A 2017 study found that coffee was associated with a probable decreased risk of several forms of cancer. Photograph: Emily Suzanne McDonald/Getty Images/Tetra Images
Every day, around the world, 2bn cups are consumed. But what actually happens after you swallow that first mouthful? Here is everything you need to know.
Coffee. Go juice. Liquid gold. The one with all the psychoactive properties. Once used by Sufi mystics as an aid to concentration during religious rituals, it’s now one of the most ubiquitous drinks on the planet: we get through about 2bn cups a day.
It’s also one of the most valued and pored-over drinks. One particularly sought-after blend, Black Ivory, which is produced by encouraging elephants to digest arabica berries, retails at more than £2,000 a kilogram, while coffee-making championships attract thousands of spectators.
But what does it actually do to you? You might have a vague idea that caffeine wakes you up, wrecks your sleep and can aid sporting performance, but do you know how much you can drink safely? Considering that a typical americano contains more than 100 biologically active ingredients other than caffeine, what do you know about the drug you are glugging two or three times a day? What is happening inside your body when you have a double espresso in the morning?
How quickly does it act?
The effects may start before you even take a sip. Just inhaling the scent of coffee can improve memory and stimulate alertness, according to a 2019 study of 80 18- to 22-year-olds. Another study, from 2018, found that subjects did better in tests of analytical reasoning after a whiff of the good stuff. That said, the researchers in the 2018 study suggested that the effect probably had a placebo element, with the expectation of improved performance proving at least partly responsible.
A lot of people have three coffees back to back in the morning. They’re at 1,000-1,500mg before lunchtime….Nick Littlehales
What about when you actually drink it? “There’s a chance that the use of any supplement will carry a placebo effect,” says Dr Mike T Nelson, a researcher and performance specialist who recently co-wrote the International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position on coffee. “Many researchers use randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials to try to ferret that out. And if you look at some of the higher-dose caffeine studies and when they have been compared with a placebo, we still see a performance-enhancing effect of caffeine.”
This is why the effects really kick in some time after you start drinking. While a 2008 study found that the effects of a cup of coffee can occur just 10 minutes after ingestion, it said peak caffeine concentration in the blood occurred after 45 minutes.
How does coffee wake you up?
Caffeine acts as a central nervous system stimulant – making you more alert and focused, but potentially also more irritable and anxious. It’s all to do with your body’s adenosine receptors, which help to regulate your heart rate, blood flow and sleep-wake cycles. When adenosine – an organic compound that occurs naturally in your body – binds to these receptors, it triggers physiological responses that lead to a decrease in cellular activity, often promoting drowsiness and sleep.
Caffeine can fool your nerve cells and bind to these instead, preventing adenosine from doing its thing. This promotes increased alertness, while also allowing the brain’s stimulating neurotransmitters (such as dopamine) to run wild. This makes it a mood-booster for many people, but can also lead to anxiety after high doses. While your body adapts to caffeine’s effects after a while, different people can have very different responses to the same amount of it.
Can it really boost athletic performance?
It certainly can. A 2020 study of amateur cyclists found that coffee improved performance by an average of 1.7%. This may not sound like much, but it’s a big deal for even moderately competitive athletes. An older British study reported a dose-related improvement in tests of reaction times, memory and visual-spatial reasoning among coffee drinkers….Continue reading…
What’s your poison: caffeine”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 26 July 2009. Retrieved 15 January 2014.Jamieson RW (2001). “The essence of commodification:
It is important to be pleasant, knowledgeable, and dressed appropriately all the time to maintain a positive business image, but that’s just part of being a professional. Learn how to put together and maintain the whole professional package from how to dress to impress through how to behave around and communicate with customers and clients.
Dress the Part
Nothing too tight, too short or too revealing is a good general rule to follow when dressing as a professional. Buy and wear garments of the best quality you can afford.
However, how you dress as a business professional will greatly depend on what business you’re in. If your business involves leading bicycle tours, then obviously spandex is a fine choice. If you’re a health care professional, you’ll be wearing a uniform.
