caffeine – Observations and Misunderstandings

Have you ever got to the end of your coffee and realised you want more. That the desire you had for coffee hasn’t been satiated and you’re not satisfied. As you delve deeper into the thoughts of the moment, that you can actually barely remember drinking the coffee at all. If that is the case there’s a good chance you were also doing something else while drinking the coffee. Perhaps working on your laptop. Maybe drinking your coffee on a long road trip. Or even grabbing a quick sip while doing some gardening. Busy to such an extent we didn’t give even a momentary awareness to the thing we desired, merely hoping to absorb it’s energy induced benefits.

It can’t just be the need to fill the caffeine addicted desire that makes us crave the cup, there must be something else involved like experiencing the taste and the sensations that consuming it provide. If you drink your coffee while completing whatever task you are fulfilling then this lack of focus and awareness of the act of enjoying and appreciating the coffee will be missed and arguably while it may be in your body, you may as well have not even drunk the coffee at all.

You forgot to enjoy the moment you very nearly created, this lack of presence denies existence itself. I’ll have another please.

We live in a world that moves at such speeds that we often don’t allow ourselves the necessary pleasure of just stopping and taking that five minutes to really observe the coffee and appreciate the satiating joy it can provide. So busy we don’t even have five minutes. But we always have five minutes, no one is truly that busy. We just didn’t notice that we wasted that five minutes robotically doing something else. Facebook perhaps.

In the past when I smoked I would have similar realisations. You crave a cigarette but you desire the whole experience not just the nicotine. I would sometimes roll one ‘for the walk’ but while there was a different satisfaction from that version, you still ended up fancying another upon arrival at the destination. There was something that hadn’t been entirely fulfilling about that version of the cigarette, just as there is something lacking from the coffee you forget you’re drinking.

We are so full of distractions. Perhaps we can use things like coffee or cigarettes, both together even, to use as markers to just take that five minutes to bring awareness to our surroundings, thoughts and the moment we’re experiencing. Just five minutes, just the length of time it takes to drink the coffee. There’s thousands of years of wisdom on being present, it can’t all be worthless now we have smart phones.

One particular bonus of delivering bread is that you get the opportunity to listen to a lot of podcasts. This week I discovered a new one called The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread which aims to prove or, more likely I suspect, disprove the claims behind certain fads and those made on behalf of products. They discuss things such as noise cancelling headphones, teeth whitening and 24-hour sunscreen. The two episodes I have listened to so far have been on CBD oil and caffeine shampoo. It turns out the claims made on behalf of them don’t quite stack up. The caffeine in the shampoo is apparently supposed to stimulate the hair growth but these claims it appears are not sufficiently backed up scientifically, the benefits if any are from the act of massaging the scalp and follicles. The oil was interesting because I have bought it myself in the past and was sure that while it was very subtle, there was certainly a more relaxed and calm feeling to my mind after a few weeks of use. It turns out it may have been a placebo of sorts but not that CBD doesn’t actually have that affect. Apparently to get the benefits made in the claims such as easing anxiety, depression and even heart disease you need to take a lot higher doses than the bottles can possibly prescribe. So the claims while being accurate to a degree are slightly misleading.

I heard first about CBD in random conversations, although at that point people were still talking about oils which contained both CBD and THC, the ingredient which provides the psychoactive qualities. In the last few years, coinciding especially with legalising of hemp and marijuana in the United States, CBD oil has gone viral. In the episode they discuss CBD chocolate, effervescent bath bombs and even infused leggings. I can imagine uber-hipsters wearing them while doing yoga and feeling all kinds of good about themselves. I bought some oil about eighteen months to two years ago just when people were really getting excited. I was most likely convinced to buy by all the positive stories I read on Facebook in articles, memes and others comments. Ultimately we were sharing advertising with each other, we were unconsciously doing the advertising; being both the process and the recipient. While it does provide useful services, social media is more and more becoming little other than an advertising platform. We spot the obvious sponsored posts but the smart ones are those which manage to integrate themselves into all the real ideas, science and news going around. This is just another front of the Fake News concept which in itself already feels like a tired old trope. It seems obvious and it is but sometimes it’s worth seeing and understanding social media from another angle. We’re not just selling ourselves but everything and to everyone.