• Question: whats the bad side effects from too much caffine?

    Asked by daisymarie2k11 to Suzi, Damien, Rachael, Simon, Tim on 21 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by morgansheridan.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi Daisy

      Thanks for the question. Too much caffeine in one go can lead to heart palpitations and anxious feelings, not very fun.
      Also in some people it can prevent you from being able to go to sleep.

      Too much caffeine over a long period of time leads to addiction. When people say they need a cup of coffee to get going in the morning, this is actually because their body is suffering from caffeine withdrawal from the previous day! An experiment was done in the psychology department where I used to work which showed that although people who drink coffee every day perform better at tasks involving the brain after they have coffee, people who don’t drink coffee every day get no improvement on the experiment from a cuppa! If the people who drink every day gave up coffee, after a while they’d get back to the level of alertness each morning that they used to be before they started drinking coffee!

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi @daisymarie2k11 and @morgansheridan

      Great answer from Suzi! I was interested to hear the results of the experiment Suzi was talking about as I don’t have drinks with caffeine in them very often, but I feel much more alert on the odd occasion when I do. According to the experiment suzi talks about that is probably just a feeling I’m having and it doesn’t really improve my ability to function. This is a good example of why we need experiments rather than just using our intuition about things 🙂

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