The general dress watchword for professionals is conservative. Want to be taken seriously? Dress seriously. Save the trendy pieces for off-duty times.
Be sensible. Is it a good idea to be wearing those 4-inch heels when you have four properties to show that day?
Pay attention to your accessories. Don’t overdo the jewelry. Professional and tacky do not go together. If you need to carry a handbag, a portfolio, or a briefcase, it should be current and in good repair. Shoes should be conservative, appropriate to your profession, in good repair, and polished if necessary.
Be Prepared
Show up on time for appointments. Showing up late for a party is fashionable. Showing up late for a business appointment is rude. Avoid being late by planning to be early. If you are late, apologize first thing when you arrive.
Show up ready to go to work. Inside you may feel tired, droopy, and panting for another caffeine hit, but you cannot be dragging yourself around or begging for cups of coffee on a client site. No matter how you feel, you have to present yourself as enthusiastic to go right to work—and do it.
Bring all your supplies/equipment with you. Showing up without the equipment you need to do the job is unprofessional.
Act business-like at all times. You wouldn’t walk into a client’s house, throw yourself onto their sofa, and put your feet up on their coffee table, would you? Well, there are lots of other behaviors that you need to avoid too: smoking, eating and drinking, hugging anyone, or anything else that is not directly related to the job. If someone offers you a cup of coffee or a glass of water, that’s OK, but don’t solicit the offer.
All times means everywhere. You need to act professionally outside client sites and in your office too. Rude or obnoxious behaviors will be noted by anyone who witnesses them and, if they don’t cost you your current client, may cost you a client down the road. So don’t be rude to that person who just stole your parking space; they might be someone you want to do business with.
Behavior
Don’t be over-familiar. A professional is not a friend. As a professional, you want to be friendly, of course, but you don’t want to be encouraging personal confidences or sharing them.
Learn how to chit-chat. On the other hand, you don’t want to come off as super serious and nothing but. Especially when you are meeting a client for the first time, a little general chit-chat can go a long way toward making you look human and your client comfortable.
Have your paperwork in good order. If you’re using a tablet, smartphone or laptop, that’s great, but whatever you show the client still needs to be organized, neat, and understandable, whether it’s a project plan or an invoice. Always double-check your numbers. A client who spots an error is a client you’ve probably lost.
Say thank you. Always thank a client for her time at the end of a meeting, and if they do business with you, say thank you for that, too. A handwritten note is a great way to do this. And don’t forget to ask for a referral or testimonial if things went well.
Customer Communication
Give clients and customers face-time when you’re talking to them. Put your phone away and look them in the eye. Customers and clients want to feel that you’re giving them your whole attention, and you don’t want to lose customers by making them feel unimportant.
Listen to your clients and customers actively. Use behaviors such as mirroring and rephrasing to let them know that you hear them. Practice active listening.
Eliminate habits that interfere with communication. Don’t eat or chew gum when meeting with a client. If you’re meeting in an office, don’t play background music; it can make it very difficult for some people to hear what you’re saying, even when played at a low level.
Learn how to give a firm handshake. As a professional, you’ll be expected to do it many many times, and you’ll also be judged many times on what yours is like. It’s worth the time to learn how to get it right.
Phone Etiquette
Turn your phone off when you’re meeting with a client. Taking calls or otherwise checking your phone when you’re meeting with someone gives the person you’re meeting the message that they’re unimportant to you.
Turn off your phone in social venues where ringing would disturb others, such as performances, movies, concert recitals, etc. In other situations, such as restaurants, setting your phone to vibrate is a good option. It does not make you look professional to be sitting in a restaurant with others and talking incessantly on your phone; it makes you look obnoxious.
If you do receive an important phone call that you must take while in a social venue, excuse yourself and take the call outside or somewhere inside such as a foyer. The people around you who don’t have to listen to you talking into your phone will appreciate it.
Do not discuss the call when you return. Simply say something such as, “Now, where were we?” and carry on. For one thing, no matter how important the call was to you, chances are extremely high they won’t care.
