Tolerance, Conditioned Responses, and Your Favourite Coffee Mug

Welcome back!

Some of you may have heard of Sober October before. The first time I’d heard of Sober October was through Joe Rogan, podcaster, UFC commentator, and the ultimate hype man for when you need to eat a barrel of worms. He and some of his friends, every October for the past few years, have agreed to take part in a month long challenge where they abstain from their typical drugs of choice; cannabis and alcohol seem to be the most common. They also have a fitness challenge that runs alongside their abstinence, but for this article, I’ll keep it short and sweet.

The best-case scenario here is that everyone who is reading this doesn’t need a litre of coffee the moment they wake up in order to feel somewhat human. Or you aren’t swallowing the whole bathroom cabinet just to fall asleep. But! Maybe you know someone… who isn’t you… who may not even notice that it’s not optimal to be drinking more coffee than water in a day, or that winding down by smoking cannabis after a long day of smoking cannabis may not be the best way to go about things.

So I figured for this October, I would join in on the challenge. Now, I enjoy cannabis and coffee fairly frequently, and have noticed that the benefits and effects that were once achievable from very small doses now require larger and larger doses to achieve those same effects. I’m sure if you’re someone who occasionally uses alcohol, cannabis, or coffee, you’ve noticed this tendency. Maybe you’re drinking more coffee now than you were last October… what’s with that? Well, it’s not just because you’re getting older.

Tolerance and Sensitivity

When we take exogenous chemicals (from outside our body), we are purposefully changing our physiology for some given goal. When you drink coffee, it can be presumed that you are trying to alleviate fatigue or boost cognitive performance for a few hours. Or when you drink alcohol, you are trying to “loosen up” by briefly increasing positive feelings and inhibiting your usual inhibitions that would otherwise keep you from embarrassing yourself at a party. So why is it that over the months and years of drinking coffee and booze or smoking cannabis and cigarettes, you start to require more and more of the substance to reach the desired effect?

These chemicals interact with our physiology and temporarily manipulate the way these systems typically function. For example, when I drink coffee, the caffeine molecules are digested and shuttled to parts of my brain that have adenosine receptors that are typically responsible for telling me that I’m tired or alert. If I’m tired, my adenosine receptors are interacting with molecules like melatonin which, simply put, is a sleep molecule that aggregates more and more as the day goes on, eventually telling me I’ve hit my wall and it’s time to snooze! But in comes coffee, and as more and more caffeine gets shuttled to my brain, the caffeine actually replaces itself with melatonin and starts to interact with the adenosine receptors, which then tell me “melatonin is gone! I must not be tired anymore, time to go fast”.

The reason we start to need more and more of a chemical to get the same effect is due to a principle called Tolerance. Tolerance occurs in a number of ways, but most succinctly, it can be explained as when our body begins to “expect” a given molecule, i.e., caffeine, and starts to carry more of the enzymes and molecules that are used to break down and remove that molecule, essentially teaching our body to remove more exogenous compounds more quickly and efficiently. This is why you might be drinking 2 cups of coffee a day as opposed to 1 cup like you used to.

Conditioned Compensatory Response

Here’s another fascinating mechanism that can increase tolerance: the Conditioned Compensatory Response or CCR. The CCR is essentially your body learning to predict that an exogenous chemical is on it’s way. For example, if you always drink coffee at 9 am in your favourite blue mug, your body begins to understand that “9 am” and “favourite blue mug” means that caffeine is coming. And believe it or not, your body actually starts to upregulate and create those molecules and enzymes that it will need to break down the caffeine, BEFORE you’ve even had a sip… crazy right? One of the most protective aspects of our neurology is our brains capacity to predict outcomes of events based on past events that looked somewhat similar to current events. This capacity for association is probably one of our greatest gifts, and at the same time, one of our greatest downfalls. Our brain is capable of making very wide and often unexpected associations between things, and when you add in powerful, psychologically rewarding chemicals like caffeine, you best believe that the brain is going to remember everything leading up to that.

Want to give it a shot?

So maybe you’re not looking for total abstinence from your daily cup of joe, but you’re more than likely looking for a bigger bang for your buck. Try changing the environment in which you usually take your coffee or chemical of choice or make it differently (seriously, try a French Press if you haven’t before) or have it at a different time of day. Anything that you think your brain could use as a predictive sign that caffeine (or any chemical you’ve developed a tolerance to) is on it’s way can be used to manipulate your tolerance. Is it sort of funny that we’re basically talking about the brain tricking itself? Maybe it’s just me.

Disclaimer: If you are choosing to ingest a chemical that can lead to overdose like alcohol or opiates, be wary of how much you’re ingesting in your new environment/setting/time because the doses that you are tolerant to have the benefit of being predicted which leads to more rapid breakdown and protection against overdose. Taking the same dose to which you are accustomed to in your usual setting will be less powerful than taking that dose in a new setting. The same goes for less harmful chemicals like caffeine, which can induce significant anxiety at high doses. Essentially, consider yourself a beginner.

That’s all for this week folks. Tune in every week all month where I’ll be covering more physiology and psychology surrounding drug use, abstinence, and stigma. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S, the podcast episodes will be posted very soon! I’m sitting on a few that I really think you guys will like.

-Our Blue Sky Minds