes are whiter, my teeth are no longer mahogony and I'm sleeping.
Alll I have to do now is find some other way to stay awake into the wee small hours working on websites, copy and marketing tasks...
A huge portion of our economy is based upon addiction industries, primarily coffee, alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. Your local gas station most likely earns more profit from those 3 categories than from gasoline. Coffee and caffeinated drinks are the least socially and physiologically offensive of those, but, as you point out, it's probably doing more bad than good.
I never become a coffee drinker, I suppose because I only saw it for what it was and not what it represented as a cultural ritual. I guess that's the upside of being a geek. It's always seemed to me that something that smells/tastes bitter and has no nutritional benefit doesn't really belong in my body.
After reading your post I feel a relief that I never consume anything which contains caffeine, not even coffee. My mother never let me get habituated to coffee and cold coffee in that case when I was young. Since then I have been ignoring its consumption and I am happy to be safe from the ill effects.
If coffee or caffeine is consumed in a limited quantity then I guess it would not pose a problem to our health, emotional stability or sleeping habits. I always keep the intake of coffee to its least only when I need it desperately during an early meeting or late night pending work.
We have been taught from childhood that tea and coffee makes you less drowsy and more attentive.. Every time I used to sit and study late at night my mother would lovingly get me a cup of coffee but now with this research it seems like all her efforts where for nothing. I really don’t know what we can eat or drink because everything in someway or the other is harmful for us.
It is an interesting study. I don’t what I will do because I really addicted to coffee. I have at least five to six cup of cappuccino in a day and that is when I am not working on something which is demanding. If there is too much work pressure then the ratio tends to climb up. It is not that I am addicted to it, it is just that it makes me more alert and active. It drives my tiredness away. But now after reading this I am thinking of changing my habit.
I have about 1-2 cups of coffee starting at around 6:30 every morning. I love it and don't think I could ever give it up. I'm really surprised to learn some of that caffeine is still remaining when I go to bed. I don't drink pop (sodas for the rest of you) very often which is a good thing or I'd never sleep!
Yep people need to re-appraise their caffeine use. A lot of people's bodies are normalised to it, so they get no benefit, and in fact it makes their thinking more shallow and less well grounded.
Many people feel they cannot 'get going' in the morning without caffeine; in reality they are just experiencing withdrawal from not having ingested any over the previous hours.
Withdrawal is hard, but possible.
Just read the 170+ pages of comments of people trying to get off caffeine here;http://coffeefaq.com/site/node/11
And the research referenced here; http://caffeineevaluation.blogspot.co.uk/
I love drinking coffee when I am stressed out or working on any important task which is mentally taxing. Coffee rejuvenates me and keeps me active even when i am dead tired. I cant even think of giving up my coffee just because of some random research tells you that it is harmful for you. I need something more concrete to give up my daily dosage of coffee.
I don’t know what you have against coffee but I am never giving up my daily routine of having coffee. I have been having coffee from when I was a small kid and now I am old enough to grandsons of my own and not once did I suffer through any problems that you have stated in your blog.
I really didn’t know caffeine could be so dangerous. And to think I was having daily three to four cups of coffee. Well giving it up suddenly will not be easy. So I think I will try reducing it to one or two cups a day before completely stopping it. It was a really helpful post.
Well I really don’t know what to think of this blog. Like everything else caffeine also has its negative attributes but that doesn’t mean you have to give it up. If you give up everything that people say is harmful the soon there wont be anything left to give up. I believe that you should never overdo things, so if you take caffeine in moderation I don’t really think it wont harm you in anyway.
David just do a 30-day caffeine-free trial, and see how you feel at the end of that...
I cant survive without my morning coffee it's the only thing that wakes me up, I do however agree that coffee is not good for you. It doesnt actually give you any energy it simply stimulates your body and causes your heart rate to increase. Thanks for the post.