Caffeine’s Side Effects (And Awesome Benefits) For Gamers

Is Caffeine Secretly Sabotaging Your Quest for Diamond?

Here’s something that might surprise you (or maybe not at all).

Every day, thousands of people do a search on Google, asking questions about coffee. But instead of asking what the tastiest blend is, a lot of them are asking things like ‘Why does coffee make me sleepy?’ or ‘Why does coffee make me tired?’.

That’s unheard of, right? Everyone knows coffee gives you energy and focus and is almost essential to epic performance.

Well, turns out that’s only kind of true. For sure, caffeine can turn you into Superman, but it can also act as your personal Kryptonite.

What Is Caffeine And How Does It Work?

Before I start, small disclaimer: things might get a little science-y. But that’s the point. I’ll try to make my explanation easy to digest for those among you that aren’t intimately familiar with neuroscience or any of that stuff.

Caffeine is a kind of chemical, which, as you might have guessed, has potent effects on your brain. The way it works is as follows. Basically, your brain has a system built in that causes you to either be tired and sleepy or wakeful and alert. This system mostly works through a neurotransmitter, a chemical called adenosine.

At any time of the day, you have certain amounts of adenosine floating around in your brain and your bloodstream. Depending on the time of day and the amount of time that you’ve spent being active and doing things, the amount of adenosine builds up. Your brain also has a way of detecting the levels of adenosine that are present, because it has these receptors that the adenosine binds to (think of the adenosine molecules as ‘keys’, and the receptors as ‘locks’).

Now, the more adenosine builds up, the more it’s going to bind to these receptors, giving your brain the message that time has passed and you’ve been active a lot. So it responds by making you tired and sleepy, to get you to get some rest and go to sleep and recover.

That’s usually how things are supposed to work. But then, suddenly, a new challenger appears!

When you drink your cup of coffee or your energy drink, you flood your brain with caffeine. As it turns out, caffeine has a very similar physical structure to adenosine, so it also fits those receptors. Caffeine then binds to those adenosine receptors, but doesn’t have the same effect – you don’t get tired and sleepy anymore. Instead, you’re wide awake, focused and alert. Awesome, right?

At first – yes, very awesome. But then the caffeine wears off. And now, all that built up adenosine, which is still floating around in your brain, finally gets the chance to do its job. And now you get your energy crash, and you need more coffee to stay awake.

“Okay, so just drink another cup or take another pill, problem solved.”

And that might actually work…for a short while.

I’ll get into the details later, but first, we’ll have to explain a bit how caffeine works.

What Does Your Brain Look Like?! Does It Look Like A B*tch?!

The thing is, your brain doesn’t really like being cheated very much. After a while, it figures out that you’re gaming the system, and it adapts to your Billy Mitchell ways. It does this by making more adenosine receptors, so that it becomes easier to sense the adenosine that is present. And suddenly, if you want to block all those receptors, you’ll need to take in more caffeine to do so.

Again, no problem, right? Just drink more coffee or take some ULTIMATE ENERGY BOOSTER X9000 with 500 milligrams of caffeine per serving. And that does *seem* to work. Your energy and focus still increases, right? So it’s still working.

Well, again, yes and no.

First of all, you have to take into consideration that that amount of caffeine has major side effects, like increased cortisol (your ‘stress hormone’) levels, which breaks down your body, a making you feel jittery and anxious, as well as sending your heart rate into the stratosphere.

And even if you don’t have those effects, what you’re actually feeling is not a boost, but a return to your normal levels (which now feels like a boost). Because of the increased adenosine receptor count in your brain, even a little adenosine in your brain is going to have much stronger effects. So your baseline of sensitivity to adenosine is higher, which also makes you more sleepy and fatigued when you’re not on caffeine.

So what has actually happened is that your brain has cast a permanent debuff on yourself, and caffeine only reverses that debuff, but doesn’t provide that original buff anymore.

