We all love a good hot cup of coffee. Steaming hot with that pumpkin spice stuff they serve at Starbucks. I don’t care if you like coffee or not, according to google “Two billion cups of coffee are consumed every single day, with 1 billion coffee drinkers worldwide.” that’s a lot of coffee. So this article is aimed at the coffee drinkers.
Coffee went mainstream in the 1650’s, but the coffee break was only invented in Denver in 1940 as a result of people struggling to make ties for more than 5hours at a time. So they invented the coffee break to ‘boost production. Not to give people time to rest, but to boost production.
Now, although rest, when done adequately, does provide better focus, a 5 to 10-minute break isn’t enough for us to recover from 5 hours of work. So the logic of ingesting coffee, when we’re already tired, seems to me to be one that depletes us for the good of the company.
I’ll step away from company bashing for a second, to infuse a new idea. One of coffee as a tool. Like any tool, when used abusively, it can have undesirable effects on us.
Take social media for example, at its core, it’s an advertising platform that individuals have invested themselves on to and have ended up advertising their lives by publishing the best and only the best aspects of themselves. Some have harnessed this well, richer people tend to have an easier time advertising their lives as they have a lot of desirable toys many poor people want. A good number of women have taken to social media like flies to ****, because it appeals to their nature to flaunt and shine, they advertise ‘their business’ and attract gullible morons like sirens in the sea.
Another example would be smartphones. We used to love sitting in front of the TV as kids, we all gathered around the set on a Sunday afternoon, until we discovered it wasn’t productive or interesting to us. Then we got smartphones, we aspired to be like the important business type people we saw in the movies and took to sending emails with our hand device. Fast forward to today, we’re all hooked to a certain degree. Though we all know it’s not great for our health or our mindsets, but we do it anyway because the hook is that we’re all separated from each other and we’re hooked to wanting to connect to others but we can’t always do that so we depend on smartphones to bridge the gap. Obviously there are other details of why we’re addicted to social media, but that isn’t the point.
All of this to say that, coffee is but a tool, not a staple in our diet. And when we see it that way, we can actually down regulate our energy, recover efficiently, and heal our bodies well.
Imagine being on a high constantly, but never coming down to a grounded state. It’s the contrast we like, not the high. We like the high, because it gives us altitude over the low or the norm’ we live everyday. That’s just it though, our norm should be a norm for us, it shouldn’t always be high. Take a plane for example, if it doesn’t refuel it can’t fly high in the sky. So, it must be grounded to refuel after every so many flights. We humans aren’t machines though, so our ability to refuel isn’t mechanical and therefore isn’t as predictable as putting fuel in a tank or ingesting coffee. This is the big mistake we make, we don’t make that distinction, we just do it because that’s what everyone else does.
Which is why I propose the idea to you, as I already apply it for myself, to not consume coffee but only specific types of food and drinks that don’t stimulate you during your everyday life and find a baseline that is natural to you. That baseline is maintainable and devoid of illusion. It allows us to respect our bodies, our organs and our health.
And only, when the time comes, that one has refuelled properly which is having slow days, having down days, going through boring uneventful days, and so on, that one can choose to – if one needs the stimulus – ingest coffee to reach the nervous high.
For example, take the No Coffee row from monday to sunday. During the no coffee phase, we actually prepare, heal, compound nutrients in our body. And then on the sunday when we choose to consume coffee or a stimulus (going for a cycle or run for example), the preparation during our week has lead us to have a higher and more qualitative High on the sunday.
In the second Row ‘No Stimulus’, we eat and drink as neutral and calming nutrients as possible, and only if the event happens where we need to added output ‘on thursday’ do we consume the coffee, and then we go back to the status quo baseline of energetic normalcy.
No only is this better for our health, if we choose to consume coffee, it’s more effective when time comes for the added usage of the beverage. When I was a student, I never drunk coffee. Though I applied this same principle. No stimulus during X amount of time, and then I’d use sport/exercise, or music as a stimulus to get a creative output. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, though, looking back I was intuitively reading my energy and applying it efficiently.
Sometimes we just need time to let our lands lie fallow. If a farmer ploughs his fields consistently, they eventually get depleted and die out. Why do we think our body is any different? The illusion that we have anything technological or mechanical about us.
There’s a reason why, when we’re taking a medical drug for an extended period of time, that we’re advised to take a 3 to 4 day break after every 30 days of usage of the drug. Why do you think this is?
Test it out, see how it works for you. I’ll bet that you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
All the best,
Cherokee
Cherokee.blog 