Do not ignore phone calls. Business calls should be answered by the next day at the latest. Can’t manage it? Then it’s time to invest in some additional phone services or hire a receptionist or answering service.
If you use voicemail phone services, check it regularly. It is frustrating for customers when they keep getting the “mailbox full” message when they’re calling you.
Email
Like phone calls, business/professional-related emails need to be answered within one business day if possible.
Design a professional signature using your email program and then use it on all your business-related email.
Use business-like salutations and complimentary closes. Start a professional email with the person’s name alone or with “Hello.” “All the best,” “Cheers,” and “Sincerely” all are good choices for closes.
Use full English sentences and words in the body of your professional email. Think of email much as you would a professional letter, and always proofread and spellcheck your email before you send it. Errors make you look unprofessional.
Turn off your email program’s ping or beep alert and check email at set times during the day. You have a lot of important things to do each day and the more often you drop everything to read the latest email that’s come in, the fewer of them you’ll get done.
Social Media
Keep your personal and your business social media accounts or profiles separate. If you’re on Facebook, for instance, you should have both a business page and a personal one. LinkedIn is one of the few exceptions to this as it’s currently a network solely for professionals.
Don’t post anything on any of your social media pages that you don’t want to have follow you around the rest of your life. Increasing numbers of businesses and government agencies are data-mining social media—including some that might have become future employers or customers of yours if only you hadn’t made that stupid post back then.
The same applies to your comments on other people’s posts and websites. Choose which opinions you “like” or share carefully, keeping in mind that some of your opinions may alienate potential clients.
Keep your posts on your business profiles professional. If in doubt, don’t post.
Choose one or two platforms, post regularly, and be responsive. Answer people’s questions and respond to their comments, even if it’s just with a “like.”
While the research doesn’t claim drinking more coffee adds years to your life, it’s nevertheless an intriguing association that scientists are keen to investigate further. It’s also important to weigh the findings against previous studies linking brain shrinkage and an increased risk of dementia with a daily habit of six or more cups of coffee.
“In this large, observational study, ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause,” says electrophysiologist Peter Kistler, from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Australia.
“The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle.”The UK Biobank is a large-scale database containing records on individuals’ genetics, health, and lifestyle. In this study, the sample provided an average of 12 and a half years’ worth of health and dietary information on 449,563 people with a median age of 58.
The participants were grouped according to their daily coffee consumption, and what type of coffee they usually drank – with just over 100,000 people reporting that they didn’t drink coffee at all. As part of the analysis, the researchers factored in the effects of age, sex, ethnicity, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnoea, smoking status, and tea and alcohol consumption.
From there, Kistler and colleagues could compute differences in heart health outcomes and death from any cause for all coffee drinkers over the study time period, compared to those who didn’t drink coffee. Drinking instant, ground and even decaffeinated coffee were all associated with a lower likelihood of death. Those who drank two or three cups of coffee a day had better odds of living longer than those who didn’t drink any.
Researchers can only guess what might be behind the relationship. If it is the coffee itself, a wide variety of potential compounds could be responsible. “Caffeine is the most well-known constituent in coffee, but the beverage contains more than 100 biologically active components,” says Kistler.
“It is likely that the non-caffeinated compounds were responsible for the positive relationships observed between coffee drinking, cardiovascular disease and survival.” Digging deeper, the team found coffee consumption was also linked with the development of cardiovascular disease, with the lowest risk seen amongst those who consumed two to three cups a day.
There were slightly different findings for the risk of arrhythmia or an abnormal heart rhythm – here ground and instant coffee, but not decaffeinated, were linked to a lower likelihood of developing the condition. Once again, just a couple of cups each day seemed to be the sweet spot.
As a lot of previous research has shown, coffee is a complex substance that interacts with the body in a number of complex ways – ways that scientists are still trying to understand. That this study covered so many people over an extended period only adds weight to the link between coffee drinking and longevity.
