3 ways (besides caffeine) your life improves through morning coffee
Everyone knows that coffee is a great way to perk yourself up when your energy is lagging. But when I quit caffeine a few years back, I discovered I still craved the sensation of wrapping my hands around a steaming mug in the morning and inhaling the scent of a fresh-brewed cup.
Was it just that I enjoyed the taste? I’m sure that’s part of it. Coffee is delicious. But according to a selection of diverse experts, the urge to pause for a hot morning brew — either coffee or tea — is driven by more than taste buds and tiredness. Your morning mug has a host of benefits for your focus, happiness and even empathy.
Coffee as a moment of mindfulness
When I spoke with meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg about how busy professionals can sneak mindfulness into their jam-packed days a few years ago, one of her first suggestions revolved around a hot beverage.
“Maybe don’t drink the tea while you’re checking your email, while you’re on the conference call, while you have the TV on mute reading the crawl underneath. Maybe just drink the cup of tea. It’s not going to take hours, and you’re not going to ruin your workday, but it’s a very different experience,” she told me.
Salzburg’s contention is that drinking a cup of hot deliciousness can serve as a form of mindfulness, centering and calming you — but only if you give it your full attention.
She’s not the only person with this idea. A variety of time management and productivity gurus have suggested turning your morning coffee into a “savoring ritual.”
Focusing on the perfect blend, perfect mug and simple pleasure of it all coming together turns an automatic habit into a proper daily ritual, and science suggests these kinds of simple, rituals can have surprisingly large mental health benefits.
Coffee as a creativity booster
Science recommends a hot beverage for other reasons too. One small study out of China found that drinking tea helped people come up with more creative solutions to a brainstorming task. This could conceivably have something to do with some chemical compound in tea, but the researchers suspected the effect was mostly down to relaxation. A nice hot brew chilled people out, and that helped the ideas flow.
Modern neuroscience and super innovators like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs all agree that one key to creativity is simply leaving blank time in your day to let your mind breathe, turn over problems and make unexpected connections. You need to relax to move forward.
There are lots of ways to accomplish that (taking a walk was a popular choice among history’s great thinkers), but there are few more practical and accessible options for modern office workers than pausing for a quiet cup of coffee or tea.
Coffee as an exercise in empathy
Perhaps the most impressive endorsement of drinking coffee or tea for its psychological benefits comes from none other than the Dalai Lama. When Harvard happiness researcher Arthur Brooks recently shared the five most important teachings he’d learned from the Buddhist spiritual leader over the years, the first was, simply, “Serve the tea.”
“Whenever I visit the Dalai Lama at his home, he invariably starts each meeting or conversation by serving me tea,” Brooks reports. “Among Tibetans, this is a common act of generosity and humility — to serve others rather than expect to be served. Such a quiet gesture of hospitality starts a cycle of goodwill. As the Buddha taught, ‘Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.’ ”
A lovely, hot cup of something might help you to focus, relax and be more innovative. But Brooks’ experiences remind us that we can also enjoy coffee or tea socially. Taking a moment to prepare and share a brew with your colleagues seems like a tiny action, but science agrees with Buddhist tradition that such small actions can ripple out to create much larger gains in happiness and empathy across a group.
Coffee isn’t just caffeine. It isn’t even just self-care, bringing us pleasure and greater peace of mind. It can also be a simple but profound way to make the world a little bit of a kinder place.
So enjoy your morning mug. It’s probably doing much more for you than you fully appreciate.