Caffeine vs Long Term Fatigue
There is a war underway. This is a constant struggle that we all fight to get enough sleep at night. Is your life so busy that it cuts into your precious shut-eye? Mine is, and I’m sure most of you reading this have dealt with it from time to time. Sleep is by far, the most precious thing in my life. Without it, I am destroyed, worthless, grumpy and I have no energy to sustain myself throughout the day or in my exercise routines. Personally, the issue of sleep can be very daunting. I try to get up at a certain time everyday and I try to go to bed around a certain time as well. This is not the case as much as I would like it. Sometime I work too late or I’m just not ready to go to sleep when the hour arrives. I end getting to sleep many hours later than I would have liked to. What does this mean? Lots of bad things for me during the next day. Then we stress out about the fact that we will be tired while we’re not getting to sleep and it makes it worse…. endless cycle.
Enter stage left caffeinated beverages. Coffee and energy drinks much like the ones you see pictured above are fancy soda marketing’s answer to your lack of energy. If I don’t get enough sleep tonight Ill just slam down one of these pretty colored cans or make the coffee extra strong in the morning and all will be well, right? It’s the caffeine that gives you energy right?
Wrong.
Caffeine is an energy catalyst which functions by stimulating your adrenal glands which then pump your bloodstream full of the super-human, fight-or-flight hormone called adrenaline. This is a system that is normally reserved for situations where a big bad guy is trying to thump on you and you need to pull some quick, fancy kung-fu, get to steppin’ or become worm food. Having such direct access to this vital system in our body which increases strength, speed and reflexes by as much as 400% is a bit of concern to me.
The emergence of popular disregard for our fatigue load is taking its toll on human health. Consuming caffeine on a daily basis allows you to effectively ignore your body’s natural desire to recuperate and get some rest. Do this on a continual basis while not getting enough sleep and you have a recurring disaster on your hands. Long Term Fatigue is what your body accumulates over time while not having enough rest from your day to day activities. Add exercise into this while continuing to not get enough sleep each night and you begin to develop an accumulation of Long Term Fatigue. This is not something you can sleep off in one night either. I have become so tired from long stretches of physical work with high stress and not enough sleep that it has taken me almost a month to start feeling fully rested again.
Want to know how much you have? This is the fun part. When you wake up in the morning are you dreading going to work and all you can think about is calling in sick just so you can sleep in till 11?
You have got some. Try this one too: Go into a bathroom or other darkened room during the middle of the day and leave the light off. There should be plenty of sunlight or brightness outside the room but leave the room dark with the blinds shut or having no windows. This will provide a high-contrast reflection of you in the mirror inside the darkened room. Now take a look at your eyes. You see those dark spots just under them? That is the accumulation of your long term fatigue, measurable by the congested blood capillary traffic that gets stuck in gridlock from your lack of sleep.
The bottom line is that we have become accustomed to not getting enough sleep, and if you have intentions on becoming an athlete in any way, you will need to master the art of daily, restful sleep.I am not telling you to abandon your morning cup of Joe either. Caffeine is an essential part of my exercise routine as it gives me a tremendous boost to my energy output at the gym, but I don’t need it to wake up. The best way to meter it out is to not drink it on the weekends and make sure you listen to your body when it tells you it’s tired.