So when you are caffeine dependent, every morning you wake up, you are feeling kinda ‘meh’ , unfocused and lazy. Because you’ve been on caffeine for so long, you don’t recognize that this is not your normal state of mind anymore. The first thing that springs into your mind when you wake up in the morning is that you just need your daily caffeine fix to get your performance boost again.

But in fact, what’s going on is that this ‘daily boost’ isn’t a performance boost anymore, it’s just undoing your caffeine withdrawal debuff. So by making yourself dependent on high amounts of caffeine every day, you have in fact lowered your own stats and decreased your performance semi-permanently, lowering your mood, making you feel tired, sleepy, unfocused, lowering reaction time, and screwing with your memory.

And now you’ve come to think that those lowered stats are your original, normal stats, because you feel like this every day (unless you use caffeine again). Pretty messed up, right?

Why Energy Drinks Actually Make You Tired

Besides just regular caffeine from coffee or tea, the energy drinks that gamers commonly consume are even worse. That’s because they usually don’t just contain extremely high amounts of caffeine, but also lots of sugar and artificial flavorings. If you drink multiple of these a day when on a gaming binge, you might easily get over 1000 mgs of caffeine on a regular basis, besides tons of sugar and calories that make you fat.

Let me repeat what I said earlier: energy drinks do give you an initial boost of energy. But that initial boost will wear off once you use them often. Besides the negative neurotransmitter adaptations we discussed above, there are also a few other nasty side-effects from using energy drinks.

We’ll list them for you.

Sugar Lowers Orexin, Which Makes You Sleepy

Aside from adenosine, which we discussed earlier, there are also other neurotransmitters that regulate our sleep and wakefulness. One of these is called orexin.

Orexin is the neurotransmitter that gives you a feeling of wakefulness and energy, in the sense of ‘let’s do it!’. When orexin levels are high, you feel motivated, energized. It makes you feel like you want to accomplish lots of things and gives you the energy to do them.

Naturally, if you want to go and kick ass in CS2 or League of Legends, you would prefer that you orexin levels were high.

When your body experiences a rapid increase in blood sugar, the levels of orexin in the brain drop. Of course, this will happen when you consume energy drinks with high amounts of refined sugar. This makes you feel low energy and sleepy. You might even feel like nodding off. No way you’re going to play at your very best in that state.

Refined Sugar Causes Inflammation And Damages Your Mitochondria

Science has shown that consuming a lot of refined sugar creates lots of inflammation in the body. This is bad for multiple reasons.

Going back to our orexin story: chronic inflammation is the most powerful suppressor of orexin that exists. So if you’re constantly feeling low-energy, chances are you might suffer from chronic inflammation.

Taking in lots of refined sugar also tends to make you fat as well – but we hope you already knew this – and excess body fat in itself also releases a lot of inflammatory substances, making the problem even worse.

Refined sugar also damages your mitochondria. Mitochondria are parts of your cells that produce energy. They’re literally the power plants of your cells. To have high energy levels, without needing to use stimulants all the time, you want your mitochondria to be strong and powerful. If they get damaged, you’re going to feel weak and fatigued all the time. Then you want to use more stimulants again.

If you want to become the very best in any game, you don’t want to be in that state.

Consuming Refined Sugar Drains Your Body Of Nutrients

Normally speaking, sugar provides energy. The sugar you ingest through food is turned into glucose, which is then transported to your cells, where your mitochondria transform it into ATP, which is the fuel your cells use as an energy source.

However, creating energy from glucose requires certain vitamins. If you consume ‘real food’ that also contains these vitamins, then there is no problem. But if you consume empty calories from lots of refined, added sugars with zero nutritional value, your body’s existing stores of those vitamins will be depleted fast. This will make it harder for your body to produce energy. Also, this will drain your cellular levels of ATP (so your energy stores), because ATP is also needed to turn certain sugars into energy.

ATP is what gives each and every one of your cells the energy it requires. This is what gives YOU energy. When you run out of ATP, you will feel weak and fatigued. You’re not going to win a lot of games like that.

Do You Need To Stop Consuming Caffeine? Not Really.

If the above heading confuses you, we don’t blame you.

