Caffeine is the cause and the cure
I strap my shoes on, check my phone frantically for peppy songs. No podcasts, your brain is overloaded - I say to myself. I walk to the cafe for a single shot flat white, so that caffeine doesn’t leave a mess behind when it withdraws. I come back and continue working on the assignment. I miss a meal. Or two. Doesn’t matter, it will all be worth it if I get this job - I tell myself. A few hours later, I get a splitting headache that just refuses to budge despite taking a paracetamol. I stop working, and wake up at an ungodly hour the next day to compensate. I finish the assignment and present it to the panel. I am in a messy state while presenting but I keep my calm really well. Two weeks later, the dreaded email titled “An update about your application..” hits my inbox.
To this day, I wonder if I would have gotten the job had I prevented that headache from taking over that crucial night.
Who knows! But a few months later, I have a headache again. A less intense one. I think it’s the cold weather this time, since there’s no obvious stressor - I already have a job offer by this point. I put on a sweater and make some chai the way I like it. I wrap a blanket around myself, sit on the sofa, and sip the chai like I’m on vacation in the Himalayas. The chai comforts me, soothes me and puts me at ease. So I get curious if it’s doing something chemically, not just culturally. Maybe it’s the mild caffeine, and caffeine is known to help alleviate headaches. I wonder if it’s not just the 10,000+ warm memories with chai that are soothing me. Coming back to my original question, what was it that really helped my headache?
After a few back and forth discussions with Gemini and Claude, filtering the pop out of pop science (will write more on this!), here’s what I found.
Headaches are sometimes caused when blood vessels dilate after a long bout of constriction (caused by a long bout of work). They press on nerves, which causes pain. Caffeine constricts the vessels again, easing some of the pain. That’s why most OTC pain medicines have caffeine. The slow brewing in chai would have extracted quite a bit of caffeine, perhaps up to 100mg from almost 2 tea bags. That’s a fair amount, given that the healthy limit is around 400mg per day. It would have helped. Cultural comfort and learned association - can’t really discount this, can I?
In addition, L-theanine, an amino acid found in tea also helps. It produces a relaxed but alert state, and has been recommended by folks like Andrew Huberman. However, the amount in my cup would have been 20-40mg, way lower than the recommended 200mg. Noticeable effect but not major.
If you intersperse your day with cups of chai and coffee, like I do, you end up constricting your vessels quite often. The body returns with a vasodilation vengeance. Caffeine is both the cause and the cure. Do I wish I had known this before the interview? No. Some answers just give you new ways to feel bad.