People are under a lot of stress. They’re sleeping during the daytime. They’re awake during the nighttime. They’re drinking three cups of coffee after 4:00 in the afternoon. (I happen to be guilty of this vice). They can’t function in their early morning meetings or classes without at least two shots of espresso. How did we get here?
In the words of an anonymous English Puritan poet in 1674, “Coffee arrives, that grace and wholesome Liquor/That heals the stomach, makes the genius quicker,/Relieves the memory, revives the sad,/And cheers the Spirits, without making mad.” Does coffee really “make the genius quicker”? Or does it make the so-called genius jittery, overtired, and manic? Considering how some sleep-deprived people behave when they have had too much coffee to drink, maybe it does make us “mad” after all…Maybe this anonymous poet never had to pull an all-nighter.
As Meir Kryger explains in The Mystery of Sleep, caffeine counteracts the effects of adenosine and thus keeps people awake. Adenosine, which is instrumental in transferring energy in the body, works to stimulate sleep and reduce alertness. Caffeine does the opposite. The fragrant beverage undoubtedly made “the genius quicker”: Coffee—both literally and figuratively—awakened the rising middle class of Enlightenment Europe from its previously alcoholic daze to a realm of political thought that relied on rational, capitalist thinking and a productive work ethic. European coffee houses emerged between the mid-seventeenth century and the nineteenth century, in tandem with the growth of Europe’s economically productive, politically-oriented middle class.
Across the pond, coffee and other caffeinated beverages such as tea had significant political ramifications in the English colonies. Most notably, the Boston Tea Party united the colonists behind the cause for liberation from the British crown. As the historian of colonial American history T.H. Breen writes in his article “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” the impetus for “this new solidarity was not so much that the Americans shared a common political ideology, but rather that the [Tea Act of 1773] affected an item of popular consumption found in almost every colonial household.” Tea had reached the farthest corners of colonial American households, regardless of social class or income. Breen elaborates that for colonists fuming about the Tea Act, “it was not difficult to transmit perceptions of liberty and rights through a discourse on tea.” The discourse around the Tea Act and the subsequent Boston Tea party in December of the same year only increased the popularity of caffeinated beverages in the colonies, a popularity that exists in the United States to this day. If taxation without representation gave us cappuccinos, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
The invigorating effects of coffee were understood for centuries in the Arab world, particularly in the coffeehouses of the Ottoman Empire, before reaching the West. Historians including Ralph Hattox often credit Ethiopia with the agricultural development of the coffee plant and its powerful beans that would eventually be dispersed throughout the Western hemisphere. Likely originating in Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century, coffee arrived in the Ottoman metropolises of Mecca and Cairo by the year 1510.
Initially associated with Islamic rituals, such as the Sufi practice of using coffee to prevent sleep during night ceremonies, coffee eventually shed its early religious associations and took center stage in Arab life as a social drink. Whereas alcohol is notorious for its capacity to stimulate uncontrollable emotions, coffee was revered by Enlightenment Europeans, as a “drug for sharpness and clarity of thought” in the words of the British journalist Tom Standage. Simply put, alcohol is an outlet for emotion; coffee is a tool of reason.
According to Michael Pollan, food journalist and author of Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World, those in power have often feared psychedelic drugs, even coffee, as politically dangerous. A symbol of sobriety, diligence, and reasoned energy, coffeehouse brew competed with, and in many ways overpowered, tavern beer as the beverage of choice for a newly modern Europe. Pollan generalizes that before Europeans started drinking coffee, “everybody was drunk in Europe most of the time” considering that a day’s beverages consisted of beer in the morning, beer at noon, and beer at night. Coffee’s conquest of beer represented a much larger shift from a medieval and agricultural to a modern and industrial way of life. The industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries needed to replace alcohol, which was highly disadvantageous for working with machinery.
Kryger notes in the section of his book titled “Handling the Workday” that workers who operate heavy machinery or engage in similarly dangerous tasks “should make sure that there is a system in place that allows them to be relieved for a rest if they become too sleepy.” The danger posed by sleep-deprived people handling heavy equipment is not to be scoffed at. Operating dangerous machinery at night has posed serious risks since the advent of the industrial revolution. Pollan points out that because caffeine breaks human subordination to nature’s cycles of light and dark, the very concept of a “night shift” did not exist until workers were caffeinated.
Although coffee has historically been revered in contrast to alcohol as a promoter of sobriety rather than intoxication, it is important to recognize the perils of relying on caffeine to stay awake. English physician Thomas Willis declared in the mid-seventeenth century that “there is almost none but understands well enough by experience [coffee’s] efficacy and virtue for the driving away of sleep.” I myself am all too familiar with the seemingly magical ability of coffee to help me stay awake when studying for an exam, or, ironically, when writing a paper about the mystery of sleep and its relationship to coffee. Kryger argues that coffee is not an adequate substitute for sleep. He cites the recent developments of airlines that are “beginning to allow copilots to nap on long-haul flights.” He elaborates on this point by specifying that “the naps must not be too long, however; people who fall into a deep sleep might wake up groggier than they were before the nap.”