However, there are some limitations to consider. The database records were predominantly Caucasian, making it harder to generalize the findings across a more ethnically diverse population. Coffee drinking was also self-reported rather than monitored, and the database doesn’t factor in changes in coffee consumption or coffee type over time.
For now, sip that morning brew guilt free – chances are it’s doing you some good. “Our findings indicate that drinking modest amounts of coffee of all types should not be discouraged but can be enjoyed as a heart healthy behavior,” says Kistler.
While past studies hinted that coffee might have a dark side, newer research suggests that it may actually have health benefits.
Why the reversal? It’s hard to look at just one aspect of diet and connect it to a health condition because so many other factors that could play a role. For example, early research on coffee didn’t always take into account that heavy coffee drinkers also tended to use tobacco and be sedentary.
When newer studies adjusted for such factors, they found a possible association between coffee and decreased mortality. Coffee may offer some protection against:
Parkinson’s disease
Type 2 diabetes
Liver disease, including liver cancer
Heart attack and stroke
Coffee still has potential risks, mostly due to its high caffeine content. For example, it can temporarily raise blood pressure. Women who are pregnant, trying to become pregnant or breastfeeding need to be cautious about caffeine. High intake of boiled, unfiltered coffee has been associated with mild increase in cholesterol levels.
The bottom line? Your coffee habit is probably fine and may even have some benefits. But if you have side effects from coffee, such as heartburn, nervousness or insomnia, consider cutting back.
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Like many companies, manufacturing technology firm Augury ditched its New York City office during the pandemic. With few people coming in, and most work able to be done remotely, paying rent on an empty office was a waste. But the need for an office didn’t go away completely, and now the company is fitting out a new space in the city. As it does, it’s fundamentally rethinking how the space will work by looking at who will actually be using it.
To help guide the new design, the company surveyed its teams to understand how different departments expected to use the space, especially in a more hybrid work mode. “When we were talking about that, we started asking what kind of people will be there?” says Tiffany Millar, Augury’s workplace experience director.
The people who’d be using the office, the company realized, fit into a few distinct categories—locals coming in semi-regularly, for example, or foreign-based workers visiting only rarely. Head counts might range from 20 people to 80, depending on the day, with different types of workers needing different spaces. “At a high level, we broke it down into five personas,” says Millar.
Home Away From Home
The first persona is what Augury calls Home Away From Home, or people who live in the tristate area who may come into the office once or more per week, even if most of their work can still be done remotely. “These were the people that essentially wanted to get out of their tiny New York apartments, or maybe it’s really loud because the kids are home,” says Millar. “It’s about getting away and going into the office,” Millar says.
The spaces designed for the Home Away From persona focus on the social side of work—a nice kitchen area, coffee machines, high-top tables where employees can work but also chat with people they may only see in person every few weeks. “It had a lot to more do with hospitality,” says Millar.
Time Traveler
There’s also the Time Traveler persona, or employees who are based in Europe and fly in for meetings but need a bit of a time-zone adjustment. The office includes space to store luggage, and even rooms where the jet-lagged can take a nap after landing early in the morning. “While they might not need a conference room at 5 in the morning, they definitely need a place to store their luggage or take a nap,” Millar says.
Hero Visitor
Another persona is the Hero Visitor, which Millar envisions as investors, board members, and potential clients who may visit quarterly. Spaces designed with this person in mind focus on creating a comfortable and fun environment while also showcasing some of Augury’s technology, which is used to monitor and perform diagnostics on industrial devices. The HVAC system in Augury’s new office will have its technology on display for Hero Visitors to see.
On-Site and Fresh Blood
More work-focused personas are On-Site and Fresh Blood—remote workers and new recruits who may be coming to the office for annual meetings or for the first time since being onboarded. The innovation economy—a reason to be optimistic. Creating global solutions that beget great economic opportunities requires a higher purpose
For remote workers in the On-Site category, conference rooms and breakout spaces are being designed into the office to enable easier in-person collaboration after months of working on projects only remotely.
For the Fresh Blood persona—mostly new hires and people being recruited—the design prioritizes way-finding and clear signage. “That space has everything to do with making sure things are easy to find,” says Millar. “It’s very overwhelming when you’re hired remotely and you go to the office for the first time.”