Thing is, natural products that contain caffeine, when used right, actually do have very well documented positive effects on mood, focus, physical and mental performance. Aside from that, the antioxidants and other plant compounds that you can find in certain caffeine-containing products like coffee and tea are associated with:

• Lower risk of heart disease
• Lower risk of cancer
• Lower risk of neurological diseases
• Lower risk of diabetes
• Anti-aging effects

So, those are all really good things that you would obviously want to enjoy.

The kicker is, those positive, performance-enhancing effects only appear to happen when you don’t consume coffee every day. That insane mood boost, laser focus, and god-tier reaction speed only happen to people who aren’t dependent on it and who don’t consume it regularly and in large amounts. The rest of you, who are dependent and take large amounts of caffeine only ‘don’t feel shitty anymore’ after using caffeine, and that’s about it.

So here’s to go about it.

If you want to regain your original stats and undo that debuff, you’re going to have to go cold turkey for a month or so. Yes, at least an entire month. It took a while for you to acquire all that damage, and it’s going to take a while to reset your adenosine receptors to their normal levels again. But that unfortunately means no more caffeine for you, at least for a while.

Then, once that month is up, and you have restored your brain to its former glory, and you want to enjoy the benefits of caffeine consumption again, you’re going to want to cycle your use.

That means you want to only use caffeine sparingly, and in line with when you most need it. So, if you have a ranked game or tournaments going on, you’d want to use some caffeine, but on the days you just do some casual training, you’d switch to something else.

Ideally (but that’s up to you), you should also try to get your caffeine from healthy sources, instead of unhealthy energy drinks with massive amounts of caffeine and tons of added sugars or artificial flavorings and sweeteners.

One way to do it would be to use caffeine on weekdays, and then go off it on the weekend. Or you could do it in reverse, which would be even better.

Another way to do it would be to use it two weeks on, two weeks off, but that might not be the most practical way of cycling. You’d be without your buff two full weeks.

Again, you have to find a way to use it in a way that works best for you and for your schedule. Just keep this one rule in mind: the more frequently you use caffeine, the less powerful of a  performance booster it becomes and the more you’re going to experience those negative effects on your stats.

Are We Hypocrites? Yeah, Maybe A Bit.

Now, before you leave, we want to touch on just one more thing. You could say that Ranked XP also contains caffeine, so that kind of makes us hypocrites. In a way, you might actually be right. And it was actually a big point of discussion when we developed Ranked XP if we were going to include caffeine in our product.

We wanted to make the best product we actually could, that would enhance gaming and esports performance. To do that, we couldn’t get around the fact that caffeine, when used correctly, actually has really potent cognitive enhancing effects (for the non-addicts). If we wanted to make the best gaming nootropic we could, there were very good reasons to put it in.

So in the end, we did decide to include caffeine, but we made sure to keep the amount limited. One serving of Ranked XP contains about 77 mg of caffeine, which is the same as you’ll find in a cup of espresso. If you’re not a caffeine junkie, that should still be a pretty potent boost.

Certain brands of cognition boosters and nootropics tend to brag about the high amounts of caffeine they contain. Sometimes the levels of caffeine are up to 200 mg or more per serving. If you paid attention earlier, you’ll know that’s not really something to be proud of.

We limited the dosage of caffeine to reasonable levels. We also made sure to source our caffeine from guarana instead of using synthetic sources. Besides providing a cognitive boost, guarana has potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which is a pretty awesome bonus to have.

To repeat our advice from earlier: if you take Ranked XP, be sure to cycle on and off once in a while. That way, you will experience the best results. This is our official advice if you want to enjoy the optimal benefits of our elite, diamond-tier performance enhancer. If you want to max out your health and performance stats, this is the way to go.

In the future, it is very likely that we will release a decaf version, so you’ll be able to cycle and still enjoy the benefits of the other ingredients.

One final suggestion. If you want to have lots of energy without the constant need for energy drinks and other stimulants: eat healthy, work out, and get enough sleep 🙂