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Happiness is a Warm Coffee

Five takeaways:

1. When caffeine is ingested it takes on a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine, which is produced throughout the day to help you eventually relax– the body’s message that bedtime is approaching.
2. Caffeine disrupts adenosine receptors, effectively pushing the adenosine out of its parking spot in the brain. The jittery feeling you get from drinking a lot of coffee is a measure of how much your adenosine supply is disrupted.
3. Caffeine naturally makes you happy: study after study shows that intake of caffeine leads to a “significant increase in … happiness and calmness and decreases in tenseness.”
4. When viewed collectively, the macro effect of caffeine consumption is a boon to humanity. Writer Michael Pollan argues in his book Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World that caffeine’s arrival to Europe in the 17th century led to booms in productivity, safety, and innovation: that it accelerated the formation of the world we know today.
5. While too much of anything is never a positive thing, studies have shown that habitual coffee consumption can reduce all-cause mortality. It can also help autophagy, the natural process of cleaning out cellular trash, and it has been linked to reduced levels of fatty acid in the blood of aged mice, which has been linked to diabetes and cancer in humans.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
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