5 Personas, 1 Space
Each persona has influenced different parts of the office, which will have two floors. Millar says there’s no space that’s dedicated to one persona only, but rather that each will tend to use some sections of the office more than others. Instead of designing the space with one main user in mind, like Augury’s old office, the new office will include these persona-focused design elements to make it adaptable to whomever happens to be in the office on any given day.
While the end result may not look all that different from other pandemic-era office redesigns, it does suggest a new way of rethinking these spaces to better reflect how office work has so thoroughly changed. It’s an evolving concept, and one that the company is creating as it prepares to move into the space early next year.
“There used to be a very clear blueprint of how to build out an office. Post-COVID in a hybrid model, I would say that’s failing,” she says, noting that the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday office is no longer relevant to the way companies like Augury work. “Knowing who exists in your space, and understanding the gaps and the holes will help you create a solution before the friction starts to happen.”
The personas that Augury is using to guide its design may ultimately change, Millar acknowledges. She says it will be important to track how the spaces are being used, and by whom, to determine whether the design is meeting the changing needs of the different types of people using the office. The five personas Augury has designed around in 2022 may be completely different a year from now.
“I think we’re at the foundation of using personas,” Millar says. “Next comes issues of human behavior, and we’ll see whether we were right.”
Evidence is starting to emerge that workplaces that adopt a hybrid model early are most likely to thrive. In fact, a recent ONS Survey showed that 85% of UK working individuals favoured a hybrid approach of both home and office working. Similarly in the USA, 52% of US workers preferred a mix of both. And it’s not just a passive sentiment.
The number of searches for jobs offering remote working has increased threefold in 2021 in comparison to the year before. On a more local level, London tube passenger numbers are regularly around 60% of pre-pandemic levels. That includes the 25% boost since the lifting of restrictions on the 19th of January 2022.
What has changed for employees following the unprecedented disruption of the global pandemic is the way the working population consider work-life balance, well-being, and flexible working. Business owners and directors consequently need to address these concerns and make the appropriate changes to their office design and layout to accommodate hybrid working. This is one trend that’s likely to stay.
While the hybrid office is by no means a new concept, the Covid-19 pandemic has given fuel to it. It has changed the dynamic to one where employees move seamlessly between home and office work environments. But it also requires a different set of solutions and ideas, some of which include:
Wi-fi enabled spaces for connecting with staff working from home
Technology to book meeting rooms and private spaces
A combination of team-working collaborative spaces alongside private spaces
Hybrid design typically involves the reconfiguration of existing office space and furniture to create more collaborative and flexible workspaces. The key principle of hybrid design is to create spaces that transcend physical and social barriers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean less space. A communications agency we worked with in London reduced their number of desks from 200 to 100 while retaining their existing space. What they achieved was creative desk layouts and breakout areas for increased flexibility and dynamic working that allowed for collaborative engagement.
The space also included a new booking system that provided the client with a feature-rich cloud-based booking of workspaces and meeting areas. Similarly, Adtrak, a digital marketing agency in Nottingham, reduced its number of desks from 120 to 70 while retaining around 100 staff. The space was essentially reconfigured to include hot-desking areas, social areas, and meeting rooms designed for videoconferencing with remote working staff.
Do you find yourself dozing off at your desk, even after what you thought was a good night’s rest? Then you probably have the same question as so many others: How much do I need to sleep? The answer of how many hours you need is not so straightforward, said Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an assistant professor of clinical medicine in the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.Sleep needs are very individualized, he said, but the general recommendation — the “sweet spot” — is to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Recommendations really change as people age, however.”Sleep needs vary over the lifespan,” said Christina Chick, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
CDC’s sleep guideline
Adults should get at least seven hours of sleep a night, but 1 in 3 of them don’t, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Poor sleep has been associated with long-term health consequences, such as higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and dementia. In the short term, even one day of sleep loss can harm your well-being, according to a recent study. People who get poor sleep might also be predisposed to conditions such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder, Dasgupta said.”There are chronic consequences, and there are acute consequences, which is why sleep is more than just saying, ‘The early bird gets the worm,'” he said. “It’s much more than that.”
