Benefits of caffeine and meditation

This blog is not all about decaffeination and decaf coffee. Caffeine also has its place. As with everything, it’s all about moderation.

Today, we’ll talk about meditation and how caffeine can help your regular meditation session. For those who haven’t meditated before, it’s really worth doing on a regular basis.

It starts off as very challenging, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more worthwhile enabling you to be happier, calmer, make better decisions, get your best ideas and deal better with  difficult situations.

How can coffee help meditation?

It’s not easy integrating a meditation practice into everyone’s busy and  hurried lives, but actually you can fit it around drinking coffee!

Drinking decaf or caffeinated, it’s one of life’s rituals that a lot of people do every morning.

So, why not try, meditating just after you’ve had a cup of coffee? As soon as you finish your cup of coffee, sit quietly for as long as you can, which in the beginning may be only five minutes. By making meditation a part of an already very strong, almost automatic habit that you’ve already built, it becomes quite easy to integrate into your morning routine.

On paper, it sounds crazy, but here are some of the benefits:

1. Caffeine can help your mental focus during meditation

It might appear that caffeine, being a stimulant, it would be a bad combination since meditation requires some calmness.

However, certainly for some people, the opposite is true. You need to try it and see if it works for you.

It can increase mental focus, which is essential for calming the mind and slowing down the stream of thoughts. Often, after caffeine, one is able to sit for longer periods of time and keep the mind more focused and quieter.  

2. Meditating after you consume coffee will put you in a good mood

The caffeine in coffee is a natural feel good drug – in moderation and depending on the individual. Definitely not for everyone. That’s why we created Decadent Decaf!

Caffeine stimulates the release of dopamine, which leads to an elevation in positive feelings and hence it can help with your meditation session. Sometimes, in the mornings, when we try meditating, we feel groggy and tired, which makes it more difficult and less beneficial.

But, try meditating when the caffeine has kicked in and you’ll feel euphoric and focused on the task at hand – clearing your thoughts.

3. Drinking coffee before mediation can become a useful habit to build regular meditation sessions into your coffee break

Since coffee is a habit and a regular session, you can build your regular mediation session out of it. In short, it makes it the perfect trigger for starting a meditation practice.  

So, in summary, although it would appear counterintuitive, coffee and meditation can be a perfect combination for some people.

This caffeine strategy can also work with black or green tea – particularly green tea - if you’re someone who prefers tea, but they are different types of caffeine and the caffeine from coffee is more focused.