No Stupid Questions

for some ppl the smell and taste of coffee are like pavlovs bell

Someone can correct me if what I've heard is totally stupid and wrong but, what I've heard is that caffeine doesn't "give you energy," it merely suppresses your body's ability to feel tired. That is to say, it won't make you more energetic than when you've got enough sleep.

Chemistry is a hell of a lot more complex than people will tell you it is when they are concocting things for human consumption.

The stuff in coffee includes a lot more than caffeine. And even if caffeine was the only molecule at issue, the synthesized/extracted caffeine in the energy drinks is guaranteed to have impurities and imperfections in it. It's just not going to be as good qualitatively as the molecules before they've gone through that process. It'll just be up to 95% or 99% or whatever and then they'll call it good, leaving whatever byproducts or altered molecules to wander into your system alongside the main stuff. And even if they didn't, the energy drink would include guaranteed a whole bunch of other crap alongside just the caffeine, some of which might depress your system or produce any one of a wild array of other effects. And even if it didn't, humans are psychological creatures, so the pure taste and experience of drinking the coffee can produce a physiological effect even if the chemistry was 100% identical which it is not.

TL;DR Yes

Most coffee has more caffeine than most energy drinks.

It's funny people asking these kinds of question on thw internet.

Like they'll believe words on a screen more than they'll believe what they observe in their own life. Like lived experience needs to be validated by a forum

Same. I also have a different experience with tea (tend to get a more even distribution of “energy” throughout the day whereas coffee gives me a jolt). I understand that it has something to do with how we metabolize the caffeine molecule in different contexts (which includes how it is carried into our bodies).

I read a thing several years back that argued for a distinction between caffeine and theine—the name for the molecule as it appears in tea. This is because, iirc, caffeine is found in the oils of the coffee bean and theine is found in the tannins of the tea leaf. The human body metabolizes oils and tannins differently, resulting in different absorption times (for lack of a better term). When it comes to energy drinks, the caffeine is either synthesized or isolated from a carrier (oil or tannins) and is thus metabolized differently from both coffee and tea.

My wife cannot drink coffee. But she can drink strong teas fine (including matcha, which has a higher concentration of theine/caffeine than coffee). She seems to be sensitive to the oil-based metabolic process (which is supposedly quicker than with tannins) and it gives her brain fog and an inability to concentrate (plus shakes).

How do you measure the caffeine in your coffee? It is incredibly difficult to do so because of the variability in brewing, individual beans, etc

Having an irregular reaction to caffeine (eg. it helps you relax) is one of the symptoms of ADHD, FWIW

How do you drink your coffee, and is it in similar quantities to the energy drinks?