Sleep for kids and teens
If it feels like babies are sleeping all day, they pretty much are. In the first year of life, babies can sleep 17 to 20 hours a day, Dasgupta said. Infants 4 months to 12 months need their 12 to 16 hours of sleep, including naps, according to Chick. Toddlers, who are between the ages of 1 and 3, should get 11 to 14 hours of sleep, according to Dr. Bhanu Kolla, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Mayo Clinic with a special interest in sleep. Children ages 3 to 5 should sleep for 10 to 13 hours, he added, and from ages 6 to 12, they should sleep nine to 12 hours. For kids up to age 5, these sleep recommendations include naps, Chick said. Teenagers should get eight to 10 hours of sleep, Kolla said. This recommendation has sparked a debate in recent years about start times for school.
“As children move toward adolescence, they naturally prefer to go to sleep later and wake up later,” Chick said. “This is why school start times are such an important focus of debate: If you can’t fall asleep until later, but your school start time remains the same, you’re going to get less sleep.” The quantity of sleep is important, but so is the quality of it, Dasgupta added. Getting deeper sleep and hitting the rapid eye movement (REM) stage helps with cognition, memory and productivity throughout the day. REM is the sleep stage where memories are consolidated and stored. It also allows us to dream vividly. People can sometimes get the right quantity of sleep but still feel fatigued, and this might mean they aren’t reaching these sleep stages.
Sleep for college students and adults
The stereotypical image of the college student usually includes messy hair, undereye bags, and a coffee or energy drink in hand. It doesn’t matter if they stay up all night partying or cramming for an exam — both result in sleep deprivation. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s almost like a rite of passage in a college student to pull the perennial all-nighter even though we know that’s not what you’re supposed to do,” Dasgupta said. He and Kolla concur that seven to nine hours of sleep is best for adults, though Kolla added that older adults may be better at coping with some sleep deprivation.
As an exception, young adults may need nine or more hours on a regular basis because their brains are still developing, Chick said, and adults of any age may also need nine or more hours when recovering from an injury, illness or sleep debt. There are also “natural variants,” Kolla said, referring to some people who require more than 10 hours of sleep and others who get less than four and function normally. If you’re wondering whether it matters if you’re an early bird or night owl, Chick said it depends on “whether your lifestyle is compatible” with your preference. “If you are a night owl, but your job requires you to be in the office at 7 am, this misalignment is less than ideal for your physical and mental health,” she wrote in an email. “But it would be equally problematic for a morning person who works the night shift.”
How to improve your sleep
Are you not getting enough sleep? Here are a few ways to solve that:
1. Stick to a bedtime routine. Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. You can even keep a journal to log these sleep times and how often you wake up at night, Dasgupta said, so you can have an idea of what works for you. You should also make sure your room is dark, cool and comfortable when you go to sleep.
2. Turn off the electronic devices. Do this as early as possible before bed, Chick added, as light exposure can affect your body’s sleep-wake cycle. “Particularly if you are aiming to fall asleep earlier, it’s important to expose yourself to bright natural light as early as possible in the day, and to limit exposure to light in the hours before bedtime,” she said. “Electronic devices mimic many of the wavelengths in sunlight that cue your body to stay awake.”
3. Try mindfulness techniques. Breathing exercises, meditation and yoga can also support sleep, Chick added. Her recent study showed that mindfulness training helped children sleep over an hour more per night.
4. Set good food and exercise habits. Finally, eating healthy and keeping a daily fitness regimen can support better sleep at night, Dasgupta said. “Always try to be consistent with exercise during the day,” he said. “Exercise relieves stress, it helps build up your drive to sleep at night, so there’s many good things there.”
A 2017 study found that coffee was associated with a probable decreased risk of several forms of cancer. Photograph: Emily Suzanne McDonald/Getty Images/Tetra Images