Kryger further notes that while “some people will use caffeine in its various forms to try to be alert,” fatigued or even exhausted workers “should consider finding a place to sack out” as opposed to powering through by “having doughnuts and coffee during a break.” In the days of the Industrial Revolution when the “night-shift” was invented, workers could not take naps when they became tired. Picture this: an eighteenth century English factory worker nicks a piece of nearby cloth, spreads it out delicately on the cleanest patch of filthy factory floor he can find, and conks out next to the Spinning Jenny while his industrial compatriots continue to toil away in obscurity. This worker would surely be fired on the spot, if not beaten or abused in other ways. Today, however, we can hope that employers treat their employees more humanely. These new airline policies with respect to napping rights are a step in the right direction—if not a step directly into bed.
Overconsumption of caffeine can also be a sign of depression. Kryger underscores the fact that “people with depression suffer from a variety of sleep problems.” He enumerates several examples: over 50% of people suffering from depression have insomnia, while “others have trouble staying asleep, or they wake up early in the morning and have trouble falling back to sleep.” Kryger highlights the reality that if depressed people are extremely tired during the day, “they might take a long nap or drink excessive amounts of caffeinated beverages, both of which could inhibit their nighttime sleep.”
Whether the beverage was consumed during an elegant afternoon luxuriating in a Viennese coffee house or throughout a late night spent tinkering with the Watt steam engine at a North London factory, the coffee of the seventeenth century was far weaker in its adenosine-counteracting qualities than the coffee we drink today. As historian Brian Cowan points out, there was “no early modern espresso.” Quite on the contrary, in England, water from the River Thames was often used in coffee, and the estimated ratio was 1 ounce of coffee grounds for every 1 quart of water. Avid coffee-drinkers of today would surely spit out this watery java upon its making contact with their taste buds.
Although the coffee itself was weak and watery, coffee’s effects on European society were nothing short of revolutionary. The power of European coffeehouses between the mid-seventeenth and nineteenth centuries rose alongside an increasingly politically active, successful middle class. The coffeehouse’s existence as the focal point of European society was a classic case of the chicken and the egg, or in this case, the coffee grounds and the milk; coffeehouses both awakened and resulted from excitement about spaces for social, political, and economic discourse.
For those of us who can’t seem to stop drinking coffee, how can we break our reliance on the dangerously caffeinated gustatory delight? Whether it be a hot latte swirled with regular cow’s milk, or an iced chai freckled with cinnamon and an almost invisible yet omnipresent dusting of coffee shavings, the drink is irresistible to me and many of my peers. For starters, I believe that understanding our dependence on coffee can help us break the vicious cycle of overreliance on caffeine. As we learned in class, all life on our planet is dependent on the sun, and all living organisms “probably have clock genes” that developed synchronously with their exposure to sunlight.
The rotation of the earth causes the circadian rhythm, a biological clock that varies in its timetable from one organism to another. Principally influenced by light and darkness, circadian rhythms, though strong and resilient in many ways, can be broken—and if breaking the human circadian rhythm is a crime, then we should handcuff our iced lattes and put them behind bars. As Michael Pollan notes, caffeine very nearly destroys our body’s natural inclination to become sleepy when it is dark outside, a core tenet of the circadian rhythm. It interferes with the natural rhythms of wakefulness and sleepiness, sun and moon, light and dark.
In a study conducted at the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder in 2015, researchers found that “evening caffeine consumption delays the human circadian melatonin rhythm.” Having conducted a double-blind study, the researchers found that the “equivalent amount of caffeine as that in a double espresso 3 hours before habitual bedtime induced a phase delay of the circadian melatonin rhythm in humans by ~40 minutes.” Not only does caffeine send our circadian rhythm into haywire, caffeine withdrawal can also lead to serious sleep problems. In a study conducted at the School of Applied Psychology at Griffith University in Southport, Queensland, Australia, researchers found that frequent and semi-frequent coffee drinkers “tend to confirm a ‘net benefit’ for caffeine use, particularly in relation to psychomotor performance.” While coffee-drinkers may be reluctant to admit to coffee’s negative effects on their sleeping patterns, the researchers duly noted that “motivation and compensation may mask the deterioration that occurs during fatigue-induced task difficulty.”
Today, the concept of “awakening” is revered in “woke” culture. Why do so many people equate social consciousness with being awake? Is it not true that some of our most profound thoughts come to us in dreams? What is so terrible about being asleep? The word “woke” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the state of being “alert to injustice in society, especially racism.” Many 21st century coffee drinkers use wokeness as a foundation for critiquing the institutionalized oppression of Western capitalist structures. Ironically, centuries ago the awakening effects of coffee and the coffeehouse subsisted as the cornerstones of industrial capitalism in a newly modern Europe.
Capitalism and anti-capitalism aside, perhaps the common ground (no pun intended) between Enlightenment Europe’s emphasis on reasoned alertness and the twenty-first century focus on being “woke” is in fact coffee—or rather, what coffee represents. A symbol of an awakening and maybe even wokeness, coffee sharpens the mind and encourages sensitivity to political, economic, and social issues. But we also have coffee to thank for insomnia, daytime naps, and so many more problems. The mystery of coffee, much like its cousin the mystery of sleep, is certainly not an easy case to crack.