What is it that’s different about different people that means caffeine (or maybe all drugs that alter mental states?) can affect different people in different ways.
For me coffee has no noticeable affect on my energy at all seems to actually work quite well as a warm drink before sleeping. But for others it can give them more energy or even make them anxious?
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I don’t know all of the ins and outs of it. Maybe someone with the appropriate knowledge can enlighten us both.
I do know that our brains have many different receptors. I think they work something like plugging a charger into a device. Only you have a bunch of chargers and a bunch of devices and you might plug a charger into a device and it doesn’t charge. It’s the wrong charger.
So, you might try to plug caffeine into your receptors, but it’s not compatible, so it doesn’t charge.
Caffeine doesn’t have much of an effect on me, and certainly doesn’t wake me up or give me energy but that’s cause I’m autistic. In the same way that Adderall and other stimulants can help people with ADHD and similar processing (dis)orders mellow out, focus, and relax, caffeine can too.
That said if I have a lot of caffeine in one go (and I mean a LOT cause I have a pretty high tolerance) I can still get a headache from a blood pressure spike, so just because a substance doesn’t affect someone in one way doesn’t mean it can’t in others
You might have ADHD. People with ADHD have brains that absorb dopamine too quickly, causing them to constantly seek excitement and making it harder to concentrate on something they don’t find exciting. Stimulants can help by slowing your brain’s dopamine absorption and allowing you to relax.
In wider terms, nobody’s brains are exactly the same. The more we learn, the more it becomes apparent that neurodivergences are everywhere. As a result, two different people might have vastly different reactions to the same substance.
The effect of most drugs may vary with the dosage. As the human body tries to get rid of xenobiotics (substances that are not Food per se), it changes the chemical properties of the substances to accelerate excretion (e.g. increase water solubility). This is mostly done with specific liver enzymes, that can be expressed differently throughout a population, which means some have more (fast metabolizer) and some have less (slow metabolizer). The faster you metabolize and excrete a substance, the lower is your blood concentration.
Of course, the stimulant effect of caffeine can be antagonized by other substances, as well as underlying conditions, that alter Neurotransmitter concentrations, such as ADHD.
There’s a lot of different factors. One that I know of is people have different versions of liver enzymes that metabolize caffeine, so they will metabolize it at different rates. This means that the caffeine will remain in the bloodstream for different amounts of time in different people.
This is also true for other drugs, so one dose may be appropriate for one person, but the same dose might kill someone else.
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