Coffee breaks can make you stressed

Taking a coffee break at work can boost your stress not relieve it, say U.K. researchers. But men and women react to caffeine in different ways.

Taking a coffee break at work can boost your stress not relieve it, say U.K. researchers. But men and women react to caffeine in different ways.Research by Professor Peter Rogers and Dr Lindsay St Claire from the University of Bristol shows that men who work alone become more stressed after a coffee break because they think the coffee should make them perform faster. And men who work in teams tend to feel less stressed after a coffee. But this makes their performance less effective, the researchers found.Women didn’t have the same response to caffeine. Caffeine tended to reduce their stress levels.The researchers divided 96 people into three groups of 32, half who drank 200 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent to about one and a half cups of brewed coffee, the other half had a placebo with no caffeine.The researchers told one group their drink contained caffeine and it would help their performance while doing certain tasks; another group their drink did not contain caffeine; and the third group they were drinking caffeine and that it would cause stress-like side effects. The researchers then measured stress by looking at the participants’ heart rates and how confident or stressed they felt while they a did series of tests. In a public speaking exercise women appeared less stressed than men after having a caffeinated drink. Men told that caffeine would enhance their performance had higher heart rates and felt more stressed, the researchers found.”Our research findings suggest that the commonplace tea or coffee break might backfire in business situations, particularly where men are concerned. Far from reducing stress, it might actually make things worse,” said St Claire.The research also found that the way caffeine affected performance varied according to the type of task completed and whether people worked alone or in a team.Australian researcher Dr Gavan McNally from the School of Psychology at Sydney’s University of New South Wales said the research was “neat” as it showed that the effects of the coffee depended on the context in which it was drunk.McNally said that people don’t always recognise that the effects of many drugs, including caffeine, depended on the expectations they have of the drug.”We might like to think that coffee is going help us concentrate more, going to increase our arousal [a component of stress], and make us perform better. That might be true for some tasks that are particularly boring, like driving.”For other tasks that are already very stimulating, like public speaking, the extra arousal you get from caffeine might just send you over the edge.”McNally said many researchers had shown that men and women respond differently, biologically and psychologically, to stress. Men and women also had different ways of coping with stress. Despite the potentially stressful effect of caffeine, McNally thought it was unlikely that the research would change office workers’ coffee drinking habits.”I think the average office worker is still going to take their coffee,” he said.(Source: Heather Catchpole, ABC Science News, Feb 2004)