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Why Coffee Is A Silent Career Killer And Why You Should Switch To Tea


If you believe that coffee can improve your performance at work, it’s not. In fact, it’s actually a silent career killer. Learn why you should sip tea instead.

The Benefits Of Coffee Reviewed

Many coffee drinkers drink coffee in office because it improves performance, but is this true? According to a 2010 publication that summarizes a wide body of research articles on this topic and concludes that even though caffeine increases alertness, it usually does not improve performance of learning and memory related tasks.

coffee versus tea

The study also finds that low caffeine consumption reduces anxiety while a high dose actually increases anxiety. At last, there is mix scientific evidence on age related effects. Some studies find no age related effects while other studies actually find a decline in mental performance when older people consume coffee.

Even more recent, a new research by the Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal. In other words, stop drinking caffeine actually reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. So the only way to get back to normal performance is to drink coffee, and when you do consume it, you feel like it’s improving your performance significantly. In fact, caffeine is only taking your performance back to normal level  for a short period!

At last a known side effect is that caffeine makes it harder for you to fall asleep. However, what less people know is that the worst comes when you finally fall asleep: caffeine disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing the rapid eye movement (REM) when your brain is recuperating and processing emotions. As caffeine disrupts this, you will wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. So what happens after is that you will naturally long for another cup of coffee and the vicious cycle continues…

See also the image below for some other side effects of coffee.

coffee side effects

Why You Should Switch To Tea

But don’t worry, tea is luckily offered at many workplaces around the world besides coffee. Here’s you should make the switch:

  1. Tea contains caffeine, but at a much lower dose, so you will not easily get an overdose. Here’s a tea caffeine guide if you want to know more.
  2. There are decaffeinated teas for those who are very sensitive to caffeine (even though it will still contain some caffeine). Besides, there are many herbal teas that are free of caffeine such as this calming Chrysanthemum tea and Rooibos tea.
  3. Tea does not only contain less caffeine but it is also distributed over a longer period of time, so result in mood swings. See the image below for further clarification.

coffee tea caffeine table distribution over time

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