Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox

How about a reason to cycle your coffee :)

https://rouvy.com/blog/caffeine-in-cycling

Caffeine periodization in cycling: the science behind performance (2025)

One thing I've learned over the years is that specifically setting out to enjoy and appreciate something on a daily basis is beneficial to overall satisfaction with life. And for me, that's my morning cuppa before the rest of the house wakes up. Is it (just) the coffee or is it (also) the rituals surrounding coffee?

I don’t have hard data, but I think this optimal value is very closely approximated by coffee drinkers’ daily average. 400 ml is about 1.75 cups, and i think the normal distribution of coffee cups among drinkers is centered at ~2 cups. Makes me wonder if we’re all self medicating and accidentally finding the sweet spot.

One thing you learn from reading depression papers is that there are a lot of things that supposedly have significant effects on depression according to some papers, but then fail to work when people try them or they’re tested in trials.

The linked paper is pretty obvious AI paper mill content, so I wouldn’t take anything it says as directly true without checking citations. The citation is a meta-analysis so you’d have to check the criteria and the studies.

The most common explanation for the “everything treats depression” result is inclusion of studies that have no control group. The placebo response rate in depression studies is very high as many patients revert to the mean of being not-super-depressed after they are so depressed that they enroll in a study for depression treatments. Paper writers seeking a positive result will abuse this to their benefit by omitting the control group. They’ll collect depressed patients, give them some treatment, and when the average improves they’ll publish a paper saying that the treatment has positive effects in depression. So after reading a lot of papers about depression, you start dismissing claims by default unless you can confirm they came from a properly powered, placebo-controlled, double-blind study.

But hey, if you’re already drinking coffee and enjoying it, continue to enjoy it!

The problem is, most Americans don't drink coffee, they drink sugary mix with coffee flavor

It kinda makes sense if you consider depression to be a mechanism to get into winter hibernation. It's just we can't hibernate and even if we could, somebody has to pay them bills.

Agreed. It even has the classic “this not that” and “from this to that” LLM tells in the headline.

I would suggest ignoring this document and reading the Nature article linked in the comment above.

Glad I wasn't the only one to suspect AI slop. The language is too self promoting and vacuous in parts. Just doesn't feel like a human wrote it to me.

Completely anecdotal but I've found Ujjayi Breathing from yoga to have an enormously calming effect.

Long exhales in general with a short pause at the end, before inhaling, are also incredibly useful. I try to do this as often as I need.

I’ve found wim hof no more effective than laughing gas. Very short euphoric high then back to where I was plus a slight headache.

Not an expert, but the standout thing about ketamine in particular is that it targets an entirely different neurotransmitter pathway than almost all traditional anxiety and depression meds. Traditionally, people treating serious depression or anxiety rotate through a variety of drugs that all hit same small set of neurotransmitters and settle on the one that works the best/sucks the least.

This is why people get excited about ketamine and psychedelics as therapeutics. Otherwise, we're just sitting around waiting for the next round of "new" drugs that manipulate the same pathways as all the old drugs (and carry much of the same risks).

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